Former chief of the General Staff Pavel Muraveiko has become a deputy head of dictator Lukashenka’s Administration. On 5 October the head of the Administration, Dzmitry Krutoy, said his brief includes citizens’ appeals, including those from TikTok, Threads and Telegram: someone has to pick from the stream the topics worthy of attention “at the president’s level.” On 7 October, in the show “How to read this,” analyst Artyom Shraibman and journalist Hleb Semianov asked whether that means a new wave of prosecutions. Shraibman thinks it does not. The security services were already reading those networks.

On 28 September he was not hired for TikTok

On 28 September Muraveiko left the post of chief of the General Staff and first deputy defence minister. He had been appointed chief of the General Staff on 23 May 2024. Before that he was first deputy state secretary of the Security Council.

On the day of the appointment the dictator, according to BelTA, said nobody had recommended the name. It was his own decision, a surprise to the Administration, to the Security Council secretariat and to the military. “So be free of everyone.” He wanted another view of the armed forces.

Muraveiko himself did not talk about social media that day. He said his job was to give a deeper picture and not to replace institutions that already exist. Krutoy brought up TikTok a week later, on 5 October, on the state channel First Informational.

What he was actually given

Krutoy listed three lines of work. Oversight of strategic projects, not only the military industry but regional programmes. Coordination of the dictator’s assistants in the regions. And citizens’ appeals: the old channel stays, but it is now joined by “modern media: TikTok, Threads, Telegram and the rest.”

Krutoy’s wording was not “jail people for posts.” It was: pick from the mass the topics for the dictator. He pointed to Muraveiko’s “communication skills,” said he “works with people very well,” and that he can prepare material on civic initiatives.

Threads had already been called a threat

The day before the appointment, on 27 September, Natallia Sakharchuk, head of the Interior Ministry’s information department, called Threads a “security threat” on the state channel STV. Zerkalo published that on 28 September.

She said people aged 30 to 40 write there: they dislike the food on a shelf or the look of a traffic officer, and they post at once. Sakharchuk said monitoring had already found posts for which people were held administratively liable, and she warned that criminal liability is also possible. Complaints, in her version, should go to the police, on 102, not onto the network.

Those are the words of an Interior Ministry spokesperson, not a list of cases. The Investigative Committee separately warned that it was tightening control of posts on Threads and TikTok: “disinformation,” “social enmity,” false reports of danger.

Shraibman: the apparatus is already there

In the 7 October episode Semianov asked whether the authorities were closing the arrangement in which complaints on TikTok and Threads sometimes led to a fix and people were not prosecuted for them. Shraibman said Muraveiko’s appointment does not show that.

Shutting networks, repression and monitoring, he said, are the work of the security agencies. They have the staff, the resources and the ability to jail people for comments. Alongside those agencies, he believes, “troll factories” operate: a post about Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya is met at once by a hundred and fifty identical comments. Without that kind of apparatus, Muraveiko “is unlikely to add anything.” He will be one more person collecting slices of what people are writing. Natallia Kochanova and Natallia Petkevich, Shraibman says, already do this.

He does not treat the post of deputy head of the Administration as a lever in itself. First deputy Uladzimir Pertsau is the chief ideologue, and, the analyst notes, almost nothing has been heard from him in two years. Without a separate mandate and a staff, a high title changes little. The crackdown on Threads and TikTok, in his view, has already been running for several months. The wave is growing, but he would not tie it to Muraveiko.

Shraibman hears irony in Krutoy’s line that the general “knows how to talk to people.” Muraveiko was a loud state commentator and, the analyst recalls, threatened Lithuania. The duty of reading social media was “hung on him.” Shraibman does not see a change of approach in the appointment. We will see, he says, whether the general is noticeable in the new job at all.