Journalist Aleh Supruniuk reported sent to correctional facility, faces problems due to disability

Jour­nal­ist Aleh Supruniuk, con­vict­ed for his pro­fes­sion­al activ­i­ties, has been sent to serve his sen­tence at Mahilou Cor­rec­tion­al Facil­i­ty No. 15. For­mer polit­i­cal pris­on­er Ali­ak­san­dr Fiadu­ta, who was released from that same facil­i­ty and deport­ed from Belarus in Decem­ber of last year, shared details of his encoun­ters with Aleh Supruniuk.

Jour­nal­ist Aleh Supruniuk. Cour­tesy pho­to

Accord­ing to Ali­ak­san­dr Fiadu­ta, he spoke with Aleh Supruniuk twice in Novem­ber 2025.

It turned out that the jour­nal­ist, who has a hear­ing dis­abil­i­ty, was not allowed to use his hear­ing aid in the facil­i­ty. For this rea­son, Aleh could bare­ly hear any­thing and faced enor­mous prob­lems com­mu­ni­cat­ing with oth­er peo­ple.

“At first we didn’t rec­og­nize each oth­er. Only on the third day did I ask him: ‘Are you a jour­nal­ist?’ ‘And you’re Fiadu­ta?’ Aleh Supruniuk asked in response. He didn’t have his hear­ing aid and was com­plete­ly deaf. I spoke to him so that he could read my lips. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, oth­er pris­on­ers don’t know how to do that, and so Supruniuk didn’t even have any­one to talk to,” Ali­ak­san­dr Fiadu­ta recount­ed.

From those brief con­ver­sa­tions, Fiadu­ta learned that dur­ing his short time in the facil­i­ty, the jour­nal­ist had already been placed in a pun­ish­ment cell.

In the facil­i­ty, Aleh Supruniuk was assigned to sweep floors at the pro­duc­tion facil­i­ty. This is work typ­i­cal­ly giv­en to phys­i­cal­ly weak­ened pris­on­ers. Accord­ing to Fiadu­ta, oth­er pris­on­ers treat him kind­ly and sym­pa­thet­i­cal­ly — they under­stand that due to his deaf­ness and with­out a hear­ing aid, it’s dif­fi­cult for him to com­mu­ni­cate. In his free time, Aleh, like every­one else, reads a lot, “even more than oth­ers, because he can’t pass the time in con­ver­sa­tion, and so remains prac­ti­cal­ly in soli­tude.”

Whether the journalist’s prob­lem with the inabil­i­ty to use this med­ical­ly essen­tial device has been resolved since that time remains unknown.

Aleh Supruniuk’s story

Aleh Supruniuk is a 58-year-old jour­nal­ist from Brest. Dur­ing his career in the pro­fes­sion, he worked for the news­pa­per Brest­s­ki Kuri­er, the online pub­li­ca­tion Per­shy Rehi­jon, and col­lab­o­rat­ed with oth­er inde­pen­dent media out­lets. He was detained in Jan­u­ary 2025, and for almost five months noth­ing was known about the journalist’s fate.

Only in ear­ly June did the Brest Region­al Prosecutor’s Office release infor­ma­tion that a crim­i­nal case had been sent to court against a Brest res­i­dent under Part 3 of Arti­cle 361–1 of the Crim­i­nal Code. The agency did not name the accused, only stat­ing that no lat­er than Octo­ber 2023, the man had joined the Belaru­sian Asso­ci­a­tion of Jour­nal­ists, which was des­ig­nat­ed an “extrem­ist for­ma­tion” by a KGB deci­sion dat­ed Feb­ru­ary 28, 2023.

On August 8, 2025, Aleh Supruniuk was sen­tenced to 3 years of impris­on­ment. The Brest Region­al Court found him guilty of “par­tic­i­pa­tion in an extrem­ist for­ma­tion”. Last Octo­ber, the journalist’s name appeared on the Min­istry of Inter­nal Affairs web­site in the list of per­sons “involved in extrem­ist activ­i­ties.” The Belaru­sian human rights com­mu­ni­ty con­sid­ers Aleh Supruniuk a polit­i­cal pris­on­er.