Belarusian blogger handed parole-like sentence

A fam­i­ly mem­ber said on June 24 that they had been informed that a court in Min­sk had sen­tenced Bern­shteyn to three years of restrict­ed free­dom as the gov­ern­ment con­tin­ues to crack down fol­low­ing mass protests sparked by a dis­put­ed pres­i­den­tial elec­tion in August 2020 that hand­ed vic­to­ry to author­i­tar­i­an ruler Alyak­san­dr Lukashen­ka.

Bern­shteyn, who went on tri­al the day before, was arrest­ed on March 11. He was ini­tial­ly sen­tenced to 15 days in jail on charge of «dis­obey­ing law enforce­ment.»

Instead of releas­ing him after serv­ing the term, offi­cials kept Bern­shteyn, list­ed among the 50 best authors of Wikipedi­a’s Russ­ian seg­ment, in deten­tion and charged him again.

It remains unclear what exact­ly Bern­shteyn did to war­rant the sec­ond charges.

State-con­trolled media has said that the charge he faced stemmed from an entry he wrote on Wikipedia about Rus­si­a’s unpro­voked inva­sion of Ukraine, adding lat­er that inves­ti­ga­tors had found data on his mobile phone that led to the new charge.

Lukashen­ka, 67 and in pow­er since 1994, has tight­ened his grip on the coun­try since the 2020 elec­tion by arrest­ing — some­times vio­lent­ly — tens of thou­sands of peo­ple.

Fear­ing for their safe­ty, most oppo­si­tion mem­bers have been forced to flee the coun­try.

The West has refused to rec­og­nize the results of the elec­tion and does not con­sid­er Lukashen­ka to be the coun­try’s legit­i­mate leader. Many coun­tries have imposed sev­er­al rounds of sanc­tions against his regime in response to the sup­pres­sion of dis­sent in the coun­try.

With reporting by Mediazona