On April 8, the Brest district court announced a guilty verdict in the case of six young men who made ‘inscriptions of political nature’ on the statue to Vladimir Lenin in the village of Damachava not far from the city of Brest.
The defendants were charged with ‘hooliganism’ under Article 339 of the Criminal Code.
Judge Syarhei Maruchak sentenced Yaraslau Burak to 3 months in jail; the man is currently doing military service; he is to resume it after serving his sentence in a guardhouse in Minsk. Kiryl Bekish and Dzyanis Charnyhin got 2.5 years of the restriction of liberty without being sent to a correction facility; Alyaksandr Nikitsin and Uladzislau Tsyareshka – to 1.5 years of the restriction of liberty without being sent to a correction facility; Dzyanis Khars was sentenced to one month under arrest.
All the convicts are aged from 17 to 19 years. In August 2020, they drew the words ‘Long live Belarus!’, ‘3%’, ‘Step down!’ (the latter was addressed to Alyaksandr Lukashenka) on the monument to Lenin. It should be recalled that local activists ‘decorated’ the same monument with funeral wreaths in the year of 2012, but then no one was prosecuted in the wake of the action.
