Young IT specialist from Innowise Group sentenced for political reasons

Viktoryia Patashkina. Photo from her VKontakte page

Viktoryia Patashkina, a resident of Homiel, is 33 years old. She graduated from Francysk Skaryna Homiel State University, where from 2009 to 2013 she studied finance and credit (banking).

Later, she changed her field of activity and moved into IT, where she began working as a software engineer and automation specialist (JS, Java).

In 2020, Viktoryia first worked at the Homiel office of Godel Technologies Europe, and in September of the same year, she joined Innowise Group. This is a large international company specializing in software development and IT consulting.

Currently, Viktoryia's professional profile indicates that she is on a long-term leave (sabbatical).

In the middle of last year, the girl became subject to political persecution. Recently, Viktoryia was tried in the Homiel Regional Court under parts 1 and 2 of Article 361-4 of the Criminal Code (facilitating extremist activity).

The circumstances of the case are unknown. The girl is currently serving her sentence — where, we have not yet found out. She has not reappeared on social networks.

The Belarusian authorities consider "extremism" to be subscriptions to independent channels, media, the presence of links to them on social networks, or the presence of Belarusian national, pre-Lukashenka symbols on social networks or on personal items. "Extremism" also includes virtually any criticism of the authorities, official historical narratives, or expressions of solidarity with Ukraine. Many recent criminal cases under the article on "facilitating extremism" have been linked to the "Hayun case."

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

The "Hayun case" began after security forces detained an activist who had been living underground in Belarus for several years. On 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. Therefore, the security forces were able to connect to the bot and extract all information from it. They obtained messages from accounts that had written to the bot, as well as their IDs and usernames.

Immediately after the hack, the founder of "Hayun," Anton Motolko, explained how the information leak occurred and announced the closure of the project.

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