Pressure on media reporting military activity on Belarus-Ukraine border: Security forces threaten searches “until coverage stops”

Pres­sure con­tin­ues on the inde­pen­dent Homel media out­let Flagsh­tok in Belarus. The edi­to­r­i­al team report­ed that, on May 19, secu­ri­ty forces searched the homes of the par­ents of two indi­vid­u­als asso­ci­at­ed with the pub­li­ca­tion. Accord­ing to Flagsh­tok, an anti-extrem­ism unit offi­cer open­ly stat­ed that “such actions will con­tin­ue until new pub­li­ca­tions stop appear­ing on the resource.”

This is effec­tive­ly an attempt to force the media out­let to silence through threats and per­se­cu­tion of rel­a­tives. The news­room itself con­nects this to the over­all sit­u­a­tion in the region since 2022, when the Homel Region became involved in Rus­si­a’s mil­i­tary logis­tics dur­ing the war against Ukraine.

“It’s pos­si­ble that amid poten­tial esca­la­tion of the sit­u­a­tion, there’s an attempt to pre­emp­tive­ly cleanse the infor­ma­tion space of inde­pen­dent and uncon­trolled media,” the pub­li­ca­tion notes.

Flagsh­tok is one of the inde­pen­dent region­al online media out­lets in the Homel Region that cov­ers local issues, gov­ern­ment activ­i­ties, envi­ron­men­tal issues, urban­ism, and socio-polit­i­cal top­ics. The media also mon­i­tors mil­i­tary activ­i­ty on the Belarus-Ukraine bor­der and reports on Russ­ian drones fly­ing through Belaru­sian ter­ri­to­ry toward Ukraine.

After the 2020 protest events, the pub­li­ca­tion’s jour­nal­ists were forced to leave the coun­try due to per­se­cu­tion for their pro­fes­sion­al activ­i­ties and cur­rent­ly work from exile.

Pres­sure on Flagsh­tok and peo­ple who coop­er­ate with it has con­tin­ued for sev­er­al years. In 2022, Belarus’s KGB des­ig­nat­ed the pub­li­ca­tion and its social media as an “extrem­ist for­ma­tion.”

Lat­er, per­se­cu­tion also affect­ed jour­nal­ist, direc­tor, and his­to­ri­an Maryia Bulavin­skaya, con­nect­ed to the Homel media com­mu­ni­ty. Search­es were con­duct­ed at her home, and in 2025 it became known that her house near Homel was seques­trat­ed. In addi­tion, her pho­to­graph was placed on a “Want­ed” poster.