On 11 March 2022, Mark Izraylevich Bernstein, a Belarusian blogger and contributor to the Russian Wikipedia based in Minsk, was detained by GUBOPiK personnel after online accusations of violating the Russian 2022 war censorship laws for his editing of Wikipedia articles on the topic of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. He was sentenced to 15 days' administrative arrest under Article 24.3 of the Administrative Code of Belarus. After that period, he was kept in detention; on 24 June 2022 he was sentenced to three years of restricted freedom and released from custody.

The Russian Wikipedia is the Russian-language edition of Wikipedia. As of May 2024, it has 1,978,779 articles. It was started on 11 May 2001. In October 2015, it became the sixth-largest Wikipedia by the number of articles. It has the sixth-largest number of edits (137 million). In June 2020, it was the world's sixth most visited language Wikipedia.