Pauline Sergeevna Zyl

Mozyr activist and blogger Polina Zyl. Nasha Niva has learned that she was charged with participating in protests and belonging to an "extremist group." Her boyfriend, Maksim Shukanov, was arrested along with her. There has been no information about his release; he is likely also in pretrial detention.

After Zyl's arrest, security forces gained access to a bot used by informants from the Belarusian Gayun OSINT monitoring project. A fatal technical error lay in the fact that the link with access rights to Gayun's bot, which she had once received—apparently back in 2022—had no expiration date. It's unlikely that Zyl knew this, and it's unlikely that Motoľko remembered it, but nevertheless, even in 2025, it was possible to access the bot and gain access to all the information. This is precisely what ultimately happened. When security forces detained Polina in February 2025 and gained access to her mobile phone, they were able to connect to the bot and extract all the information. They obtained messages from the accounts that had written to the bot, as well as their IDs and usernames.

Polina is 31 years old. She is originally from Yelsk and studied in Mozyr. In 2020, she supported the protests and even received a day's detention. Polina then retreated into the shadows but remained in the country. Both Zyl and Shukanov were wanted by authorities but refused to leave Belarus.