Nearly five years after he left Belarus, journalist Zmitser Pankavets is still on police radar

Secu­ri­ty offi­cials appeared at the home of Zmitser Pankavets’s rel­a­tives on Octo­ber 15 at 6 p.m., when it was already get­ting dark. They did not con­duct a search, but they asked many ques­tions and request­ed the journalist’s Telegram con­tact.

Zmitser Pankavets. Pho­to from Face­book

“The vis­it came right at dusk, and the police offi­cers even tried to jus­ti­fy them­selves, say­ing they work in two shifts. They asked whether I had returned to Belarus (as if that wouldn’t have been record­ed at the bor­der), or whether I was per­haps plan­ning to. The rest was stan­dard: where I live, what I live on, where I work. They remind­ed my rel­a­tives that a crim­i­nal case has been opened against me in Belarus. My rel­a­tives don’t remem­ber the arti­cle exact­ly, only the num­ber 361, and I assume it is most like­ly Arti­cle 361–1 of the Crim­i­nal Code, par­tic­i­pa­tion in an extrem­ist enti­ty. They also took down my Telegram con­tact, but so far they haven’t called or texted,” Pankavets told BAJ.

Pankavets recalled that police vis­it­ed his rel­a­tives with the same line of ques­tion­ing back in the sum­mer of 2024. Even then, they informed the fam­i­ly that a crim­i­nal case had been opened against him. There have been sev­er­al more vis­its since.

“I have no idea why they came again right now. It seems I haven’t done any­thing new; I’m not even very active on social media,” Pankavets added.

The jour­nal­ist has lived abroad for sev­er­al years. He left Belarus in Decem­ber 2021, fear­ing pros­e­cu­tion for his pro­fes­sion­al activ­i­ty. Before that, Pankavets worked in inde­pen­dent jour­nal­ism for almost 20 years, col­lab­o­rat­ing with Nasha Niva and RFE/RL Belarus, and was repeat­ed­ly a win­ner of BAJ’s Vol­naye Slo­va cre­ative con­test.