Lukashenka Fires Deputy Head Of Security Council Supervising Work With KGB

According to one version, the reason was the failure of the "information war" with the democratic media.

One of the country's top security officials, Uladzimir Archakou, has been relieved of his post as deputy state secretary of the Security Council. The decree on his dismissal has not been officially published, however Lukashenka's decree No 268 of August 1, which excludes him from various commissions and boards where he was formerly a member, was published on the National Legal Internet Portal. As it follows from the decree, the post of Aliaksandr Valfovich's deputy is now taken by Aliaksandr Neviarouski, as zerkalo.io reports.

Neviarouski used to be the chief of the KGB in Hrodna region, Archakou came to the Council of Ministers from the same position. One of his duties in the Council was to supervise the work with the KGB. Apparently, such a supervisor will be Neviarouski now.

Major General Uladzimir Archakou, a native of Yekaterinburg, graduated from the Institute of National Security in Belarus in the 1990s and served in the KGB before the Security Council. After two years as head of the KGB office for Vitsebsk Region, he was appointed deputy state secretary of the Security Council in 2014. The current Secretary Valfovich is the fifth under whom Archakou has worked. In the Council, he was deputy chairman of the Interdepartmental Commission on Security in the Economic Sphere and chairman of the Interdepartmental Commission on Security in the Information Sphere.

This year, Archakou, as a major general, reached the retirement age of 55. After that, the service contract is extended only by Lukashenka's decree. Nasha Niva, quoting its sources in the law enforcement agencies, says that Archakou's contract was not renewed and that he has remained in his position for the last two years only because they didn't want to fire him before he retired.

According to the newspaper, one of the reasons for Archakou's dismissal is the failure in practice of the Information Security Concept of Belarus, which Archakou was developing. It was approved in March 2019 and Archakou defended his thesis on it marked "classified". Sources explain that it took several years to develop the Concept and hundreds of experts were involved in developing it, but as a result, as early as 2020, "enemy" telegram channels became the leaders of the infosphere, and then opponents of the government managed to hack and steal many republican databases.

According to another version of the publication, Archakou's dismissal was part of a vertical mopping up of ideologues who, according to Lukashenka, "failed 2020": similarly, many ideologues of executive committees and Lukashenka's administration had previously been dismissed.