Uladzimir Butskavets was arrested on September 5, 2022, and sentenced to seven days of arrest under Article 19.11 of the Code of Administrative Offences for the 'dissemination of extremist materials'. On September 14, one of the pro-government Telegram channels posted a video of Butskavets being arrested by the police with the use of force. Then he confesses to having been posting news about the Belarusian language as the moderator of a social network page, which was recently recognized as an "extremist formation".

In the summer of 2022, Butskavets was fired as "politically unreliable". He tried to defend his position under the law filing numerous appeals and complaints but to no avail.

Butskavets was accused of managing the online community promoting Belarusian as the single state language in Belarus in the VKontakte Russian social network. He was convicted under Part 1 of Art. 361-1 ('Creating an extremist formation'). On August 5, information published by his online community was qualified as "extremist materials", and on August 18 the community was recognized as an "extremist formation".

On February 13, 2023, the Homieĺ Regional Court sentenced Butskavets to three years of imprisonment in a medium-security penal colony. Judge Ruslan Tsaruk pronounced the verdict.

On April 18, 2023, the Supreme Court considered the appeal against the verdict and replaced the sentence with three years of freedom restriction with a referral to an open-type penal facility. Uladzimir Butskavets was released from remand prison #3 in Homieĺ until he is sent to an open-type penal colony.