Naviny.by

» see naviny.by as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

The last address the paper ever answered on, naviny.online, was still being crawled in late January 2022, and nothing on it had moved since autumn. The top story carries a timestamp of 12.11 at 09:20. The strip labeled "news of the hour" reads «БелаПАН признан экстремистским формированием», which is to say: BelaPAN has been recognized as an extremist formation. The last thing the paper ever put in that slot was the notice of its own killing, and then the slot stopped turning over.

BelaPAN was founded on 19 November 1991 by two journalists, Ales Lipai and Vital Tsyhankou. Its first office had one PC and one fax machine on three desks, and the news went out by having somebody print it and walk it over to the editors of the Minsk newspapers. By 2001 six of the nine FM stations in the city were running on its feed. In June 2002 the agency put up a web paper called Belorusskiye Novosti at naviny.by, the first site in the Belarusian internet to publish the day's news on the day, and in 2007 the two newsrooms were separated into their own operations. The joint Runet Prize in 2006 was for the Russian-language web outside Russia.

The pressure arrived long before the ending did. On 24 October 2011 somebody broke into BelaPAN's site and left Lukashenko's portrait on the main page. The naviny.by and belapan.com domains were blocked inside the country on 20 December 2014, and twice more by February 2016, each time around a political event and each time attributed officially to hackers rather than to the ministry that had ordered it. From the end of August 2020, over the protest coverage, the block became permanent, and the paper kept publishing from naviny.online as a mirror. Belarus restricted that from April 2021. naviny.media went the same way.

~ the dossier ~

~ the raids ~

On 14 January 2021 the office was searched and the equipment and the paper files were carried out, which stopped the agency's work for a while. On 18 August the searches came back, this time to the newsroom and to the homes of six staff, and five people were detained, the director and chief editor Iryna Leushyna among them, along with Aliaksandar Zaitsau, the deputy chief editor who ran Naviny.by. The servers went out of the building along with the personal laptops and phones.

The charges filed that day were gross violation of public order under Article 342 and tax evasion of an unspecified amount, carrying up to sixteen years. By early September one letter from Leushyna had reached her daughter.

~ how it read from here ~

The section list across the top of that frozen homepage is the honest measure of how far away I was from it. Politics, economy, elections, incidents, Belarus and the EU, German news, Ukrainian news. There was a desk for the countries that mattered to a reader in Minsk and no reason at all for one aimed at a reader in Ankara. I know this paper the way I know most Belarusian institutions, which is through other people's summaries, written after the fact and usually in English.

~ what the list did ~

The decision is dated 1 November 2021 and the entry went onto the Interior Ministry's list on 12 November, seven days short of the agency's thirtieth birthday. BelaPAN was the first media outlet in the country to be put on that register, and the logo was declared extremist alongside the organization. Under Belarusian law, creating such a formation or taking part in one is a criminal offense, so the designation turned the act of continuing to work into the crime itself.

The editors suspended operations immediately, to keep the journalists who were already in a file from collecting a second charge. Leushyna and Navazhilau were later charged with creating an extremist formation, and a Minsk court convicted her of running one and sentenced her to four years. The Belarusian Association of Journalists read the listing as an attempt to cut the outlet off from its audience, which is roughly what happened: the readers were not told the site had stopped, they just found it never changed again.

~ pozirk ~

In January 2022 the former staff restarted the Telegram channel under a new name, Pozirk, and in October 2023 they launched pozirk.online to go with it. The authorities followed the name across: in April 2023 the channel and the old Naviny page on Odnoklassniki were declared extremist materials, and in 2024 Pozirk itself was declared an extremist formation, the same category the parent agency had been given three years earlier.

naviny.by answers today with a redirect to a hosting provider's blocked-account page. The last capture of the real site is dated 29 January 2022, and the headline at the top of it is still the one about the list.

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