Ministry of Information cancels registration of Narodnaya Volya newspaper

“The reg­is­tra­tion was revoked since the news­pa­per has­n’t been pub­lished in print for six months in a row,” reads the state­ment of the agency.

Nar­o­d­naya Volya faced prob­lems as ear­ly as August 2020. After cov­er­age of the protests appeared on the front pages of the news­pa­per, the Press House that used to print the edi­tion refused to do so alleged­ly due to a break of machines. The same hap­pened with Kom­so­mol­skaya Gaze­ta. The con­tract with the news­pa­per was lat­er can­celed, and it was print­ed in Rus­sia for a while. Belaru­sian Post stopped dis­trib­ut­ing the paper.

In Novem­ber 2020 it became known that Nar­o­d­naya Volya stopped pub­lish­ing the paper edi­tion. The Moscow print­ing house annulled the con­tract with the edi­tion after Russ­ian con­sumer safe­ty watch­dog Rospotreb­nad­zor came with an inspec­tion and sus­pend­ed its work. At the same time, law enforce­ment offi­cers came to the edi­to­r­i­al office of Nar­o­d­naya Volya in Min­sk and con­fis­cat­ed the entire print run of a new issue. They also detained the dri­ver and the vol­un­teers who deliv­ered the pub­li­ca­tion.

The web­site of Nar­o­d­naya Volya was blocked in August 2022. At the end of Decem­ber last year, the Min­istry of Infor­ma­tion lift­ed the block. In April this year, the pub­li­ca­tion ter­mi­nat­ed the issue of the PDF ver­sion of the news­pa­per.

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