The State Security Committee of the Republic of Belarus has included the opposition blogger Sergei Tsikhanovsky in the list of people involved in terrorist activity, reports Russian state news agency TASS, citing the Security Committee.
“The reason for the inclusion of Tsikhanovsky in this list is his sentence entering into legal force,” the Committee said in a statement. Tsikhanovsky was found guilty of inciting hatred and organising mass riots.
Tsikhanovsky was detained on 29 May, 2020, in Grodno, during a picket in support of the presidential candidacy of his wife, Svyatlana Tsikhanovskaya. Sergei himself was supposed to register as a candidate for president but could not file the relevant documents, seeing as he was, at the time, held in the pre-trial detention facility.
Tsikhanovsky was accused of organising mass riots, inciting social hatred, obstructing the work of Belarus’ Central Election Commission, and organising actions that gravely violate public order.
In December 2021, a Belarusian court sentenced him to 18 years in a strict-regime penal colony.
