Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko on Saturday signed a law banning “unfriendly” media from foreign countries in Belarus, according to a statement from his press service, APA reports citing CNN.
It comes as Lukashenko this week said that Wagner head Yevgeny Prigozhin was in Belarus as part of a deal brokered after his private military group attempted a rebellion against the Kremlin. At the same time, Lukashenko announced that most of the nuclear weapons Russia planned to station in Belarus had arrived.
“The document is aimed at improving the mechanisms for protecting national interests in the media sphere, as well as expanding the tools for responding to unfriendly actions against Belarus,” according to the statement about the new law.
“The law provides the possibility of imposing a ban on the activities of foreign media on the territory of the Republic of Belarus in the event that foreign states display unfriendly actions against the Belarusian media,” it said.
In the early stages of the war in 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a censorship bill into law, making it a crime to disseminate “fake” information about the invasion of Ukraine, with a penalty of up to 15 years in prison for anyone convicted.
Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich was arrested in March and remains in detention, facing up to 20 years in jail on espionage charges, which he and his employer vehemently contest.
More background: Prigozhin was last spotted leaving the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don on Saturday, after abruptly calling off his troops’ march on Moscow. The United States said it doesn’t know his whereabouts. While there are no videos or photos showing Prigozhin there, satellite imagery of an air base outside Minsk showed two planes linked to him landing there on Tuesday morning.
In a speech Friday dedicated to Belarus’ Independence Day, according to state news agency Belta, Lukashenko said Wagner mercenaries were not in his country but he invited them to come and train his troops.
Belarus previously had no nuclear weapons since the early 1990s, when it agreed to transfer them all to Russia after gaining independence following the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Source: Azeri-Press News Agency