Vasily Prokhorov is 57. He was born in Chernobyl and served in the airborne troops. Viasna calls him a person who suffered in the Chernobyl accident. He was given 11 years for “treason.” His wife Larisa and his son Pavel got eight each. He began the term in Novopolotsk colony No. 1. What happened to him there was told to Viasna on 12 October by a former political prisoner who did not give his name.
A closed trial
The closed trial at Homiel Regional Court began on 20 May 2024. The judge was Vadim Bobyrov. Tried with the family were a Belarusian-language teacher, Ruslan Prokhorenka, and Fyodor Aksenenka. The participants signed a non-disclosure undertaking. The terms became public on 28 June 2024, when Radio Svaboda and Viasna reported them: 11 years for Vasily, 8 each for Larisa and Pavel, 10 for Prokhorenka. What Aksenenka received was not reported. The prisoner card lists 20 May as the date of the verdict, the same day the trial opened.
The group was charged under four articles: article 356 part 1, “treason”; article 130 part 1, inciting enmity; article 361-4 part 1, assisting “extremist” activity; article 406 part 1, failure to report a crime. The family was convicted of treason. Vasily’s card lists all four. An unofficial source told Svaboda that the case was about photographs of various sites in Belarus and that the security services had followed the people before the arrests. That is the source’s account, not the text of the verdict.
The card sets a closed appeal for 30 August 2024, with Pavel Korshunovich chairing the panel, and does not record how it ended. On 6 September 2024 Vasily was put on the “extremist” list. The card counts the sentence from that date. Before the colony he was in remand prison No. 3.
Who they are
Vasily Vasilyevich Prokhorov was born on 18 May 1969 in Chernobyl. He is an ethnic Ukrainian. The family lived in Hrabauka, in the Homiel district, and by the time of the detention in Uza, where they had moved two years earlier. Construction work, a foreman and a site master, and haulage. On YouTube he filmed villages of the Homiel region, including the Chernobyl zone, and Airborne Forces Day. In 2021 he had no open criminal cases. He often travelled to Ukraine.
Larisa, born in 1975, is from Hrabauka and worked as a hospital orderly in Homiel. Pavel was born in 1996, graduated from the Belarusian State University of Transport and worked at a construction trust. From 2007 to 2019 he was abroad seven times, in Ukraine and Poland. Their daughter Anastasia was detained in December 2023 and released without a charge.
Colony No. 1
The former inmate of colony No. 1 says Vasily held up: his wife is in a Homiel colony, his son at Vitba. They were moved in the same transport. At first they were in different compartments; then the son was moved in with his father, and they rode that way to Vitebsk.
“He was under constant watch. They kept sending provocateurs and informers to Vasily. They put him in the punishment cell several times for trifles. He lost a lot of weight. When he arrived at the colony he was very tall and heavily built. Then he was just very tall.”
For work, the same account says, he was given the heaviest jobs: first breaking pallets, then coal. No respirators and no masks, dust everywhere, “he walked around literally black.” This is one person’s account, not an inspection report.
In September 2025 Vasily said they wanted to “bury” him, prison slang for a transfer to a cell regime. In early November 2025 he was given three years of prison regime. He is now in prison No. 4 in Mahiliou, 99A Krupskaya Street. The last line of Viasna’s note calls this Mahiliou colony No. 4. The card, and the paragraph above that line, say a prison.