Now Tut.by is only left with the social networks.

From Tuesday morning, the regime of dictator Alexandr Lukashenko had the editorial office of the most important independent medium in Belarus searched, including the apartments of employees in the capital Minsk and other cities.

The website was blocked, and soon a Tut.by mirror site, which "mirrored" the content, was no longer accessible.

Friedrich Schmidt

Political correspondent for Russia and the CIS in Moscow.

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    At least 14 people were arrested, including Marina Zolotova, editor-in-chief of Tut.by.

    The whereabouts of several employees remained unknown on Wednesday.

    Also that of Julija Chernyavskaya, the co-owner of Tut.by.

    According to human rights activists, she developed heart problems in the clutches of investigators and was taken to hospital;

    then Chernyavskaya's trail was lost.

    Nevertheless, the colleagues who were still at liberty wrote on the Tut.by channel on the Telegram messenger service on Wednesday: “Let's start the morning with good news.” Because in the East Belarusian city of Gomel, Katerina Borisevich was released from a penal colony after six months in prison.

    Tut.by was indispensable for many

    Your story, the “zero alcohol case”, illustrates why Tut.by has become indispensable for many Belarusians. Last November, henchmen of the regime beat the young protester Roman Bondarenko so much that he died in hospital. The regime spread to Lukashenko himself that the victim was drunk. Borissewitch, citing research results, however, showed that Bondarenko was sober.

    For this she was sentenced to six months imprisonment in a trial for breaking medical confidentiality, and the doctor involved was sentenced to two years imprisonment, which he is due to begin in March of next year. “It never occurred to me that I could come to the colony for an article,” said the 37-year-old journalist after she was released. While in custody, she learned to look calmly at anything crazy around her.

    She only wanted to cry on the first day of her arrest, but then saw 19 or 20-year-old students, just a little older than her own daughter. "I understand that I will definitely not cry," said Borisevich. The regime had given her a “brown card” for prisoners who were “prone to extremism”, which is why she was always handcuffed between detention centers, unlike two women transported with her who were sentenced to long prison terms for murder be. That made the two of them laugh.

    Lukashenko's anger at Tut.by had grown to the extent that the protest movement against him grew more and more popular last summer. The news portal documented how the dictator gradually eliminated candidates for the presidential election in August, and how Svetlana Tichanovskaya, the wife of one of these imprisoned opponents, turned from the substitute candidate into a symbol of hope for millions of Belarusians. Lukashenko does not want independent journalists, but propagandists. On election day, the dictator threatened a reporter from Tut.by: "If you fight the country, if you try to throw the country into chaos and destabilize the situation, you will get an immediate answer from me."

    Among the hundreds of journalists arrested since the protests began, the dozen injured and sentenced to prison terms, many have been from Tut.by. An end to the repression, as the EU warned on Wednesday, is not in sight. In December, Tut.by's media license was revoked; it kept working. Now law enforcement officers are trying to break up allegations of tax evasion. “You feel the total defenselessness in relation to the arbitrary regime. But no despair, ”wrote Tut.by editor-in-chief Zolotova in an article for Deutsche Welle shortly before she was arrested. The solidarity of colleagues and the audience “gives us strength and helps us to look optimistically into the future”.