Twenty-six years ago, on 5 October 2000, the site TUT.BY opened. It was thought up by journalist Sergei Dmitriev, entrepreneur Yuri Zisser and several people with them. Twenty-one years later, on 18 May 2021, the site was blocked. By then the newsroom was the country’s main independent outlet.

An idea given away

In early March 2000 Dmitriev wrote on the forum of the paper Computer News: he had an idea for an internet project, and he would give it to anyone who would build it. Programmer and businessman Yuri Zisser answered. They met on 15 March. Dmitriev wanted free email for people in Belarus, on the model of Russia’s Mail.ru.

Zisser did not leave it as email. He proposed a portal, on the model of Yahoo: news, weather, exchange rates, fuel prices, with mail beside them. Dmitriev did not take the manager’s job. Journalists from the same paper, Andrei Kononovich and Kirill Voloshin, joined, and so did programmer Danila Rudenko, who had already built mail services. Development started in July. The site opened on 5 October. In Zisser’s notebook there were a little over a hundred hits on the first day. Two weeks later, 52,000 a day. He showed it himself in an interview.

Then came forums, counters, ads, job listings, blogs. The site began selling advertising and made its first money on it. Zisser later said that, for lack of money and because of competition, the portal “was forced to become a news site.” Meduza and an anniversary piece in Belarusian News, citing the company history, tell the start this way.

First — after Google and VKontakte

In March 2018 TUT.BY for the first time passed YouTube, Yandex and Mail.ru in the Belarusian audience. The BBC called that the moment the site officially became the country’s main one. More precisely: it became the third platform, after Google and VKontakte. A local news site with an audience like that did not exist next door.

In May 2020, against the presidential campaign and the persecution of opposition candidates, the portal broke a national record: 176 million visits in a month, across all pages. That figure is the BBC’s. Before the closure, a Gemius study for April 2021 counted 3.3 million unique users a day — one in three people in the country. Reach was put at 62.5 percent of the population, infants and the elderly included.

Zisser did not see this

On 17 May 2020 Yuri Zisser died of cancer. He was 59. His daughter, portal shareholder Yauheniya Charniauskaya, told the BBC that her father did not see the work of twenty years being killed.

On 18 May 2021 the site was blocked. The formal pretext was a mention of a fund that helped people targeted by repression. The same day a criminal case was opened against the management for “tax evasion on an especially large scale.” Editor-in-chief Maryna Zolatava and director Lyudmila Chekina were sentenced to 12 years in March 2023. Zolatava was freed on 13 December 2025, in a group of 123, and taken to Ukraine. Chekina was freed on 16 September 2026, among 25, and taken to Lithuania. The site that opened twenty-six years ago is still not available in Belarus.