Until August 2025 kvitki.by was the main service for concert and entertainment tickets in Belarus. On 26 August officers of the Department of Financial Investigations came to the office and detained a co-founder and the head of the service. In January 2026 the trademarks were registered to the republican enterprise Belarusian Lotteries, part of dictator Lukashenka’s property directorate. How it got there, Zerkalo was told by a person from the business. In the piece he is called Sergei. The name is changed. The co-founders declined to talk.
What they said themselves
The co-founders answered briefly: very well-known people first took up racketeering under the cover of the state, then staged a raider seizure. They suggested asking the market: “Everyone knows.” On whether they will get the company or the money back, they said everything has its time. Baskov and Seluk are not named in that reply.
Ticketpro and a letter to the Culture Ministry
The rival is Ticketpro. According to Zerkalo, the shares are: Dynamo-Minsk hockey club 38 percent, the Belarusian Hockey Federation 32 percent, the private company Bismart 30 percent. On the hockey owners’ side, Dmitry Baskov remained in the club’s affairs. The International Ice Hockey Federation suspended him for five years. He went on taking part in Dynamo Minsk’s business.
Sergei says Ticketpro lived on sport: hockey, football, big tournaments. After sanctions, international events left the country and that revenue fell. The regions, he says, were already working almost entirely with kvitki.by. The rest is his account. As a senator, Baskau wrote to the Ministry of Culture: state cultural institutions should end their contracts with kvitki.by and move to Ticketpro. He worked through the then culture minister, Anatol Markevich. In September 2023 he joined a ministry meeting by video and said the service was from an “unfriendly” country because the director held Lithuanian citizenship. Then he went to venue directors himself. There were rumours, Sergei adds, that Baskau attacked Ticketpro’s director, Sushchinsky, over bad figures, and that Sushchinsky blamed an “uncompetitive environment” and kickbacks at kvitki. Sergei calls that an invention. Even state organisers, he says, admitted kvitki.by was easier to work with. Baskau’s administrative weight was not enough.
Anna Seluk’s offer
Anna Seluk is the wife of the dictator’s middle son, Dzmitry. Photo captions also call her Anna Lukashenka. Zerkalo writes that she became general producer of the Musical Media Company and moved into entertainment. Sergei says the organisation quickly took state contracts for holidays and state-company parties and pushed private organisers out. With kvitki.by, he says, it worked exclusively. There was no cooperation with Ticketpro.
A second Zerkalo source says Seluk, against the dispute between the two operators, offered kvitki.by protection and a chance to keep working. “Either Kvitki refused, or they did not agree.”
The office, the jail, ten thousand
On 26 August 2025 the financial investigators entered the office and detained the head. In public it looked like an outage: the site would not open, the social-media pages vanished, and buyers were sent to box offices or to Ticketpro. Nasha Niva, citing several people, wrote that the firm had been “swept up.” By the evening of 28 August the site was open again. Who was in jail was not named then.
Sergei passes on what others say: the order to “destroy Kvitki” came from deputy prime minister Natallia Piatkevich, because Baskau has no such powers. The decisions, he says, were taken on 10 June 2025 at a meeting on cinema and Belarusfilm, where the whole cultural sector was discussed. In those weeks heads of state cultural institutions and private organisers were already being detained: bribes, taxes. On Kvitki, in his version, the investigators were told to dig until they found something, and they found unpaid tax. In parallel the case was tied to the chat Org BY. It was labelled “extremist” only after the detention and the shutdown. Seluk, Sergei supposes, either stepped aside or took part in the decision. That is his guess.
The head spent almost half a year in pre-trial jail. Then, Sergei says, the leadership was forced to sign the trademarks over for ten thousand rubles. The contract date was set backwards, to the day before the detention, so the sale would look earlier than the raid. The register shows a different calendar. In mid-January 2026 the marks passed to Belarusian Lotteries. In the bulletin of the National Centre of Intellectual Property the contract is registered on 14 January 2026, number 13956. The previous owner is Kvitki Bel. The price is not in that entry. The ten thousand and the backdated day remain the source’s words.
After the mark was handed over, Sergei says, the “extremist” chat case dissolved. One charge was left: unpaid tax, about half a million rubles. The head was released on bail. For several more months he waited to see if the prosecution would be dropped. The Lithuanian citizen was able to leave almost a year after August 2025.
The site is silent
The brand is listed to Belarusian Lotteries. The kvitki.by site still does not open. Whether it will is unknown. The company Kvitki Bel went into liquidation: the decision was taken on 17 September 2025, the liquidator is the firm Rezervy Upravleniya, and creditors’ claims were accepted until 1 December 2025.
Sergei believes the company was removed because it had grown too large and stayed independent, while the sector already belonged to people close to power. Entertainment, he says, is held by the dictator’s daughter-in-law, and her “empire” may yet grow its own ticket service. He calls the market a scorched field: private organisers are pushed out or under the eye of the security services, a concert can be put on only by a firm from an approved list, and the audience is left with what has passed censorship. That is his judgement, not a report of market shares.