The Ministry of Information of Belarus has supported the re-accreditation of foreign media initiated by the country's Foreign Ministry.

“The Ministry of Information believes that the measures taken today to improve the activities of foreign media in Belarus have really been in the making for a long time, they meet the interests of our country, will undoubtedly increase the effectiveness of informing the foreign public about the life of Belarus and simplify the conditions for accrediting representatives of the foreign press to work in the Belarusian media field,” said the Minister of Information Igor Lutsky.

He also stressed that the Ministry of Information "welcomes and supports any actions aimed at strengthening the information sovereignty of Belarus, its security in the information sphere as a whole."

On Friday, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Belarus announced that it will re-accredit foreign media according to new rules, the old cards will no longer be valid effective October 2.

On Monday, October 5, the Foreign Ministry's Commission on Accreditation of Journalists of Foreign Media begins its work with new members.

At the same time, the press secretary of the Foreign Ministry Anatoly Glaz urged not to regard the re-accreditation of foreign media as a cleanup of the information field of Belarus. “First of all, I would like to emphasize that this is not some kind of clearing up of the information field, termination of accreditation or something else related to this. This is simply re-accreditation of foreign media under the new rules,” he said.

In other news from Belarus, the country’s YouTube users complained about problems with accessing the hosting, as was reported by Downdetector, which specializes in tracking the work of popular Internet resources.

According to the service, the problems started around 20.02 and were resolved an hour later.