60-year-old insurance agent from Gomel convicted for Gayun

Sviatlana Bazhankova — in the center. Photo: nikolsky.by

Sviatlana Bazhankova is 60 years old and hails from Gomel. It is known that the woman worked as an insurance agent for many years.

She is an Orthodox believer.

In her free time, the Gomel resident loves to cook, especially to bake. She is a member of various culinary communities and has attended culinary master classes.

Sviatlana was recently convicted in the Gomel Regional Court. She was charged under parts 1 and 2 of Article 361-4 of the Criminal Code of Belarus — "facilitating extremist activity." It appears that the political persecution was related to her writing to the chat-bot of the "Belarusian Gayun" project.

The woman was sentenced to restricted freedom.

The Belarusian authorities consider "extremism" to be subscriptions to independent channels, media outlets, the presence of links to them on social networks, or the presence of Belarusian national, pre-Lukashenka symbols in social networks or on personal belongings. "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 related to the "Gayun case."

"Belarusian Gayun" is an OSINT monitoring project created in 2022 when Russia attacked Ukraine via 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 "Gayun 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 Gayun bot, which she had been sent at the very beginning of the project's existence. The fatal error was that the link was permanent. Because of this, 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, "Gayun" founder Anton Matolka explained how the information leak occurred and announced the project's closure.

According to estimates by the security forces association "Belpol" and human rights defenders, the names of 9,594 people who faced politically motivated criminal cases are known. In total, various political repressions (criminal cases, administrative cases, dismissals, searches) affected about 500,000 Belarusians. Several hundred thousand people were forced to leave the country.

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