Belarusian-speaking engineer from Khoiniki sentenced — most likely in the Hayun case

Aliaksandr Povad. Photo from his VKontakte page

Aliaksandr Povad is 29 years old. He is from Khoiniki, Homiel region. In 2016, the young man graduated from Minsk State Energy College, and then entered the International Sakharov Environmental Institute of BSU, where he received a diploma as a medical physicist in 2021. In his diploma thesis, he developed an algorithm for measuring the activity of multi-component radionuclide sources for "Atomtekh".

Aliaksandr started working at "Atomtekh" as a dosimetric department engineer and programmer. He wrote code in Python, C/C++, C#, and JavaScript, created cross-platform applications using Qt, and developed web systems for radionuclide accounting. He also used machine learning for radiation data analysis and worked with radiation modeling programs. From Aliaksandr's resume, it appears that he is a high-level specialist at the intersection of IT and nuclear physics.

On social media, Aliaksandr most often commented in Belarusian — about movies, languages, memes. In his free time, he contributed to open-source projects on Github.

Minsk City Court recently sentenced him under parts 1 and 2 of Article 361‑4 of the Criminal Code (facilitating extremist activity). What specifically prompted the prosecution is not exactly known, but most likely it is the Hayun case.

Aliaksandr Povad was sentenced to house arrest ("home chemistry").

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"Belaruski Hayun" is an OSINT monitoring project that was created in 2022 when Russia invaded 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 activist Palina Zyl, who had been living 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, 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 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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