2023-05-26 00:05:49
The Belarusian opponent has been pardoned after retracting his criticism and condemning his former partner, who remains incommunicado in prison
Quin. Roman Protasevich (Minsk, 1995) exiled Belarusian opposition activist. He was arrested along with his girlfriend, Sofa, in 2021 when the plane he was flying on was forced to land.
What. He has been pardoned by the Belarusian leader, Alexander Lukashenko, after retracting his criticism and condemning his former partner, who remains incommunicado in prison.
Por qu. From the dissidence they accuse him of having betrayed his colleagues, in his environment they believe that he was mistreated.
Ro’s post-vacation smile
Man froze when he heard the pilot announce that the plane he was traveling in was diverting from its destination. Like so many Belarusian dissidents,
Roman Protasevich
he would have preferred any other country except his own. Already on land, the activist was arrested after he
his Ryanair flight was forced to land in the Belarusian capital, Minsk
. His imprisonment in that murky 2021 with his girlfriend,
Russian Sofia Sapega
, turned them both into martyrs, some suffering Romeo and Juliet in the fight for democracy. During this time deprived of liberty by the regime of
Alexander Lukashenko
-the dictator who has controlled Belarus since 1994- has been breaking it little by little so that he retracts his earlier criticisms. This week he has been pardoned. Those around him fear that he has betrayed his colleagues by providing information about them.
Protasevich knows that, in exchange for not wearing the recluse outfit, many in Belarus are going to make him one of a traitor. He was an editor for the Nexta channel, fighting the Belarusian regime from Poland,
posting videos about the great wave of street protests
against Lukashenko that began in the summer of 2020.
Outrage with the Belarusian regime rose to a head when he was arrested along with his then-girlfriend in May 2021 after Belarusian air traffic control
suddenly diverted his flight from Greece to Lithuania to Minsk
. The authorities had falsely reported that there was a bomb on board and even sent a MIG to follow the aircraft.
Earlier this month, he was sentenced to
eight years in prison
. But after being pardoned, Protasevich has made statements to state media that would have seemed impossible a few years ago, when he compared Lukashenko to Adolf Hitler. He now declares himself “incredibly grateful” to his president.
In a country as opaque as Belarus, it cannot be established with certainty whether he has really switched sides. It is public that he has changed partners: last year he broke up with Sapega to marry another, whose name is unknown, just as it is not clear how he met her when he was still deprived of liberty. But the stab was not the link, but rather how she dispatched on her blog the six-year sentence that Sapega is serving in a sad cell: she presented it as just punishment “for her real activities, not for having a relationship with me” . By then he had already suspiciously gone from prison to house arrest.
Sapega remains incommunicado since she was arrested
while Protasevich has even appeared in public events guarded by men in gray.
Franak Viacorka, collaborator of the Belarusian opposition leader in exile,
Svetlana Tijanovskaya
accuses Protasevich of obtaining his pardon thanks to
collaborate with the fearsome KGB of Belarus
, which in these years has not changed its name or its methods. A few months after his arrest, Protasevich appeared on state television with bruises on his wrists and a blow to the head, proclaiming the entire wish list of the regime: he confessed that he had organized protests and urged to stop the mobilizations and adopt a “neutral position”. ” towards Lukashenko and his policy. Today for many their path to forgiveness is unforgivable.
To continue reading for free
#Romeo #betrayed #Juliet #Lukashenkos #jail