Original name:
Minsk, Belarus
06.11.1977
Born in 1977 in Minsk. Graduated from the philological faculty of the Belarusian State University, later – postgraduate study at the Institute of Linguistics of the National Academy of Sciences. Fluent in English, Polish and Bulgarian.
She worked at the Institute of Science Problems, as well as the BelaPAN news agency.
In 2004, Zolotova joined the Tut.by team in the summer. In a short period of time she headed the editorial staff of this portal. Under her leadership, the resource opened its own news section and added thematic pages related to sports, culture, fashion and other topics.
Although in 2004 the portal had only 6,000 unique daily users, by 2020 it had become the leading Belarusian Internet media with a team of 50 professional journalists and a daily audience of 600,000 people.
Married, has a daughter Nadezhda and a son Fyodor.
On August 7, 2018, the office of TUT.BY was searched by the Investigative Committee of the Republic of Belarus. After this procedure, Zolotova was detained. She was charged with inactivity in office related to receiving the news feed of the Belarusian Telegraph Agency without payment. The court in Minsk found her guilty on March 4, 2019, imposing a fine. The incident raised concerns of many countries and international institutions, including the EU and the UN.
On May 18, 2021, Zolotova was detained again, this time on charges of tax evasion. A number of organizations recognized her as a political prisoner.
The case was initially presented as tax violations, but the charges were later toughened. On March 17, 2023, a local court sentenced Zolotova and Chekina to 12 years in prison for a number of crimes, including tax evasion and acting against national security.