Three Current Time Journalists Covering Presidential Election Detained In Belarus. They deported night flight to Odessa

The group — Evening news anchor Iry­na Roma­li­iska and cor­re­spon­dents Yury Baranyuk and Ivan Grebenyuk — had been cov­er­ing Belarus’ pres­i­den­tial cam­paign for the Russ­ian-lan­guage tele­vi­sion-dig­i­tal net­work. They had filed pend­ing accred­i­ta­tion appli­ca­tions with the Belaru­sian author­i­ties.

Roma­li­iska and Grebenyuk are Ukrain­ian cit­i­zens, based in Cur­rent Time’s head­quar­ters in the Czech cap­i­tal, Prague; Baranyuk is a Russ­ian cit­i­zen based in St. Peters­burg, Rus­sia.

Police detained the jour­nal­ists in the Belaru­sian capital’s Hotel Min­sk, and are believed to have tak­en them to the city’s Moskovskoye police sta­tion.

The three detainees’ phones appear to have been blocked. Anoth­er Cur­rent Time cor­re­spon­dent in Belarus, Roman Vasyukovich, also can no longer be reached by phone.

Cur­rent Time, a non-gov­ern­men­tal out­let run by Radio Free Europe/Radio Lib­er­ty in asso­ci­a­tion with the Voice of Amer­i­ca, has sent a request for infor­ma­tion about these deten­tions to Belarus’ Inte­ri­or Min­istry. Pres­i­dent Alyak­san­dr Lukashen­ka ear­li­er had threat­ened to expel RFE/RL jour­nal­ists from Belarus.

“Our Cur­rent Time jour­nal­ists were detained in the course of pro­fes­sion­al­ly car­ry­ing out their work cov­er­ing the Belaru­sian pres­i­den­tial elec­tion,” com­ment­ed RFE/RL Act­ing Pres­i­dent and Edi­tor-in-Chief Daisy Sin­de­lar. “Cur­rent Time request­ed accred­i­ta­tion for its jour­nal­ists well in advance of the elec­tion. »

«The fail­ure by Belaru­sian author­i­ties to grant cre­den­tials is yet anoth­er exam­ple of their con­tempt for the rights of a free press and the right of Belaru­sians to uncen­sored Infor­ma­tion,» Sin­de­lar said. «We are out­raged by their deten­tion and demand respect for the inter­na­tion­al­ly rec­og­nized rights of jour­nal­ists to do their work.”

The deten­tions took place fol­low­ing a four-hour August 6 live pro­gram about the Belaru­sian elec­tion cam­paign. The broad­cast, which includ­ed footage from a ral­ly in Min­sk for main oppo­si­tion can­di­date Svy­at­lana Tsikhanouskaya, has been viewed more than 500,000 times on social media.

Deten­tions of inde­pen­dent jour­nal­ists, blog­gers, and Tsikhanouskaya sup­port­ers as well as arrests of oppo­nents of Pres­i­dent Alyak­san­dr Lukashen­ka have marked Belarus’ 2020 pres­i­den­tial elec­tion cam­paign.