Gomel taxi driver sentenced to penal colony under three political articles

Ilya Karpau. Photo from his VKontakte page

Ilya Karpau is 33 years old. Judging by social media, he hails from Buda-Kashalyova district but lived in Gomel. Since 2018, he worked as an individual entrepreneur: he had his own small business producing lumber and making custom cabinets. In addition, the man worked part-time as a taxi driver in Minsk.

In a local chat, Ilya regularly reported on broken traffic lights and damaged road signs, offered ideas for improving traffic, and asked for traffic controllers to be placed at problematic intersections. In his free time, he enjoyed playing computer games — he joked in chats that his old video card could still show something.

However, his normal life was interrupted by political persecution. The Gomel Regional Court sentenced Ilya Karpau under three articles of the Criminal Code at once. The man was accused of facilitating extremism (parts 1 and 2 of Article 361-4 of the Criminal Code), insulting Lukashenka (part 1 of Article 368 of the Criminal Code), and discrediting Belarus (Article 369-1 of the Criminal Code).

The sentence is unknown, but the man faced up to seven years in a penal colony. According to human rights defenders, Ilya is currently in custody.

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. Numerous recent criminal cases under the article on "facilitating extremism" were related to the "Hayun case".

"Belaruski Hayun" is an OSINT monitoring project 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 Matolka.

The "Hayun case" began after law enforcement officers 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 mistake was that the link was permanent. As a result, law enforcement was 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.

Immediately after the hack, "Hayun" founder Anton Matolka explained how the information leak occurred and announced the project's closure.

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