The Minsk City Court has issued the first-ever sentence in Belarus under a law passed more than two years ago for "denying the genocide of the Belarusian people."
According to a statement on November 5 from the Vyasna Human Rights Center, a 55-year-old plasterer from the Minsk district, Andrey Savitski, was sentenced to three years in a penal colony on the denying genocide charge and a separate charge accusing him of “insulting" Belarusian authoritarian ruler Alyaksandr Lukashenka.
The charges stemmed from Savitski’s social media posts about Lukashenka and about the Belarusian village of Khatyn, where 149 people died in March 1943 after being rounded up by occupying Nazi troops and taken to a barn that was then set on fire.
Savitski was reportedly detained in February and held in custody since then. The arrest was carried out by officers from the Main Directorate for Combating Organized Crime and Corruption (GUBAZIK) and the Special Rapid Response Unit (SAHR).
According to the Internal Affairs Ministry, Savitski denied in his posts the “genocide of the Belarusian people by German occupiers during the Great Patriotic War, rehabilitated fascists, and attributed crimes committed by the occupiers to Soviet citizens."
The case was the first to be prosecuted since the law on the Genocide of the Belarusian People was enacted in January 2022. Vyasna said Savitski was sentenced on October 30.
Lukashenka's regime frequently uses accusations of denying the genocide to target Belarusian opposition activists. Independent historians in exile have criticized Belarusian authorities for substituting the term "genocide of the Belarusian people" for "Holocaust of the Jewish people," which echoes the Soviet narrative.
Disputes continue in Belarusian society and among Belarusian historians regarding some events during World War II on the territory of Belarus.