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Roman Protasevich’s involvement with the Lukashenko movement began a few years before last summer’s mass protests, triggered by the Belarusian president’s decision to seize power after the disputed elections.
Franak Viacorka, an aide to opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya in exile in Belarus, met the 26-year-old activist in 2011 before he became the focus of a dramatic diversion of Ryanair flights last weekend. At the time, Protasevich was a fresh teenager who took part in demonstrations against the regime.
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 newspaper’s editor. Nexta, One of the leading independent media groups in Belarus.
“Ten years ago many Belarusian activists realized that activism was not enough to win, and that you can do much more in journalism. At the same time, journalism cannot win alone. And this kind of hybrid media activist appeared and Roman was one of them, ”Viacorka said.
“It’s impulsive. It’s creativity. He cannot accept injustice, ”he added.
Protashevich is now in the midst of a global diplomatic conflict with Belarus between the EU, the United Kingdom and the US, after a plane bound for Vilnius, which flew to Athens on Sunday, ordered Lukashenko himself to fly into Belarusian airspace. The activist was arrested as soon as the plane landed in Minsk.
“It seems [Belarus’s KGB] they followed me to the airport, “he told friends before boarding through a messaging app.” Anyway – suspicious shit. “
Capture, who drew international condemnation He stressed that relations between the Belarusian regime and the West are deteriorating and that Lukashenko may be willing to silence criticism while trying to reaffirm control over last year’s horrific protests.
Protasevich, who left Belarus in 2019 and now lives in Vilnius, was put on the Belarusian terrorism list in November and charged with three crimes related to the protests, the most serious of which is up to 15 years in prison.
Belarusian security services have ordered the main protagonists of protests against the regime to continue “in any way,” according to Dzianis Melyantsou, an expert on the Minsk International Relations Dialogue Council.
“The goal is pretty obvious: to look forward to that, if you value your life you can never do anything like that in Belarus,” he said.
At Nexta, Protasevich’s twin roles as an activist and journalist reached the general public. As Lukashenko escalated his crackdown on protests that erupted against him last summer, the Nexta channel – one of the few that prevents an internet blackout – became the main source of information about what was really going on. Nexta’s Telegram channel has more than 1.2 million subscribers in the 9.4-meter country.
“My son was always someone who had a great reaction to the lie. That’s why he became a journalist, “his father, Dmitry Protasevich, told FT.
Nexta did not report any protests. He also helped coordinate, providing demonstrators with information on where to gather, what to wear and how to avoid security forces. As the editor-in-chief, Protasevich was at the core of these activities, Nexta’s founder, Stsiapan Putsila, told FT.
“Now the regime is taking revenge,” Putsila said.
In recent months, Belarusian authorities have stepped up repression by journalists with readers beyond the middle-class cities that form the core of the protests.
Last week, Belarus blocked Tut.by, the most popular independent news site, and accused 15 workers of tax evasion. Several local newspapers were banned from publishing printed versions and thus reached the working class of Belarus, the basis of Lukashenko’s historical support.
Protasevich has surely become a bigger target since leaving Nexta last September to try to reach those rural Belarusians, Igor Trushkevich, a Belarusian dissident living in exile in Ukraine, told FT. Protasevich has since been in charge of Belamova, another opposition news channel for the Telegram messaging app, with 260,000 subscribers.
Lukashenko’s regime made it clear that it was aimed at dissidents abroad in April when the Russian FSB – the successor to the Soviet KGB – arrested two people in opposition in Moscow and handed them over to Belarus.
A senior Belarusian official in charge of repression vowed to “find and clean up” dissidents abroad: “We remind the opposition that we are thirsty for blood out of control that we all know,” said Interior Minister Nikolai Karpenkov. “We know where they are, who they talk to, where the house is and where the families are.” He added: “Report that revenge is inevitable.”
Protasevich’s arrest has sparked concern over opposition in exile in Belarus – not least because Tsikhanouskaya and some of his group took the same route from Athens to the base they had a week earlier at their base in the Lithuanian capital Vilnius.
“It’s moving, it’s destructive, it changes a lot. . . It mobilizes the international community, but I am afraid that tomorrow the international community will forget, ”Viacorka said.
“If Europeans don’t want North Korea in the middle of Europe, if they don’t want to shoot down passenger planes, they should react. . . It is no longer a matter of Belarusian domestic policy, it is now a European security issue. “
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