On September 15, 2023, 57-year-old Gennady Vasilyuk was fined for "distributing extremist materials." Subscriptions to "extremist" materials were found on Gennady's Odnoklassniki page. Furthermore, Vasilyuk was dismissed from the locomotive depot "by mutual agreement."
On December 7, 2023, Gennady was arrested in connection with a criminal case for "defamation of Lukashenko" (Part 1, Article 367 of the Criminal Code) and placed in pretrial detention. The case was heard on February 22 and 26, 2024.
The man was accused of posting "likes" on three videos featuring economist Yaroslav Romanchuk on the social media site Odnoklassniki on June 8, 9, and 17, 2022.
Gennady admitted his guilt and stated that on the specified dates in June, he traveled to a village in the Zhabinka district, as confirmed by a mobile phone statement. He uses a push-button phone, so he couldn't have accessed Odnoklassniki while in the village.
Prosecutor Yegor Kronda found Gennady's guilt fully proven and requested a sentence of one year and six months in prison for him.
Gennady was convicted a second time on September 16, 2024, for participating in protests. His wife and three others were also convicted along with him. According to the court, the charge against all three was that on August 10, 2020, in Brest, people "shouted slogans, whistled, clapped, displayed white-red-white banners, and stepped onto the roadway." In doing so, they allegedly grossly violated public order.
The court sentenced Gennady to one and a half years in prison, but taking into account the unserved previous (political) sentence, the final sentence was only two years in a general regime penal colony.
He was expected to be released in October 2025 .
