President of Belarus Oleksandr Lukashenko on Saturday signed a law banning “unfriendly” media from foreign countries on the territory of Belarus, according to a statement from his press service.

The decision comes after Lukashenko said this week that Wagner’s chief, Yevgeny Prigozhin, was in Belarus as part of an arrangement after his private military group tried to rebel against the Kremlin. At the same time, Lukashenko announced that the largest part of the nuclear weapons that Russia planned to deploy in Belarus had arrived.

“The document is aimed at improving the mechanisms for the protection of national interests in the media sphere, as well as expanding the tools for responding to unfriendly actions against Belarus,” the press release of the new law says, citing CNN and News.ro. .

“The law provides for the possibility of banning the activity of foreign mass media on the territory of the Republic of Belarus in the event of unfriendly actions by foreign states towards Belarusian mass media,” the message also states.

At the start of the 2022 war, Russian President Vladimir Putin enacted a censorship bill that made spreading “false” information about the invasion of Ukraine a crime punishable by up to 15 years in prison for anyone convicted.

Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Hershkovich was arrested in March and remains in custody, facing up to 20 years in prison on espionage charges that he and his employer strongly deny.

Lukashenko invited Wagner’s mercenaries to study in Belarus

Prigozhin was last seen leaving the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don on Saturday after abruptly ending his march on Moscow. The United States said it did not know where he was. Although there are no videos or photos showing Prigozhin there, satellite images of an air base near Minsk showed two planes linked to him landed there on Tuesday morning.

In a speech on Belarus’ Independence Day on Friday, state news agency Belta reported, Lukashenko said Wagner’s mercenaries were not in his country, but invited them to come and train his troops.

Belarus had previously been without nuclear weapons since the early 1990s, when it agreed to hand them all over to Russia after gaining independence following the collapse of the Soviet Union.