BelTA
BelTA
Belarus · Quick FactsSources: President of Belarus portal and presidential appointment notice, 9 April 2026; National Archives catalogue; 2026 republican budget legislation; BelTA institutional materials; Law on Mass Media No. 427-Z of 2008; SMM interviews, May 2024, and analysis, June 2023; Reporters Without Borders 2026. Classification per the State Media Matrix.
Typology trajectory — BelTA
Belarus · 2022–2026Sources: Presidential appointment notice, 9 April 2026; President of Belarus portal; National Archives catalogue; 2026 republican budget legislation; BelTA institutional materials; Law on Mass Media No. 427-Z of 2008; SMM analysis, June 2023. SC = State-Controlled Media, per the State Media Matrix.
BelTA, the Belarusian Telegraph Agency, is Belarus’s official state news agency, legally constituted as the Republican Unitary Enterprise “Belarusian Telegraph Agency”. It was founded on 23 December 1918 as the Belarusian branch of the Russian Telegraph Agency and first took the BelTA name on 7 March 1931. It operated as Belinform from May 1992 until the BelTA name was restored on 10 October 1995. The agency is subordinate to the Administration of the President.
Media assets
News agency: BelTA
Newspaper: 7 Days
Magazines: Belaruskaya Dumka and Economy of Belarus
Official bulletin: the Information Bulletin of the Administration of the President of the Republic of Belarus, published and distributed by BelTA
Ownership and governance
BelTA is a state-owned republican unitary enterprise subordinate to the Administration of the President. The President directly appoints its Director-General.
Andrei Mokhor was appointed Director-General by President Aleksandr Lukashenko on 9 April 2026. He previously directed the News Broadcasting Directorate at ONT. His predecessor, Irina Akulovich, was relieved of the post on 25 November 2025 upon transfer to other work and was appointed Minister-Counsellor at the Belarusian embassy in the Russian Federation on 26 November.
Source of funding and budget
BelTA receives direct state financing. The 2026 republican budget assigns the agency BYN 2,901,187 as financial assistance to a legal entity from reserve funds. The budget legislation also expressly refers to funds received by BelTA in the form of republican-budget subsidies.
BelTA additionally earns commercial revenue through news subscriptions, website development and support, publishing, printing and audiovisual services.
Belarusian journalists and experts interviewed by State Media Monitor in May 2024 described state financing as predominant, but its precise share of total revenue could not be calculated.
Editorial independence
BelTA’s official institutional description identifies it as a source of news about Belarus’s supreme authorities and states that its daily output highlights the activities of state bodies. Its publication of the Presidential Administration’s bulletin and its direct subordination to that Administration place it within the state’s official communication apparatus.
An analysis conducted for State Media Monitor in June 2023 found a consistently propagandistic tone across the agency’s output.
Articles 4 to 7 of Belarus’s Law on Mass Media, Law No. 427-Z of 17 July 2008, list diversity of opinion and free expression among the principles governing the media and prohibit censorship, monopolisation, demands for prior approval, interference in the professional autonomy of an editorial entity and coercion of journalists to publish or withhold information.
Those provisions provide no structural independence here. BelTA is subordinate to the Administration of the President, which appoints its Director-General, and State Media Monitor identified no independent mechanism capable of applying the statutory protections against that authority.
AI and digital policy
State Media Monitor could not identify a published BelTA policy governing generative artificial intelligence, mandatory human verification, model provenance or audience disclosure, and could not establish the extent of adoption in production.
State Media Monitor did not establish whether Belarus has adopted a statutory framework requiring disclosure of AI-generated content.
Classification rationale
BelTA remains classified State-Controlled Media (SC).
It is state-owned and directly presidentially governed. The agency is a republican unitary enterprise subordinate to the Administration of the President, which appoints its Director-General. It publishes and distributes that Administration’s own Information Bulletin. No independent supervisory board, protected appointment procedure or external oversight mechanism was identified.
It is state-funded. The 2026 republican budget assigns BelTA BYN 2,901,187 in direct financial assistance, while budget legislation identifies funds received by the agency as subsidies. BelTA also earns commercial income from subscriptions and publishing, printing, audiovisual and website services.
Its editorial agenda is directed by the state. BelTA’s own institutional description identifies it as a source of news about the supreme authorities and states that its daily output highlights the activities of state bodies. Analysis conducted in June 2023 found a consistently propagandistic tone. Articles 4 to 7 of the Law on Mass Media contain formal protections unsupported by independent governance or enforcement.
September 2026
Citation (cite the article/profile as part of):
Dragomir, M. (2025). State Media Monitor Global Dataset 2025.
Media and Journalism Research Center (MJRC).
Zenodo.
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17219015
This article/profile is part of the State Media Monitor Global Dataset 2025, a continuously updated dataset published by the Media and Journalism Research Center (MJRC).