Context: In an interview with RT, a Russian state-funded TV channel banned in the EU and the UK, Aleksandr Lukashenko said that the US should learn democracy from Belarus. During his conversation with Rick Sanchez, he also referred to the leaders of Western countries and the United States as timeservers who are incapable of effecting change.
Belarusian state media sought to present Aleksandr Lukashenko’s interview with RT as a major international event.
“The new interview with the Belarusian leader caused a wide resonance in the global media. It is quoted, discussed, and analyzed,” said Ala Hryharchuk, a host at TRK Brest TV and radio company, on April 24, 2026.
However, the reality is far more modest. In the two weeks since it was posted, the interview on Rick Sanchez’s X account has garnered less than 1,500 views. RT’s VK and Rutube channels have received about 94,000 views in total. Reuters only used one quote from the conversation, regarding Lukashenko’s willingness to make a grand bargain with Trump. Several foreign sources reprinted this English-language news story. However, this interview did not become a notable event among major media outlets worldwide.
The topic was also discussed on the CTV program Azaryonok. Napyamuyu. Siarhei Lushch, the chairman of the Dvizhenie Soyuz movement and a supporter of Lukashenko’s thesis that Belarus is more democratic than the West, said that neither Belarus nor Russia is leading in prosecutions for internet activity.
“If these were channels run by citizens of Western European countries or the United States, they could be imprisoned for extremism. By the way, dear viewers, you might want to Google statistics on the countries with the most prosecutions for social media posts, tweets, and the like. You’d be surprised at what fantastic results you’ll get. Eastern Europe is nowhere near the top of the list. And we, this part of the world, Russia and Belarus, are far from the top of these ratings,” he said on air on April 17, 2026.
The most well-known global evaluation of internet freedom suggests the opposite.. According to the Freedom House index, which assesses the quality of internet infrastructure, content blocking, prosecution for internet activity, and other factors, Belarus and Russia are two of the five worst countries out of 72 covered by the assessed.
Siarhei Lushch may have relied on data from a social media post titled “Countries with the Most Arrests for Online Comments.” This ranking is supposedly based on a publication by The Times, a British newspaper. In the post, Belarus ranks second, behind only the UK. Germany completes the trio. However, The Times has not published such an international ranking.
In April 2025, the newspaper issued a story about the large-scale arrests of people for online messages in the UK. However, the article only covered this country. There was no international comparison, aggregate table, or ranking. According to the text, British police recorded an average of approximately 30 cases per day, resulting in around 12,000 arrests per year. However, it is important to note that these cases were not limited to online comments but encompassed a broader range of violations, including threats, harassment, and insults. By Belarusian standards, the punishments for such violations are relatively mild. They include a fine or up to 2 years of imprisonment. At the same time, out of about 12,000 detentions, only a small portion of the cases — slightly more than a thousand — went to trial. The number of convictions has declined, with nearly half as many in 2023 as in 2015.
The situation is similar in Germany. As Der Spiegel reported, the police there do conduct raids against online hate speech. However, official statistics show that such cases rarely result in severe penalties. In the German state of Hessen, police opened 4,062 criminal cases over 4.5 years. However, only 1.5% of those cases resulted in actual sentences. Nearly all of the cases ended in fines. There was only one prison sentence, but it is unclear if it was related to expressing political views.
In light of this, the situation in Belarus appears fundamentally different. There is no exact data on the number of people detained for acts related to Internet activity. However, according to the human rights initiative Dissidentby, at least 2,799 people in the country have been convicted of insulting or defaming someone online. And that’s just in a five-year period.. These are not merely fines, but cases involving restrictions of liberty or prison sentences. Additionally, certain articles — such as those on "inciting hatred" — provide for sentences of up to 12 years of imprisonment. .
When we compare the real consequences for people, the situation in Belarus appears much more severe. In the last four and a half years, there has only been one case of actual imprisonment related to internet activity in the six-million-strong German region. In Belarus, a country of nine million people, the number of restrictions and deprivations of liberty under articles on insult and defamation alone amounts to thousands over a comparable period.