Анатолий Котов. Фото: БФСС
ByHelp Foundation head Aliaksei Liavonchyk has reported unusual activity involving the Telegram account of missing Belarusian Sports Solidarity Foundation employee Anatol Kotau.
On the evening of June 13, Kotau’s Polish phone number briefly appeared as active on Telegram before disappearing a few minutes later.
“The Polish number appeared at around 11:20 p.m. London time. Three minutes later it was deleted. I noticed it immediately because I was sitting there writing work emails. I looked and saw his number, everything matched. The history had been cleared. We had a chat history that ended in 2023,” Liavonchyk told Reform.news.
According to Liavonchyk, he decided not to message the number immediately and instead observe what happened, but the number was deleted after three minutes.
“In my view, this is not a case of the number being reassigned to another person, because Kotau had two-factor authentication enabled — I am 100% certain of that. Just anyone would not be able to get into Telegram without access to the two-factor authentication. Secondly, even if the number had expired, was reassigned to someone else, and they somehow managed to bypass the two-factor authentication… I do not know how Telegram registration works now with a number that has been taken away from a previous owner,” Liavonchyk said.
Liavonchyk found the account activity suspicious: “If this is Kotau, there was two-factor authentication. If it is not Kotau, why was the account deleted immediately?”
As previously reported, Anatol Kotau disappeared in August 2025. It is known that he took leave from his job at the event agency Terra Group and on August 21 travelled to Istanbul and disappeared. According to the Turkish prosecutor’s office, Kotau’s passport was recorded at 18:35:54 on August 21 when leaving Turkey through the port of Trabzon.
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Anatol Kotau is a representative of the Belarusian Sports Solidarity Foundation (BSSF). He graduated from the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO). He worked at the Belarusian Foreign Ministry, the Administration of the President of the Republic of Belarus, the Belarusian Embassy in Poland, the National Olympic Committee, the directorate of the 2019 European Games and the Property Management Directorate of the President.
In August 2020, he resigned in protest from his position as deputy head of the department responsible for financing state bodies within the main financial directorate of the Property Management Directorate of the President of Belarus. In recent years, he had been living in forced exile. Kotau is a member of the Ethics Commission of the World DanceSport Federation and a working group of the Athletes for Freedom Foundation.
In 2024, Kotau was sentenced in absentia in Belarus to 12 years in prison on charges of conspiracy to seize power, leading an extremist formation and facilitating extremist activities.