May 03, 2026 · 8 min read
Belarus State TV Just Read 21 Exiled Journalists' Home Addresses on Air—The Host Was Pulled Off a Plane to Be Forced Into the Job
On April 2, 2026, an STV broadcast in Minsk listed the addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth, and dates of departure of 21 exiled journalists working in Poland and across Europe. Surveillance footage of one journalist's apartment building, his teenage son, and his old office was played on screen. The anchor reading the list was Raman Pratasevich—the journalist Belarusian fighter jets forced down a Ryanair flight to capture in 2021.
What Was Broadcast
The lead target was Stanislau Ivashkevich, the director of the Belarusian Investigative Center (BIC), an investigative outlet that has been operating from Warsaw since the team was forced into exile in 2021. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists' April 24 alert, the STV segment displayed:
- Ivashkevich's claimed phone number and street address.
- Private video recordings of Ivashkevich and of his son.
- Video instructions describing how to enter his apartment.
- 2022 surveillance footage from outside BIC's former Minsk office.
After the segment on Ivashkevich, host Raman Pratasevich continued through a list of 20 additional names: 16 more Belarusian journalists, one Ukrainian, and three Russians. Each entry came with the journalist's date of birth and the date they had left Belarus. Twelve of the 21 named journalists work for BIC. Four had moved from BIC to a successor outlet called Buro Media in 2023. The remaining five reported for adjacent independent outlets in exile.
Pratasevich framed the broadcast as a public information segment: each of the 21 was, he said, facing Belarusian criminal charges under Article 361 ("calls for sanctions aimed at harming national security") and Article 361-1 ("establishing or participating in an extremist formation"). Both BIC and Buro Media have been designated extremist organizations by the Belarusian Supreme Court—BIC since September 2023.
The Anchor Used to Be the Story
The detail that gives this broadcast its weight is who delivered it. In May 2021, Belarusian air traffic control invented a bomb threat to force a Ryanair flight from Athens to Vilnius to land in Minsk. On board were Raman Pratasevich and his girlfriend Sofia Sapega. Pratasevich was 26, the former editor of an opposition Telegram channel called Nexta, and one of the most wanted journalists in Belarus. He was arrested at the gate.
Over the following 18 months, Pratasevich went from a hostage paraded on Belarusian state TV with visible bruises to a "former opponent" reading scripted recantations to, eventually, a host on the same STV channel. Whether he is doing this freely or under duress is a question CPJ and Reporters Without Borders have left deliberately open—what is not in doubt is that the broadcast on April 2 went out under his name, and that his colleagues from the Belarusian press corps were the targets.
"That Raman Pratasevich—himself once a victim of Belarusian transnational repression—should now be amplifying government efforts to intimidate independent media abroad is extremely chilling," CPJ regional director Fiona O'Brien said in the April 24 statement. "His actions directly put individual journalists at risk."
Doxxing as State Policy
What STV broadcast on April 2 is what researchers call transnational repression: the extension of state surveillance and intimidation across borders, against people the state can no longer reach physically. Belarus is one of the most aggressive practitioners of the playbook, and the playbook itself is structured around several stages:
- Designation. The journalist's outlet is labeled "extremist." The label moves the work from a press freedom dispute into a criminal law category.
- Domestic prosecution in absentia. Charges are filed against journalists who have left the country; trials proceed without them. As of late April 2026, Belarus has opened criminal cases against more than 80 journalists in exile and detained at least 23 inside the country.
- Information operations against the journalist's location and family. Personal data, surveillance footage, and intimidation imagery are broadcast on state media to communicate two things: we know where you are, and we can reach the people you left behind.
- Activation of regime aligned actors abroad. Once an address is public, anyone with sympathies—or money—can act on it.
The broadcast on April 2 collapsed several of those stages into a single televised act. Naming, address disclosure, and visual intimidation footage all on a single program. The legal proceedings happen in parallel; the broadcast is the operational signal to anyone who might want to act.
