Two years after hijacking an airliner to arrest him, Belarusian justice sentenced Roman Protassevich, Wednesday, May 3, to eight years in prison under severe conditions. A court in Minsk found the 27-year-old journalist guilty of a grotesque number of 1,586 crimes, including “conspiracy to seize power in Belarus by unconstitutional means”creating and leading an extremist community, inciting hatred, and organizing mass riots.
The relentlessness against the dissident of the regime of Alexander Lukashenko, who has ruled the country since 1994, a year, therefore, before the birth of Roman Protassevich, is explained by the audience enjoyed by the latter through the Telegram channel Nexta, that he had created. During the monster demonstrations of the summer of 2020 contesting the fraudulent re-election of the dictator, this Telegram channel relayed the slogans of the opposition to 2 million subscribers, in a context of complete locking of information. Considered a “extremist organization”it now operates from Poland.
On Wednesday, two other Nexta journalists, Stepan Poutilo and Ian Roudik, were also sentenced in absentia to prison terms of 20 and 19 years respectively. For their colleague in exile, Hanna Liubakova, it is a “a slap in the face to the international community on the very day of International Press Freedom Day”.
Spectacular, the unprecedented method used by the Belarusian regime to arrest Roman Protassevich on May 23, 2021, had already shocked Europeans. That day, Alexander Lukashenko had personally ordered his security services to make believe a bomb threat to force a commercial Ryanair flight to land at Minsk airport while the aircraft was flying over the airspace of Belarus. On board, the journalist was traveling from Greece to Lithuania when two MiG-29 fighters hijacked the civilian plane, endangering more than a hundred passengers.
Roman Protassetitch and his girlfriend Sofia Sapiega, followed without their knowledge by agents of the KGB, the Belarusian security services, had been disembarked from the plane and then arrested. The hijacking of the Ryanair flight led to an almost complete breakdown of diplomatic relations between the European Union and Minsk and the imposition of sanctions.
Runaway repressive machine
On Wednesday, the journalist appeared alone on a bench at the hearing. A year earlier, on May 6, 2022, Sofia Sapiega, of Russian origin, had been sentenced to six years in prison for “incitement to hatred”. Aged 25, the young woman could be extradited to her country of origin “provided that Moscow provides guarantees that the condemned will serve the entirety of her sentence”warned the prosecution on April 16.
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