On 9 October 2026 a third criminal case was opened against political prisoner Tikhon Osipov under article 411, malicious disobedience to a prison administration. Former political prisoner Antonina Konovalova told the Viasna human rights centre. What exactly he is accused of this time has not been said. Two earlier trials on the same article had already added seven months and a year and a half.
The night on Pritytskogo
Osipov has been in custody since 14 August 2020. He was 25 when he was sentenced. On 19 May 2021 judge Piotr Orlov of Minsk City Court gave him 11 years in a penal colony under an enhanced regime. Prosecutor Anton Tyumentsev had asked for twelve.
The charge was this. Around one in the morning on the night of 10–11 August he drove to Pritytskogo Street, where a protest was under way, having first removed the plates. He did not open the door when police ordered him to. Then he pulled away, hit five soldiers of the internal troops, fled, left the car in a nearby body of water and called 102 to report it stolen. The articles: part 2 of article 293 (mass riots), part 1 of article 14 and article 362 (attempted murder of a serviceman), part 1 of article 400 (a knowingly false report). He admitted guilt only on the false report.
The injured parties were named as contract soldiers of unit 5524: Vasilchenko, Ostapenko, Protos, Volis and Lepeshkin. They put moral harm at 200 and 500 rubles. He paid before the trial, and at the hearing they said they had no claims. In his last word Osipov asked their forgiveness, said he understood their health had been at risk, and that he did not accept the prosecutor’s charge and thought the punishment too harsh.
Two additions, and a third case
On 25 March 2022, inside Mogilev colony No. 15, at a hearing held on the spot, judge Natalya Krashkina of Mogilev’s October district gave him another seven months under part 2 of article 411 and changed the regime from enhanced to strict. Relatives could not attend.
In mid-March 2026 Mazyr district court added a year and a half under the same part. That was on top of the 11 years and seven months already imposed. In that earlier case he was accused of more than 25 violations. Viasna has not published what he is accused of now.
Seven months and a year and a half together are two years and one month. With the original eleven, that is 13 years and one month. There is no verdict in the new case yet. Viasna reports that he is now in the punishment cell of colony No. 11 in Vawkavysk. Konovalova writes that he has already served more than half of the first sentence and, instead of release, keeps receiving new cases. She calls the state of his spine and heart “enormous problems” and says the colony is “slowly killing” him. Those are her words, not a doctor’s finding.
What Yaroshevich said in September
On 21 September Zerkalo published an interview with former political prisoner Sergei Yaroshevich, Konovalova’s husband. He served six years and three months in the case of the Telegram channel “The Army with the People” and left the country over a fence on the Lithuanian border. Konovalova, convicted in the same case, was released earlier.
About colony No. 11 he said article 411 was used on a mass scale there: the administration, he said, had an annual plan of up to five such add-on cases. He describes his own two penalties as formally an unbuttoned uniform button. He spoke about Osipov separately. “They spun him on 411 twice. It is morally hard for the man. He has a young family, but before the add-on case they restricted him in everything — for two years he saw neither his parents nor his wife.” That is a September account, before the third case. He names Osipov among the people whose condition worries him.
The same breach, counted twice
Article 411 is a criminal case for “maliciously disobeying” a prison administration. A breach is first written up as a disciplinary offence and punished with the isolation cell, and then the same conduct becomes a new sentence. In 2023 Viasna’s lawyers asked the UN special rapporteur on Belarus to press for the norm to be removed from the code. They write that liability under it violates the right to liberty and the right not to be tried or punished twice for one act. In November 2023 the rapporteur and the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention wrote to the Belarusian state about it.