On 30 April 2026, the Ministry of Information of the Republic of Belarus updated the national register of extremist materials and included the entire YouTube channel vDud run by journalist Yury Dud. The channel has more than 10 million subscribers. The underlying ruling was issued on 27 April 2026 by the Zheleznodorozhny (Railway) District Court of Vitebsk, as reported by independent outlets citing the ministry.
What the decision means
- The listing covers the whole channel, not individual videos: in practice the full back catalogue and future uploads on that YouTube resource fall under the restriction until the entry is removed from the register.
- Entries are added to the register on the basis of court decisions; the update was published in the Ministry of Information’s usual procedure (source: Ministry of Information of Belarus).
Context: the episode with Maria Kolesnikova
The court ruling and the register update come roughly two months after a long interview with Maria Kolesnikova appeared on vDud — a prominent figure in the 2020 protests in Belarus and one of the symbolic faces of the country’s opposition. The chronological link, as independent media sum it up, is that the authorities acted “two months after the interview was published on the channel.”
Link to the video: YouTube — interview.
The reasoning section of the court judgment was not laid out in the open press in the materials referenced here: publicly available information is essentially the fact that extremist status was attached to the channel as a whole and the wider political and media context around Kolesnikova.
Not the first time: individual videos were already listed
In March 2022, a court in Minsk declared three videos that had appeared on Dud’s channel and concerned Belarus to be extremist. Their titles were:
- Nexta: the flagship media outlet of the Belarus protests;
- Komissarenko: a new life after the Belarus protests;
- How do you live if your homeland is taken away?.
The new decision widens enforcement from singled-out episodes to the entire channel as one listed resource.
What it means for users inside Belarus
Listing is not about a “moral verdict on YouTube” but about administrative and criminal exposure when people interact with the content on the territory of Belarus:
- Dissemination: reposting, forwarding links, downloading or re-uploading, public screening, or other circulation of listed material is treated under current rules as dealing with “extremist” content.
- Subscription and possession: according to human-rights defenders and reported court stories, subscribing to a resource after it is entered in the register, as well as holding such materials, has already triggered administrative proceedings (fines or short arrests, depending on the case).
- Funding: donations or other support to channels once they appear in the register may in principle provide grounds for criminal charges (each episode is decided by investigators and judges); lawyers generally advise against sending money to such channels from Belarus when in doubt.
Liability always depends on the exact articles of the Criminal Code and the Code of Administrative Offences cited and on the evidence; the wording above summarizes typical cautions from watchdog groups regarding the national list.
Yury Dud and Russian law
Separately from the Belarusian register, Dud is listed as a “foreign agent” in Russia (Ministry of Justice registration from 2022 is noted in summaries). On 14 November 2025 a justice of the peace sentenced him in absentia to one year and ten months in a general-regime penal colony under Article 330.1 of the Criminal Code (failure to meet foreign-agent labelling obligations), as Zona Media and others reported. That Russian case does not supply the legal basis for the Belarusian vDud listing, but it is part of the same regional pressure on independent media.