How the Surveillance Material Was Gathered
The footage played during the segment raises a separate question: how Belarusian state media obtained current personal data on journalists who have not lived in Belarus for four years. The likely answers are not cyber sophisticated. They include:
- Family pressure. Journalists' parents, spouses, and siblings often remain in Belarus and have been used as leverage by Belarusian security services to elicit current addresses and contact details. Several BIC journalists have published accounts of relatives being interrogated.
- Shared diaspora apps and forums. The Belarusian exile community in Warsaw and Vilnius has its own information ecosystem. Surveillance reaches in through paid informants and through compromised accounts inside legitimate community groups.
- Commercial data brokers. Polish residency and Polish phone numbers are searchable through European data broker services that aggregate phone book data, voter rolls, and breach corpora. The pricing is low and the targeting is precise.
- Phishing and account compromise. Exiled Russian and Belarusian journalists have been targeted by Pegasus and Predator commercial spyware, and by less sophisticated email phishing campaigns. Citizen Lab and Access Now have documented multiple Pegasus infections of exiled Belarusian and Russian opposition journalists in the last 24 months.
- Old surveillance archives. Some of the footage shown on STV—the 2022 imagery of BIC's old Minsk office, for instance—is years old. Belarusian security services were filming these journalists before they fled. The footage was held until it could be deployed.
No single channel explains everything STV had on April 2. The aggregation does. State surveillance of exiled journalists is no longer a question of one technology or one informant—it is a continuous integration of family coercion, commercial data brokerage, mobile spyware, and legacy Belarusian KGB archives, fed into the same television studio.
What Polish and EU Authorities Have to Decide
Most of the named journalists live in Poland. CPJ's April 24 statement asked Polish authorities to investigate whether Ivashkevich and the others have been physically surveilled inside Polish territory by Belarusian state operatives—an act that, if confirmed, would be a serious foreign intelligence offense under Polish law. Poland's Internal Security Agency has not publicly responded.
The harder question is what the EU does about state media broadcasts that openly facilitate transnational repression. The European Commission already sanctions STV and several other Belarusian state outlets, but sanctions do not stop satellite distribution, do not stop Telegram and YouTube reuploads, and do not stop the broadcast from reaching Belarusian diaspora communities in Poland, Germany, and Lithuania, where the targets actually live.
The structural gap echoes themes in the IFJ's April 2026 global surveillance study: classic phishing emails, fake websites, and social engineering coexist with state level commercial spyware, and there is no single agency in any host country with a complete picture of the threats journalists face. Poland's police investigate physical threats. Polish data protection authorities investigate doxxing. Polish counterintelligence investigates foreign operations. They rarely coordinate.
Why This Reaches You Even If You Are Not a Journalist
The Belarus playbook is not unique to Belarus. The Hungarian government just charged a journalist with espionage for reporting on Russian intelligence ties. Russia and the GRU spent 2026 hijacking home routers to read Microsoft Outlook tokens for diplomats and journalists. The mechanics of transnational repression—designation, criminalization, surveillance, broadcast—travel between authoritarian states the same way ransomware kits travel between criminal groups. They are a methodology, not a one off.
The implication for the rest of us is narrow but real. If you correspond with journalists, work with NGOs, donate to opposition causes, or move information across borders for any reason, your name and contact details have value beyond your immediate network. The threat model is no longer a Western inbox spammer. It is a state surveillance apparatus that buys data from the same brokers, runs the same phishing kits, and now puts the results on prime time television.
For journalists specifically, the practical defenses CPJ, Freedom of the Press Foundation, and the IFJ have converged on are concrete: phishing resistant authentication on every account, compartmentalized devices for source communications, location obfuscation when posting publicly, family preparedness training for relatives still inside the home country, and a documented chain of trust with the local press freedom organization in the host country. None of these stop a state TV broadcast from naming you. They limit the damage when one does.
For everyone else, the lesson is the cleaner one. Surveillance is no longer a covert operation; in Belarus's case, it is a programming choice. The footage exists, the addresses exist, the names exist. The only question—and it is the same question every authoritarian state is asking right now—is when to broadcast them.