Unknown individuals are impersonating the Human Rights Centre ZMINA to send fake emails to various political and cultural diaspora organizations, primarily Belarusian ones. They ask for information about the individuals involved in the “Hajun case” and other persons who support Ukraine, ZMINA’s Tetyana Pechonchyk reported in a Facebook post.
She stressed that ZMINA has nothing to do with these letters.
“Please be careful and do not give any information to ‘Mr. Officer’! If you are contacted by suspicious individuals on behalf of our organization, please let me know,” Pechonchyk wrote.
She shared a post by the Belarusian human rights initiative Viasna, which also received a fake email. The letter came from a non-existent ZMINA employee, Mykola Oksynuk, from the email address [email protected].
ZMINA officially stated that they did not have an employee with that name and did not use that email address. All official communication by the organization only comes from addresses ending in @zmina.ua.
The letter mentions an effort to collect information about Belarusians related to the “Hajun case” as well as other political prisoners who oppose the Russian aggression. The letter ends with a request to “share information for possible inclusion in prisoner swap lists.”
ZMINA urged people not to respond to such letters, not to share personal data, and to immediately notify their team of any suspicious contacts.
Belarusian Hajun was an independent monitoring project tracking the movement of Russian and Belarusian troops in Belarus. The Telegram channel promptly collected and analyzed data reported by Belarusians across the country. In February 2025, Belarusian Hajun announced they were ceasing operations after the chatbot that the project used to collect data from people was hacked. The chatbot of the project’s Telegram channel was hacked within the same month, compromising informants’ personal data.