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Roman Protasevich’s involvement in the anti-Lukashenko movement began years before last summer’s massive protests, which were sparked by the Belarusian president’s decision to come to power after the disputed elections.
Franak Viacorka, an aide to Belarusian exiled opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, first met the 26-year-old activist in 2011, long before he became the focus of Ryanair’s dramatic flight fun. last weekend. At the time, Protasevich was just a fresh-faced teenager participating in anti-regime demonstrations.
In the following years, however, Protasevich became a prominent opposition voice working for various media groups in his country, including Radio Free Europe, and became the editor of Nexta, one of the main independent communication groups in Belarus.
“Many Belarusian activists realized ten years ago that activism was not enough to win and that much more can be done in journalism. At the same time, journalism cannot win alone. And this hybrid type of media activist appeared and Roman was one of them, ”said Viacorka.
“She is OK. He is creative. He cannot accept injustice, “he added.
Protasevich is now at the center of a global diplomatic dispute between Belarus and the EU, the United Kingdom and the United States, after the plane bound for Vilnius that landed in Athens on Sunday was diverted over Belarusian airspace. by order of Lukashenko himself. The activist was arrested as soon as the plane landed in Minsk.
“It simply came to our notice then [Belarus’s KGB] they were following me to the airport, “he told his friends via a messaging app before boarding.” In any case, suspicious shit. “
The interception, which he drew international condemnation and marks a worsening of relations between the Belarusian and Western regimes, he stressed the length of time Lukashenko is willing to silence his critics as he tries to reassert control in the wake of last year’s huge protests.
Protasevich, who left Belarus in 2019 and now lives in Vilnius, was put on the Belarusian terror watch list in November and charged with three protest-related crimes, the most serious of which carries a sentence of up to 15 years in prison.
Belarus’ security services have been ordered to track down the main protagonists of the anti-regime protests “in any way,” according to Dzianis Melyantsou, an expert at the Minsk International Relations Dialogue Council.
“The goal is quite obvious: to show that in the future, if you value your life, you will not be able to do anything like this again in Belarus,” he said.
It was at Nexta where Protasevich’s two roles as an activist and journalist reached his wider audience. When Lukashenko stepped up his crackdown on protests that erupted against him last summer, Nexta’s channels – among the few that dodged an Internet blackout – became a key source of information about what really was happening. Nexta’s Telegram channels have more than 1.2 million subscribers, in a country of 9.4 million.
“My son was always someone who had a strong reaction against lies. That’s why he became a journalist, “his father, Dmitry Protasevich, told the FT.” The whole problem is that the authorities are afraid of even the slightest freedom of expression, criticism or independent media. they tell the truth “.
Nexta not only reported the protests. He also helped coordinate them, providing protesters with all the information on where to gather, what to wear and how to evade security forces. As editor-in-chief, Protasevich was at the center of these activities, Nexta founder Stsiapan Putsila told FT.
“Now the regime is taking revenge,” Putsila said.
In recent months, Belarusian authorities have stepped up crackdown on journalists from independent publications with readers beyond the urban middle class that forms the core of the protests.
Last week, Belarus blocked Tut.by, the most popular independent news site, and accused 15 employees of tax evasion. Several local newspapers were banned from publishing printed versions and thus reached the working class of Belarus, Lukashenko’s historical support base.
Protasevich probably became an even bigger target after he left Nexta last September to try to reach these rural Belarusians, Igor Trushkevich, a Belarusian dissident living in exile in Ukraine, told FT. Protasevich was then at the helm of Belamova, another opposition news channel to the Telegram messaging app, with 260,000 subscribers.
Lukashenko’s regime made it clear that it was targeting dissidents abroad in April, when the Russian 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 “find and purge” dissidents abroad: “We remind our bloodthirsty and uncontrolled opposition that we know them all,” Deputy Interior Minister Nikolai Karpenkov said. “We know where they are, who they talk to, where their home is and where their families are.” He added: “Let them know that revenge is inevitable.”
Protasevich’s arrest has caused a stir of anxiety over Belarus’ opposition to exile, mainly because Tsikhanouskaya and some of his teams had taken the same air route from Athens to their Vilnius base, the Lithuanian capital, a week earlier.
“It’s shocking, it’s devastating, it changes a lot. . . It mobilizes the international community, but I fear that tomorrow the international community will forget, ”Viacorka said.
“If Europeans don’t want North Korea in central Europe, if they don’t want passenger planes to be shot down, they should react. . . It is no longer a matter of Belarusian domestic policy, but is now a matter of European security. “
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