Former political prisoner and journalist Ihar Karnei said how the story involving bailiff Kazlouskaya, who had tried to recover 258.5 rubles from him, ended. Karnei was released and expelled from Belarus in June 2025.
At the end of March, Karnei wrote on Facebook that a bailiff was sending him demands for payment. He replied to her on Viber that he could not appear in court because he had been expelled from the country, but no one responded to his messages. It remains unclear what the attempt to recover the amount was related to, but Karnei assumed it could have been for prison clothing.
The story has now continued. Bailiff Kazlouskaya eventually replied and advised him to look for information about the proceedings in the Ministry of Justice register. Accessing it was not easy, as it is blocked from abroad. He had to use a VPN. The register showed four enforcement proceedings, two of which had been initiated while Ihar Karnei was still in detention, and two after his unexpected release.
“However, I still found nothing meaningful in the debtors register — only confirmation that another proceeding had been launched under a cumbersome anonymous number. Everything is like in a concentration camp, numbers on the heart. What came as a surprise was that they started the meter running while I was still actively serving my sentence. What prevented them from warning me immediately so that relatives could promptly pay the bills? Or was the initial goal precisely to let penalties accumulate? Those with experience who have already been fleeced say the amount grows by 10% each year”, Karnei wrote.
In the end, according to him, he “bought them off”, or rather, the required amount was paid by his retired mother.
“I can congratulate my opponent, she got what she wanted: I paid up. More precisely, my retired mother paid from her modest income — this is how relatives are dragged into the financial process when they cannot get to the people themselves. Not only did she spend money during her son’s imprisonment, now she also has to cover unclear expenses after the fact. Because the commissars will not stop — first they seize property, and then, in the name of the revolution, confiscate it.
Of course, it is unknown how long these racketeers will leave us alone, because in response to the clearly read Viber message about payment there was the usual silence. Think what you want…”, Ihar Karnei concluded.
Radio Svaboda journalist Ihar Karnei was detained in July 2023 and in March 2024 was sentenced to three years in prison on charges of participating in an extremist formation. According to the prosecution, he cooperated with the Belarusian Association of Journalists, which had been designated an “extremist formation”, and in his reporting allegedly “gave a false impression of the economic, social, military and international situation of the Republic of Belarus”. He was later sentenced to an additional eight months in prison for allegedly maliciously disobeying the requirements of the prison colony administration. Karnei was released and forcibly taken to Lithuania in June 2025.
