No calls, No letters: Dzianis Ivashin cut off from the outside world for months

On Octo­ber 6, the fam­i­ly of impris­oned jour­nal­ist Dzia­n­is Ivashyn final­ly received post­cards from him — the first in more than a month of silence. All cor­re­spon­dence except with close rel­a­tives is for­bid­den.

For 32 days, Ivashyn had sent no let­ters or post­cards. His wife, Vol­ha Ivashy­na, believes this was because he was held in a pun­ish­ment cell. She assumes that since Octo­ber 1, he has been trans­ferred back to a reg­u­lar cell. How­ev­er, he will remain in a high-secu­ri­ty prison at least until June 2026, she said.

Ivashyn has been behind bars for four and a half years, since March 12, 2021. KGB offi­cers arrest­ed him a day after he gave an inter­view to the inde­pen­dent TV chan­nel Cur­rent Time.

On Sep­tem­ber 14, 2022, the Hrod­na Region­al Court con­vict­ed Ivashyn over trea­son and ille­gal col­lec­tion and dis­sem­i­na­tion of pri­vate infor­ma­tion. Judge Valery Ramanous­ki sen­tenced him to 13 years and one month and fined him $9,030.

In June 2023, author­i­ties tight­ened his pun­ish­ment, trans­fer­ring him to a high-secu­ri­ty prison. Nei­ther his lawyer nor his rel­a­tives were informed of the court hear­ing that approved the trans­fer.

Before his arrest, Ivashyn worked as a cor­re­spon­dent for the inde­pen­dent nation­al news­pa­per Novy Chas. He was known for inves­ti­ga­tions into the influ­ence of the “Russ­ian world” in Belarus and Syr­ia, the con­tro­ver­sial con­struc­tion near the Kura­p­aty memo­r­i­al site, and, in his last arti­cle, the pres­ence of for­mer Ukrain­ian “Berkut” offi­cers in Belaru­sian secu­ri­ty forces.

In 2014, Ivashyn took part in Ukraine’s Rev­o­lu­tion of Dig­ni­ty in Kyiv, lat­er join­ing the Inform­Na­palm inter­na­tion­al vol­un­teer com­mu­ni­ty as an OSINT researcher and trans­la­tor, even­tu­al­ly becom­ing edi­tor-in-chief of its Belaru­sian-lan­guage edi­tion.