A Belarusian court on Friday sentenced journalist Dimitri Luksha, who works for a Kazakh television channel, to four years in prison after being found guilty of “discrediting the country.”
Thus, the Belarusian Justice has imposed a fine of 16,000 Belarusian rubles (about 6,000 euros) against him. The correspondent for the Jabar 24 channel had previously worked for the Belteleradio chain and had been accused of disturbing public order and defaming the Belarusian state, as reported by the newspaper ‘Belarus Segodnya’.
Between November 2021 and March 2022, Luksha made a series of reports with his wife, Polina Polovinko, and the cameraman Konstantin Nikanorov about what was happening in the country.
According to the court, the content of some of these reports “was simulated and contained negative and unreliable information about the situation in Belarus”, such as the shortage of goods in stores, the plight of refugees living in a makeshift camp in the Belarusian territory, the role of Belarus in the Ukrainian war.
All of them had actively participated in the anti-government protests that took place in 2020 after the presidential elections that allowed the president, Alexander Lukashenko, to renew his mandate despite the fact that the opposition denounced irregularities and fraud in the framework of the electoral process.
Polovinko, accused of serious public order disturbances and complicity in acts of defamation, has been sentenced to 2 and a half years in prison, while Nikanorov has been sentenced to three years in prison.
