Belarusian man who lived in Russia for a long time and traded auto parts was sentenced for "facilitating extremist activities"

Raman Bulyha was born in 1982 in Baranavichy. After school, he graduated from Belarusian State University.

It is known that Bulyha lived and worked in Russia for a long time, in Lyubertsy and Pavlovsky Posad, Moscow region. There, the man built a career in B2B sales: he worked as a manager and head of departments in companies trading auto parts — "Avto-Alliance" and "Avto Master".

Outside of work, Raman has many interests: he follows paragliding competitions and rally raids.

This year, the man was sentenced in the Brest Regional Court under parts 1 and 2 of Art. 361-4 — "facilitating extremist activities".

Raman was sentenced to "home chemistry" (restricted freedom without sending to a correctional facility, often with residence restrictions and mandatory work). Presumably, the persecution is related to the Hayun case.

The Belarusian authorities consider "extremism" to be subscribing to independent channels, media, having links to them on social networks, or having Belarusian national, pre-Lukashenka symbols on social networks or on items. "Extremism" also includes practically any criticism of the authorities, official historical narratives, or expressions of solidarity with Ukraine.

Numerous criminal cases recently brought under the article on "facilitating extremism" have been related to the "Hayun case".

"Belarusian 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 troops, relying on information from Belarusians. Its activities were coordinated by a group of activists led by Anton Matolka.

The "Hayun case" began after 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 mistake was that the link was permanent. As a result, the security forces were 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.

The founder of "Hayun", Anton Matolka, immediately after the hack explained how the information leak occurred and announced the closure of the project.

According to calculations by the "Belpol" association of security forces and human rights defenders, the names of 9594 people who fell under politically motivated criminal cases are known. In total, political repression (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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