Is Alcohol legal in Belarus?

Also known as: booze

Legal status

Alcohol is regulated in Belarus, and it is regulated somewhere other than the narcotics annexes. The route is alcohol, food and excise legislation, which carries ethyl alcohol product controls. Ethyl alcohol is a product category in Belarus rather than a scheduled drug, and the controls that reach it are production, excise, retail and food law. The narcotics annexes were searched and no accepted row was found, which is a finding about where the regulation sits, not a finding that the substance is unregulated. The annexes to Постановление Министерства здравоохранения № 19 от 11 февраля 2015 г. республиканский перечень were searched on "alcohol", "ALCOHOL" at № 19/2015 with the official 2025 and 10 March 2026 amendments and returned no accepted entry, and that absence is recorded as a finding about where the regulation sits rather than as a finding that nothing regulates it. Record BEL-15. The negative half of that cross check carries a limit worth stating: the terms just quoted are in Latin script, as all eighty eight search sets in this source are, while the entries the source accepts elsewhere are mostly printed in Cyrillic, so a Latin search of a Cyrillic annex can return nothing whether or not the substance is on it.

Consequences if caught

Capital exposure: none. Belarus retains capital punishment in its general criminal law, and that is a separate question from what a drug offence carries. Criminal Code Article 328 provides neither the death penalty nor life imprisonment, so a term of years is the whole of the drug scale here. The figure itself is disputed and the dispute is stated rather than hidden: this repair reads Article 328(5) as a twenty year ceiling, the cell it replaces read the same paragraph as twelve to twenty five years, and the sources reachable here do not settle which reading is right. The earlier cell also framed the offence as articles 327 to 328 with a superscript one, a range this repair does not mention at all, so treat the article range as well as the figure as open. That scale attaches to an offence in a substance the narcotics annexes list, and this row is not one of them. Alcohol sits under alcohol, food and excise legislation at record BEL-15, so Article 328 does not engage on the footing that this substance is scheduled. What applies instead are the offence and penalty provisions of that separate regime, which are product, licensing and supply rules rather than narcotics rules, and this cell does not state a figure for them because the source does not carry one. What bites here is licensing, excise and retail law, and the offences that go with them are economic and administrative rather than narcotics offences, so nothing on the Article 328 scale is reached by holding it.

If prescribed or medical

The traveller rule is stated at country level and it is the same for every substance in this set: Belarus provides no lawful personal use allowance for a scheduled drug and no traveller exemption, and a scheduled medicine has to satisfy Закон Республики Беларусь «О лекарственных средствах» as well as the narcotics annexes. This row's placement is outside those annexes and inside alcohol, food and excise legislation, record BEL-15, so what a traveller has to satisfy is that regime's own requirements, ethyl alcohol product controls. The source states no medical route specific to alcohol and none is supplied here. There is no schedule placement to attach, because the row sits in excise and retail law, and a traveller allowance here is a customs allowance rather than anything a prescription touches.

Documentation

Carry the paperwork the alcohol, food and excise legislation route requires rather than narcotics paperwork, in the original packaging, and be able to show what the product is and on what basis you hold it. The narcotics cross check that puts this row outside the республиканский перечень was run against № 19/2015 with the official 2025 and 10 March 2026 amendments on 20 September 2026, record BEL-15. A later amendment can add an entry that moves a substance from that regime onto the annexes, so recheck before travel. What matters at a border here is the customs and excise allowance rather than any medical paperwork.

Drug laws and enforcement change and vary within a country. This is not legal advice. Always confirm with Belarus’s embassy or official drug authority before traveling; penalties can be severe, including imprisonment.