Aliaksandr Novikau was sentenced by Homieĺ District Court to two years of imprisonment in a regular-security penal colony under Part 1 of Article 130 (as amended by Act of 5 January 2015 Article 241-3) and Part 1 of Article 179 of the Criminal Code (as amended by the Act of 18 July 2019 Article 220-3) for publishing articles on his website, the content of which was ‘aimed at revising world history, the results of the war, and discrediting the victory in the Great Patriotic War of 1941–1945’. The court ruling also states that there were “signs of the rehabilitation of Nazism, as well as hostility to groups respecting the history of the Soviet period”. Novikau was also convicted of leaking personal data of employees of internal affairs bodies, namely their names and places of service. The trial was held behind closed doors.

Note: Article 203-1 (unlawful acts in relation to information on private life and personal data") was added to the Criminal Code only after the events of August 2020 (entered into force on June 19, 2021), so Aliaksandr Novikau was tried under Article 179 of the Criminal Code, which is now excluded. But, accordingly, at the time of the man's disclosure of the data, the prohibition on these actions set out in Article 179 of the Criminal Code of the Republic of Belarus was in force.