Oleg Konovalov travelled from Kyiv to his home country of Belarus for the New Year holidays. He never made it back: he was detained on January 10, 2022, and eight months later he was sentenced to five years in a penal colony.
Who he is
Oleg Anatolyevich Konovalov, a native of Gomel, ran the YouTube channel Third Region Belarus. According to the security services, he had taken part in protests since the summer of 2020, filming videos and posting them on his channel, and was fined or jailed several times under administrative law for joining rallies. In 2020 Oleg moved to Ukraine but kept the blog going, posting footage of Belarusian solidarity rallies in Kyiv.
The arrest
He returned to Belarus for the New Year holidays and was detained. GUBOPiK, the Belarusian police unit for organized crime and corruption, described him as “the owner of an extremist channel who fled abroad” (Zerkalo). The security services accused him of exposing the identities of their officers and of continuing, after his move to Ukraine, to publish “anti-state” material and call for resistance to the authorities. He was separately charged over comments about Dmitry Fedosyuk, a KGB officer who died on September 28, 2021, in Minsk during a shootout in the apartment of IT specialist Andrei Zeltser, whom security forces were trying to detain (Zerkalo).
The sentence
On September 7, 2022, Judge Oleg Khoroshko of the Gomel Regional Court sentenced Oleg to five years in an enhanced-security penal colony. The court also fined him 3,200 Belarusian rubles and ordered him to pay 5,000 rubles to a police officer recognized as a victim in the case (Zerkalo). The 27-year-old blogger was found guilty on several counts at once: creating or leading an extremist group, organizing and actively participating in group actions that grossly violate public order, publicly insulting Lukashenko and a government official, and inciting social hatred (Current Time).
The Viasna Human Rights Centre has recognized Oleg Konovalov as a political prisoner.
What happened next
The pressure continued behind bars. On July 18, 2023, Oleg was convicted again of “malicious disobedience to the demands of the correctional facility administration,” a charge often used against political prisoners who refuse to submit to prison authorities. Another year was added to his sentence, and on September 26, 2023, an appeals court upheld the verdict. That same September, it emerged that Oleg had been transferred to a prison regime, the harshest level of confinement in the Belarusian penal system (dissidentby).