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Two Ruptly Stringers Released Days After Being Detained in Belarus

MOSCOW (Sputnik) - RT and Sputnik Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan on Thursday announced that two stringers from the video news agency Ruptly, who were detained in Belarus while covering the protests against the presidential election, had been released.
Sputnik

"Our stringers have been released! Thanks everyone", Simonyan wrote on Telegram.

Ruptly was unable to get in contact with the detained staffers for four days.

On Tuesday, RT announced that a female stringer associated with the Ruptly video news agency, who was also detained while covering the protests against the Belarusian presidential election results in Minsk, was released.

She was detained on Sunday, and Ruptly was unable to contact her for more than a day.

Belarus has been engulfed by civil unrest since Sunday night after the preliminary results showed incumbent president, Alexander Lukashenko, winning over 80 percent of the vote. Opposition candidate Svetlana Tikhanovskaya refused to recognise the results, and her office claimed that she had secured between 70 and 90 percent of the ballots.

Reporters from several Russian media outlets, including Sputnik Belarus, RT, Dozhd (also known as TV Rain), Meduza, and Daily Storm, have been detained during the protests.

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