A court in the former Soviet republic of Belarus, which has ruled with an iron fist since 1994, Alexander Lukashenko, sentenced this Wednesday the former opposition journalist Roman Protasévich, arrested in 2021 after the Minsk authorities diverted a passenger plane in an action that was condemned internationally.
In the trial, which began last year, Protasevich was accused of making public calls “to seize power”, committing “terrorist acts” and insulting the head of state.
Along with him, Yan Rudik and Stepán Putilo, both in exile, were also tried. Found guilty like Protasévich, the judges determined to sentence the first to 19 years in prison in absentia and the second to 20, the state news agency Belta published.
The three had worked for Nexta, one of the best-known Telegram channels during the protest three years ago against the Belarusian regime. The medium played a relevant role in the protest movement that broke out in Belarus in 2020 after the presidential elections. It published calls to demonstrate, as well as images of the violent police repression with which Lukashenko tried to silence the opposition.
Protasévich, who is now 27 years old, started cooperating with the Nexta channel, founded by Putilo, in 2019 and working for him from Warsaw in January 2020. In the fall of that year, he quit his job.
But the Belarusian Investigative Committee was simultaneously opening several criminal cases against him for articles published about the demonstrations, accusing him of inciting hatred. The KGB, which in Belarus maintains the Soviet name, included him on its list of people involved in acts of terrorism and the Government of Minsk asked Poland to extradite him.
In 2021 the blogger moved from Poland to Lithuania, and in the spring he and his girlfriend, SofÃa Sapega, a Russian national, go on vacation to Greece.
To return, they took a Ryanair plane from Athens to Vilnius. When the plane was flying over Belarus on May 23, the pilots received a message from air traffic controllers indicating that there could be a bomb in the device. Accompanied by a Belarusian fighter, he landed at the Minsk airport.
After verifying that the supposed bomb did not exist, the plane took off for the capital of Lithuania, but without Protasévich and Sapega, who were taken from the plane and arrested.
The move by the Belarusian authorities to catch a critical voice was strongly condemned by the governments of European countries and the United States. In 2021, the EU banned all Belarusian airlines from using its airspace and recommended those from the mainland to avoid flying through Belarusian airspace.