Dmitry Dalinnik led the investigation team on the TUT.BY case. At the end of 2022 he was himself detained for a bribe and sent to colony No. 3, Vitba. In March 2026 Zerkalo reported 14 years. On 8 October a source told the paper that was a mistake. According to him, Dalinnik was given nine.
There is still no published verdict. Both 14 years and nine are what people familiar with the case have said, not a court text. In January 2023 two unrelated sources told Zerkalo that the 41-year-old head of the financial-crimes department at the central Investigative Committee had already been arrested. One of them named the day: 11 November 2022, Dalinnik’s birthday. The sums did not match. One spoke of 20,000 dollars, the other of 500,000. BYPOL also confirmed an arrest for a bribe. Several people from the Department of Financial Investigations were taken with him, those reports said.
The fourteen years were someone else’s
The March piece rested on a source: part 3 of article 430, a bribe by an organised group, 14 years, Vitba colony. In October the person Zerkalo calls Andrei says the 14 years went to someone else, Andrei Kozhevnikov. In 2011 Kozhevnikov was the state prosecutor in the trial over a protest after the 2010 election. In 2020, Andrei says, he supervised Minsk investigators and demanded that people from the Sunday marches be jailed under article 342. That, too, is his account, not a verdict card.
Squad 5/6 and a nickname
Vitba is the colony outside Vitebsk. Andrei says about half the prisoners there are former security officers. Dalinnik was put in squad 5/6. Notes from the jail, passed between prisons, already said he was lying about himself. Ordinary prisoners, Andrei says, knew he had jailed people outside any rules. Those who work with the administration would not have him, because he immediately tried to become one of them. Political prisoners kept a disgusted distance: if someone spoke to him, others came over and gave a short version of his biography. Four of his former subordinates, convicted on political charges, were in the colony at the same time. They did not speak to him. Even investigators imprisoned for corruption walked around him.
The nickname came almost at once: TUT.BY. If he asked something, he could be told to look it up on TUT.BY. It did not become a fight. Andrei calls Vitba a colony where conflicts are punished, so it stayed at cruel jokes. Dalinnik himself, in this account, called his role in closing the site a rumour and said he had decided the case by the law. He told some prisoners he had been against the authorities. They did not believe him. In quarantine he was an orderly — and, Andrei says, he pressured the people who had just arrived.
A rumour of 300,000, and a hope of “khimiya”
In the colony people said that nine years was little for a man at the top of the Investigative Committee, and that the term was short because he testified against others in his own case and in other cases. Another rumour: the bribe was supposedly 300,000 dollars, and they tried to take it twice from the same person. He had already paid; the second time he went to the KGB. Zerkalo presents this as rumour, from Andrei. Neither the sum nor any cooperation with investigators is known from a verdict.
He found no common language with the other prisoners, the source writes, and turned to the administration: he would take any job and any post. Staff, Andrei says, remarked that he was overacting. For a year he attended the colony’s vocational school. Political prisoners, Andrei notes, are not allowed in: it is warm, and it is not really work. After that he hoped to become an “activist,” an orderly, and to transfer to a settlement colony or to “khimiya.” Andrei supposes he wants to be out of the colony in a year and a half.
Part 3 of article 430 is an especially grave offence. Under the penal code, a transfer to an open-type institution is possible only after two thirds of the sentence. If nine years is right, two thirds is six years, not a year and a half. Dalinnik’s hope and the rule do not match. There is still no verdict against which to check either number.