Former press attaché of the Dynama hockey club and son of the former editor-in-chief of Pressball, Mikita Berazhkou, has been convicted under Part 1 of Article 361-4 of the Criminal Code for “facilitating extremist activity”. The sports producer was sentenced to so-called “home chemistry”, Nasha Niva reports.
The verdict was handed down by the Minsk City Court. The authors note that hundreds of people detained in the so-called Hajun case have been tried under this article, but it remains unclear whether Mikita faced the same accusation.
Mikita Berazhkou is the son of Uladzimir Berazhkou, the editor-in-chief of Pressball, who headed the newspaper from 1995 to 2014 and in 2015 was placed in a detention center on corruption charges. At the time, he was the general director of Minsk’s Dynama hockey club. After his release, Berazhkou Sr. worked at the Belarusian Football Federation, the SB. Belarus Today newspaper, and the Belarusian Ice Hockey Federation.
Mikita worked as a press attaché at Minsk’s Dynama hockey club and moved to Russia shortly after his father’s arrest. There, he spent seven years working as a producer at the Match TV sports channel. At one point, he was a laureate of the Atlant International Sports Film Festival.
Belarusian authorities regularly use extremism charges to suppress political opponents and dissent more broadly.