Minsk Renault car center master jailed for helping repressed, then another case was opened

Dzmitry Rozhyn was born in 1996. Before his arrest, he lived in Minsk and worked as a body shop master at the car company "Lozange" — which is a Renault car center.

The young man was arrested on May 12, 2025. According to human rights defenders, the reason was his assistance to a fund that supports repressed Belarusians.

As a result, the Minsk City Court sentenced him under Part 1 of Art. 14 and Part 2 of Art. 361-4 of the Criminal Code — attempted "facilitation of extremist activity." Dzmitry was punished with 3 years in a general regime penal colony and a fine. The political prisoner was sent to Bobruisk penal colony No. 2 to serve his term.

In the spring of 2026, it became known that a new criminal case was opened against Rozhyn, and he was returned to Minsk pre-trial detention center No. 1.

In September, it became clear that the young man had been sentenced again, again under an article for "facilitation of extremist activity" (this time under Part 1 of Art. 361-4 of the Criminal Code). The total sentence is unknown.

Mass political repressions in the country began after 2020. At that time, Aliaksandr Lukashenka lost to Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya but did not hand over power to her, forcing her to leave the country. Mass popular protests against the dictatorship and falsification of elections took place. The authorities responded with repressions.

According to the calculations of the security forces' association "Belpol" and human rights defenders, the names of at least 10,050 people who fell under politically motivated criminal cases are known. In total, these or other political repressions (criminal cases, administrative cases, dismissals, searches, forced emigration) affected hundreds of thousands of Belarusians.

The authorities of Belarus consider "extremism" to be the demand for free elections with a transparent vote count, as well as virtually any criticism of the authorities, pro-Russian historical narratives, expressions of solidarity with Ukraine, and anti-war speeches.

Many recent criminal cases under the article on "facilitation of extremism" were related to the "Hayun case."

"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 Motolko.

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

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