TUT.by

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

~ the goodbye ~

For twenty years an ordinary Belarusian email address ended in @tut.by. That is the fact to start from, because it explains what the rest of the site was. This was not a news website that people also read. It was the national mailbox with a news desk attached, and the currency rates and the weather sat underneath both. By 2019 something over sixty percent of everyone online in Belarus passed through it in a month, and the traffic ran to roughly two hundred million visits in that time, in a country of nine million people.

Yury Zisser started it on 5 October 2000. The name is a small joke that works in two languages at once: tut means here, and.by is the country, so the address reads as here, in Belarus. Marina Zolotova took over as chief editor in 2004, when the site was getting about six thousand visitors a day. By 2020 that number was over six hundred thousand.

The pressure was already visible before the end. In 2018 Zolotova and more than a dozen staff were pulled in over accessing the state news agency's subscriber feed without paying for it, a case that ended in a fine. In October 2020, after the site covered the protests that followed the presidential election, the information ministry stripped TUT.by of its media accreditation for three months, citing publication of prohibited information. Zisser did not see any of what came next. He died on 17 May 2020.

i have no memory of this site and no reason to have one. It published in Russian and Belarusian for a country i have never been to, and it died in a year when i was reading about entirely different things. It is here because of the shape of the death, which this site does not hold much of. Nearly everything on rip.so was killed by money running out or by a bigger product taking the users. TUT.by was killed by a warrant and a set of vans arriving at an office on a Tuesday morning, and everything that happened afterward was procedural.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what a portal meant there ~

The mail is the part that outsiders underrate. TUT.by ran its own mail system until 2009, moved onto Google's platform after that, then onto Yandex's from 2015. It never mattered to users whose machines were doing the work. What mattered was that the address on the business card and the one the bank had on file both ended in the same four characters, and that those characters belonged to a private company rather than to a state provider.

A portal in that position is convenient right up until the moment somebody wants leverage. Everything a person did through it ran through one company with one office in one city, reachable in a single morning.

~ the tax case ~

On the morning of 18 May 2021 the financial police searched the newsroom in Minsk along with offices in five other cities, and went to journalists' apartments at the same time, including Zolotova's. Fifteen people were detained. The stated basis was large-scale tax evasion connected to a press-accreditation technicality, and the site was blocked the same day.

The tax framing did real work. It kept the case out of the category of a press shutdown for as long as anyone was willing to accept it, and it put the chief executive and the chief editor in the same proceeding as the accountants. Political charges were added to Zolotova's case on 9 January 2023. She was sentenced on 17 March 2023 to twelve years in a general regime penal colony.

~ declared extremist ~

On 13 August 2021 a district court in Minsk declared the entire content of TUT.by extremist, and included Zerkalo.io, the successor the surviving journalists had already started, in the same ruling. In Belarus that designation is not symbolic. It reaches the reader as well as the publisher, so forwarding a link or keeping an old article on a phone became an act with a penalty attached to it.

Twenty years of archive went into the same category as the day's headlines. The practical effect was that a person could be prosecuted for possessing a copy of something that had been the country's most-read website eighteen months earlier.

~ the last service to go dark ~

Zerkalo.io publishes from outside the country and carries the old masthead's people. Zolotova was released and sent into exile in Ukraine on 13 December 2025, part of a group of 123 political prisoners let go under a deal with Washington.

The portal itself had one piece still breathing. The @tut.by mailboxes went on working for five years after the block, because mail is infrastructure and nobody had switched it off. In February 2026 Belarusian companies were instructed to stop using addresses on domains listed in the extremist register, with a deadline of 18 February to migrate. The mail servers stopped answering for good on 18 May 2026, five years to the day after the vans arrived. The last thing to die was the address book.

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