The horrific conditions in which psychiatrist Ihar Pastnou is held in detention have become known

Ihar Pastnou

«I accidentally stumbled upon articles online about psychiatrist Ihar Pastnou, who was once sent to a psychiatric hospital for criticizing the Belarusian authorities.

And I remembered that this psychiatrist was imprisoned at the same time as me in Navapolatsk. He probably set a record for time spent in SHIZA, having served 150 days in a row there in 2023 and refusing to leave for the general unit.

I don't know his article [charge], but he is in «low status» and spent all these 150 days in the same 12th cell of the SHIZA. He constantly wrote complaints to the administration and the prosecutor's office, complaining about torture by cold, and arbitrary punishments. The complaints, naturally, went nowhere. In response, he was only constantly punished, but it got to the point where they didn't know what to do with him, because he was already refusing to leave SHIZA for the general unit, and they somehow managed to force him to do it by all means fair and foul.

I think such treatment and inhumane conditions with abuse greatly affected his mental state, because he eventually reached a point where, out of hunger, he even stooped to looking for food in the trash near the canteen.

At every inspection, he warned the administration about responsibility for torture, to which they only mocked him in return; the SHIZA orderly poured bleach on him, they took away his toilet paper, cut off his water, and froze him in every way possible. They do this to many people there,» writes Ihar Losik.

Vitebsk doctor-psychiatrist Ihar Pastnou became known in the 2010s when he began publicly criticizing high-ranking officials and the entire system they built, earning him the image of a «truth-telling doctor.» His speeches were usually emotional and eccentric, for which the doctor was, among other things, sent for compulsory treatment in a psychiatric hospital. He participated in several political campaigns in conjunction with another Vitebsk figure with an eccentric image, Siarhei Ryzhyou. Siarhei Ryzhyou was sentenced to 6.5 years in prison in 2015 on a non-political criminal charge; after serving his term, he disappeared and may have perished in Russia.

Pastnou himself was sentenced in 2019 to three years of «chemistry» (penal labor) for alleged defamation of a prosecutor, after which he disappeared from social networks, where he had previously been very active. After that, nothing was known about his fate.

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