Ukrainian journalist arrested in Belarus

Pho­to from Myko­la Bal­a­ban’s face­book page

After about 6 hours in the police depart­ment the jour­nal­ist was sud­den­ly released. It turned out he was mis­tak­en for anoth­er Ukrain­ian jour­nal­ist with the same name and date of birth, appar­ent­ly black­list­ed in Rus­sia, who works for Informnapalm.org web­site, inves­ti­gat­ing Rus­si­a’s mil­i­tary involve­ment in Krimea and Don­bass.

The jour­nal­ist was scared, so he can­celled his par­tic­i­pa­tion in the media forum and flew back to Ukraine. 

The ques­tion that imme­di­ate­ly comes to my mind is why the hell it took immi­gra­tion offi­cers 6 hours to find out they picked up a wrong per­son, if it only took me two min­utes to find pic­tures of both of them in the Inter­net?

Sec­ond­ly, do we real­ly have to use same old NKVD (ear­ly KGB) tac­tics like com­ing for you at 5AM and con­fis­cat­ing shoelaces?

And final­ly, the fact that Belarus has to obey instruc­tions from the «Big Broth­er» and arrest peo­ple, for some rea­son black­list­ed in Rus­sia, does not quite go in line with recent «lib­er­al­i­sa­tion» and «open­ness» declared by Belaru­sian author­i­ties.