volkovysk.by website and online community declared extremist formation

«A group of indi­vid­u­als unit­ed through social media, mes­sen­gers, and oth­er Inter­net resources affil­i­at­ed with the volkovysk.by web­site under­takes extrem­ist activ­i­ty,» reads the Inte­ri­or Min­istry’s com­mu­ni­ca­tion. Apart from the social media pages of the media out­let, the list includes per­son­al pages of edi­tors Ales Zait­sau and Ali­ak­san­dr Tarant­sei.

Arti­cle 361–1 of the Belaru­sian Crim­i­nal Code pun­ish­es founders, lead­ers, mem­bers and spon­sors of extrem­ist for­ma­tions with prison terms rang­ing from 6 to 10 years.

Volkovysk.by is a media focused on the town and dis­trict of Vaukavysk and run by vol­un­teer authors at their own expense.

«For 13 years, volkovysk.by has been the only inde­pen­dent media cov­er­ing events in our town. All this time, we were opposed by the state machine with its ide­ol­o­gists and local news­pa­per edi­tors who were nev­er able to com­pete with us in terms of reach. Unlike them, we nev­er received a pen­ny from the bud­get. We also nev­er applied for any grants, we just love our town and pro­duce ver­i­ta­ble con­tent sac­ri­fis­ing our time and mon­ey,» the edi­to­r­i­al team said in their state­ment.

The site was moved to a new domain volkovysk.eu and new social pages will be cre­at­ed.

The author­i­ties have already rec­og­nized mul­ti­ple Belaru­sian inde­pen­dent media, includ­ing Bela­PAN, Nasha Niva, Euro­ra­dio, Bel­sat, Zerka­lo, Grodno.Life and Flagsh­tok, as «extrem­ist for­ma­tions.»