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Roman Protasevich’s participation in the anti-Lukashenko movement began last summer in a large-scale protest that was triggered by the decision of the President of Belarus to govern after a disputed election.
Franak Viacorka, an assistant to Belarusian opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, first met the 26-year-old activist in 2011, and long after that he became the focus of last weekend’s dramatic Ryanair rerouting. At the time, Protasevich was just an unrecognizable teenager who participated in anti-regime demonstrations.
However, in the next few years, Protasevich became the main voice of the opposition by working for various media in his home country (including Radio Free Europe) and becoming the editor of The Patriot. Nextida, One of the main independent media groups in Belarus.
“Ten years ago, many Belarusian activists realized that activism was not enough to win, and in the press, you can do more. At the same time, journalism cannot win alone. This mixed form of media activism The person appeared, and Roman is one of them.” Viaacocca said.
“He is impulsive. He is creative. He cannot accept injustice,” he added.
Now Protasevich finds himself at the center of global diplomatic disputes between Belarus and the European Union, Britain and the United States. Under the command of Lukashenko himself, he boarded a plane in Vilnius in Athens on Sunday after being transferred to Belarusian airspace. After the plane landed in Minsk, the militants were arrested.
“looks like [Belarus’s KGB] Follow me at the airport,” he told his friends through the messaging app before boarding. “Anyway-suspicious shit. “
Intercepted International condemnation It also marked the deterioration of relations between the Belarusian regime and the West, highlighting Lukashenko’s preparedness to do everything possible to silence critics, because Lukashenko tried to regain control of himself after last year’s massive protests.
Protasevich left Belarus in 2019 and now lives in Vilnius. Protasevich was placed on the terrorist watch list in Belarus in November and was charged with three crimes related to the protests, the most serious of which carries a maximum sentence of 15 years in prison.
Dzianis Melyantsou, an expert at the Minsk International Relations Dialogue Committee, said that the Belarusian security services have been ordered “by any means” to track down the main figures in the anti-regime protests.
He said: “The goal is very obvious: show the way forward. If you value your life, then you will never do anything in Belarus again.”
In Nexta, Protasevich’s dual role as activist and journalist attracted the widest audience. As Lukashenko stepped up its suppression of the protests against him last summer, Nexta’s channel-the few channels that avoided Internet blackouts-became an important source of information about the actual situation. Nexta’s Telegram channel has more than 1.2 million subscribers in 9.4 million countries.
“My son is always someone who reacts strongly to lies. That’s why he became a journalist,” his father Dmitry Protasevich told the Financial Times . “The whole problem is that the authorities are afraid of even the smallest freedom of speech, criticism or independent media to tell the truth.”
Nextida not only reported on the protests. It also helped coordinate them by providing all information to the protesters, including information about where to gather, what clothes to wear, and how to escape the security forces. Stsiapan Putsila, the founder of Nexta, told the Financial Times that Protasevich, the editor-in-chief, is at the core of these activities.
“Now the regime is taking revenge,” Putsila said.
In recent months, the Belarusian authorities have stepped up their crackdown on journalists from independent publications outside the middle class in cities that are central to protests.
Last week, Belarus blocked Tut.by, the most popular independent news website, and accused 15 staff of tax evasion. Several local newspapers were banned from publishing print editions, thus achieving the basis of historical support of the Belarusian working class Lukashenko.
Igor Trushkevich, a Belarusian dissident in exile in Ukraine, told the Financial Times that Protasevich left Nexta in September last year to try to get in touch with these. After the Belarusians in the countryside, it may become a bigger target. Since then, Protasevich is responsible for Belamova, another opposition news channel on the Telegram messaging app with 260,000 subscribers.
Lukashenko’s regime made it clear that it targeted overseas dissidents in April, when Russia’s FSB (the successor to the Soviet KGB) arrested two opposition figures in Moscow and handed them over to Belarus.
A senior Belarusian official then vowed to “discover and eliminate” foreign dissidents: “We remind us that we are out of control, the bloodthirsty opposition, we know all of them,” Deputy Interior Minister Nikolai Karpenkov (Nikolai Karpenkov) Karpenkov) said. “We know where they are, who they are talking to, where their home is, and where is their family.” He added: “Let them know that revenge is inevitable.”
The arrest of Protasevich made the Belarusian opposition in exile anxious-especially since Tsikhanouskaya and some of her team returned to their base in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, from Athens a week ago.
“This is shocking, it is shocking, it has changed a lot… It has mobilized the international community, but I am worried that the international community will forget this tomorrow.”
“If Europeans don’t want North Korea to be in the middle of Europe, if they don’t want to shoot down a plane carrying passengers, they should respond… This is no longer a question of Belarusian domestic policy, it is now a question of European security.”
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