New York, August 5, 2026—The Committee to Protect Journalists urges Kazakhstan to stop harassing prominent journalist Lukpan Akhmedyarov after he was
barred
from leaving the country for a holiday on August 3.
“Amid a worrying surge in criminal prosecutions of leading independent journalists in Kazakhstan, the unexplained travel ban on Lukpan Akhmedyarov is deeply concerning,” said Gypsy Guillén Kaiser, CPJ’s chief global affairs officer. “Kazakh authorities should immediately lift all restrictions on Akhmedyarov’s movement and swiftly investigate attempts to harass him for his work.”
Akhmedyarov, founder of the popular YouTube-based outlet
Prosto Zhurnalistika
(Just Journalism), wrote on
Facebook
that he had been attempting to fly from Kazakhstan’s capital, Astana, to Montenegro on holiday with his family when border guards informed him that city police had placed him under a travel ban.
The journalist told CPJ that he was not given more information about the ban, but believes it is related to a July 31
police summons
during which he was questioned over social media posts from April 2025. In those posts, Akhmedyarov shared a Ukrainian government list of Kazakh citizens alleged to be fighting for Russia in its war on Ukraine.
Even though the list has been published by Ukraine,
two Kazakh nationals
have recently publicly demanded that Akhmedyarov be prosecuted for sharing it, saying they were wrongly included in the list and suffered harm from its publication.
Akhmedyarov, who was
shot and stabbed
in a
near-fatal attack
in 2012, said he fears that authorities may seek to arrest him on fabricated charges of spreading false information or unlawful dissemination of personal data, citing a string of recent cases in which Kazakh journalists have been
jailed
,
placed
under
house arrest
, and
received
multi-year
journalism bans
on these charges in apparent retaliation for their reporting.
In April, CPJ and five international press freedom
… [more]
