Police detained 66-year-old Belarusian Valery Smolensky from Lepel after he went to a forest to load drugs.[1] Officers watched his every step and arrested him red-handed as soon as he drove out of the forest onto the road.[1] Officers also detained the people who were in the forest and in a nearby car, described as previously convicted for drug trafficking.[1] The Interior Ministry newspaper later placed the courier detention in Skidel, carried out by drug-control officers with Almaz special-police support.[2]

The courier car had a hidden compartment behind the rear bumper with room for 60 kilograms of drugs.[1] In Skidel officers seized 11 kg of hashish and 54 kg of 4-CMC from the courier.[2] Officers later found a 14 kg hashish forest cache that had not fitted into the overfilled car hideout and was meant for a second run to Russia.[2] A separate balloon found by a fish-farm watchman in Grodno District had landed on water and contained 326 bricks of hashish.[1] Inside that balloon officers found GPS trackers with a SIM card from a Lithuanian mobile operator.[1] Forensic experts confirmed that the brown substance in the seized lot was the dangerous narcotic hashish.[1]

Belarus was used as a transit corridor with Russia as the final delivery point.[3] Police presented the case as Belarus used as a transit corridor for delivery onward to Russia and valued the transit lot at $4 million.[1] Police said the balloons were fitted with a GPS tracker and mobile phone, met by local accomplices, and couriers such as Valery were to carry the drugs on to Russia, mainly synthetics.[1]