Minsk tour guide with top ratings from tourists sentenced for politics

Mikhail Masalevich. Photo: holiday.by

Mikhail Masalevich was born in 1991. In 2009, he graduated from the history class of the BSU Lyceum, and in 2014, he received a diploma from the BSU Faculty of History with a specialization in "Document Science". While studying at the university, the young man researched the organization of record keeping in the State Dumas of the Russian Empire.

In 2018, Mikhail completed tour guide courses and passed certification at the National Tourism Agency. For the last six years, he worked as a guide, conducting tours of Minsk in Belarusian and Russian. On the specialized portal Holiday.by, he had the maximum rating.

Mikhail studies his genealogy; for example, he recently searched for information about his great-grandfather who served in the imperial army during World War I and was listed in 1923 as a conscript of the 78th Infantry Regiment in Baranovichi. The man often helped other users with advice on how to work with the National Archive.

Mikhail Masalevich was sentenced under parts 1 and 2 of Article 361-4 of the Criminal Code — "facilitating extremist activities". Usually, prosecution under this article is related to the Hayun case.

The historian was sentenced to home chemistry (restricted freedom).

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"Belaruski Hayun" is an OSINT monitoring project that was created in 2022 when Russia attacked Ukraine through Belarus. The project tracked the military activity of Russian and Belarusian troops, relying on information from Belarusians. Its activities were coordinated by a group of activists led by Anton Matolka.

The Hayun case began after security forces detained an activist who had lived underground in Belarus for several years. In her mobile phone, they found a link to join the Hayun bot, which had been sent to her at the very beginning of the project's existence. The fatal mistake was that the link was permanent. As a result, the security forces were able to connect to the bot and extract all information from it. They obtained messages from accounts that wrote to the bot, as well as their IDs and usernames.

The girl herself was detained because she was forced to seek help from state structures, from medics. Her boyfriend, who was hiding with her, began to experience severe health problems following his father's arrest.

The founder of Hayun, Anton Matolka, immediately after the hack, explained how the information leak occurred and announced the closure of the project. 

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