"A Journalist in Jail: Freed Former RFE/RL Reporter Recalls Belarus Prison Ordeal", 02 July 2025

...[Ihar] Karnei, who worked with RFE/RL for over 20 years, is one of thousands of Belarusians imprisoned on what rights groups say are politically motivated charges since Lukashenko, who has tolerated little dissent in his 31-year rule, stepped up an already persistent clampdown on basic freedoms following a 2020 election that millions say he stole.

Karnei’s ordeal underscores the atmosphere of oppression and injustice that opponents and activists say pervades Belarus. It began with a stint at Akrestsina, a notorious pretrial jail in Minsk where “the conditions…are simply inhuman,” Karnei said...

In August 2023, a month after his arrest, Karnei learned that the case against him was related to his association with the Belarusian Association of Journalists, which the KGB branded an extremist group earlier in the year.

He was convicted of participation in an extremist group and sentenced to three years in prison in March 2024, and his sentence was extended by 10 months in December.

One of the main pieces of evidence presented against him was a statement he wrote in 1997 asking the recently formed Belarusian Association of Journalists to accept him as a member, he said. It was a detail he found somewhat absurd...

...during his trial and his time in prison, prosecutors and jailers focused not on the journalists’ group but on his work with RFE/RL, whose Belarus Service is known locally as Svaboda -- Belarusian for “freedom.”

“Svaboda was always mentioned, and this was a difficult factor for me,” he said, suggesting he was singled out because of the state’s false claim that “it meant that I had long since sold out, that I was following not my own will but the will that was imposed on me.”

After Akrestsina, Karnei was sent to a prison in the eastern town of Shklou. In a phenomenon that has persisted since the Soviet era, inmates convicted of “political” crimes, as opposed to violent or financial crimes, were often denied basic privileges such as meetings or even contact with relatives, use of the prison library, sports fields, or exercise machines...

In January... Karnei became the third imprisoned current or former RFE/RL journalist to be forced to appear before a state TV camera in what he called “a propaganda film for the KGB...”