November 5, Pozirk. A Minsk judge has sentenced plasterer Andrej Savicki to three years in prison for denying genocide against the Belarusian people during World War II and insulting the head of state, SB. Belarus Segodnya reported today.
Savicki deliberately distorted the circumstances of the mass extermination of the Chatyń villagers in March 1943, the state-owned newspaper said. “He lied that Auxiliary Police Battalion 118 and the SS Dirlewanger Special Battalion were not involved in the extermination of the people,” it claimed.
He also created and administrated an Odnoklassniki group that features posts insulting Alaksandar Łukašenka, it added.
The man was arrested in February.
Following the 2020 postelection protests, authorities in Minsk launched a campaign to highlight the genocidal dimensions of massacres committed by the Germans in 1941–43.
Two years ago, Alaksandar Łukašenka signed a law to criminalize genocide denial, while officials and propaganda workers often try to pin genocide on opposition activists by calling them “fascists.”
Prosecutor General Andrej Švied personally contributed content by editing the “Genocide Against the Belarusian People During the Great Patriotic War” textbook for 5th graders, in which he accuses voters who took to the street to protest election fraud in 2020 of using Nazi symbols.
Švied also referred to Belarus’ historic white-red-white flag, used by the opposition, as a “symbol of Nazism and genocide.”
