The Klaipeda Regional Court has imposed seven-year prison sentences on a Lithuanian couple after finding them guilty of gathering sensitive information about the country's military capabilities to hand over to Belarus.
Mindaugas Januitis and Tatjana Beleckaja, both Lithuanians, acted jointly and, according to the investigation, their task was to obtain data on the military potential of Lithuania, a member state of the European Union and NATO, which they subsequently transferred to Minsk. According to the RLT channel, the magistrate concluded that "both Januitis and Beleckaja have been working for the Belarusian secret service since May 2022."
Lithuanian judicial authorities detail that the couple traveled to Minsk in May 2022, where they agreed to collaborate as intermediaries with certain representatives of the Belarusian Army. From that first meeting until their arrest in 2023, they carried out data acquisition tasks for the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ministry of Defense of Belarus.
The two defendants were arrested in November 2023 and have been in pre-trial detention for more than two years, a period that will be deducted from the seven-year prison sentence. The ruling is not yet final and can be appealed to the Supreme Court of Justice within a period of up to 20 days.
Januitis and Beleckaja received 8,500 euros in exchange for providing intelligence information on the Lithuanian Armed Forces, NATO equipment, the activity of the Belarusian opposition in exile, and the Lithuanian Riflemen's Union, an organization of which Januitis was a member until his expulsion in 2024.
According to the authorities, the couple closely monitored military infrastructure and movements using mobile phones, cameras, and recording devices. They acted discreetly and held clandestine meetings with agents of the Belarusian intelligence services.
Although the data obtained by these spies in the service of Belarus was not classified as official secrets, the Klaipeda Regional Court has determined that it was sensitive information of great potential utility for a possible military operation against Lithuania.