CPJ calls on Kazakhstan to overturn travel ban, end harassment of journalist Lukpan Akhmedyarov

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 and human rights organizations sent a joint letter to Kazakhstan’s President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, expressing concern over a series of journalist detentions and growing pressure on the media.

Since last year, Akhmedyarov, whose recent work has focused on Russian recruitment of Kazakh citizens to fight in Ukraine, has frequently been targeted by authorities because of his work. In April 2025, authorities detained and interrogated him in connection with a criminal false information investigation into another social media post on the same topic. 

In June this year, police briefly detained him and informed him that an unspecified criminal case had been opened against him in Russia. Over the past year, his social media accounts have also repeatedly been blocked and posts deleted on the basis of spurious copyright complaints, and in July an unidentified individual sprayed paint over his car.

CPJ emailed Astana police for comment via Kazakhstan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which handles inquiries from foreign organizations, but did not receive a reply.