Belarus: subscriptions and phone checks

The guides below are drafts: a lawyer has not reviewed them yet. This is not legal advice.

Draft Safety

For anyone living in Belarus, travelling to or through it, returning, or waiting for relatives to return.

Phones are checked at the Belarusian border on a mass scale, including people who never protested: Telegram channels and chats, Instagram, YouTube, likes, comments, photos and calls. Officers find forgotten subscriptions and reposts.
Subscribing to, reposting, commenting on or liking 'extremist' material is punished under art. 19.11 of the Administrative Code (fine or up to 15 days). Donations and 'assistance' to 'extremist formations' are criminal (arts. 361-1, 361-2, 361-4 of the Criminal Code).
The lists keep growing and are applied to actions taken before a designation.
Prepare the phone weeks in advance; an empty phone may raise questions, but it is still better than your main one if there was no time.

Rights groups advise postponing a trip that may be dangerous.
A separate phone with new accounts is safer; don't sign in to your main Telegram on it.
If your phone was taken during a 'talk' with the KGB, GUBOPiK or at the border, treat it as infected: ResidentBat spyware was found in 2025 on a journalist's Android phone after officers watched the passcode being typed.

Don't carry a phone you donated from, or donation screenshots and receipts.
Don't forward Belarusian independent media or organisations' materials to people in Belarus.
Don't remotely wipe a seized phone or laptop (Find My, Find Hub) without talking to a lawyer first: it can be treated as destroying evidence.
If a case has been opened, a report drawn up or your phone seized, don't delete anything without a lawyer: deletion can be used against you and won't remove what the authorities have already copied.

Telegram subscriptions, reactions and comments live on its servers and return when you sign in.

Situations this guide covers