Belarusian journalist Roman Protasevich and his girlfriend, Sofia Sapega, are just the latest political prisoners to lose their freedom in dictator Alexander Lukashenko’s jails.
But they are far from the only ones.
In his continuing crackdown on leaders of national demonstrations to protest his rigged Aug. 9 re-election, the Belarusian dictator has viciously broken up rallies and imprisoned opposition leaders and independent journalists.
Today, Belarus has 436 political prisoners, according to the Vyasna human rights group. Thirty five journalists are currently imprisoned in the country, according to the Belarusian Association of Journalists.
Lukashenko has also moved to block most of the independent news outlets, including both print and online publications.
The scale of the repression is actually even bigger than human rights groups’ official figures. Not everyone who’s been arrested for opposing Lukashenko has been recognized as a political prisoner due to technicalities. More than 3,000 criminal cases have been opened against protesters.
Despite the flurry of global attention to Lukashenko’s latest move, the world seems to have forgotten about the falsified 2020 presidential election in which Lukashenko declared himself the winner, perpetuating his rule since 1994.
Lukashenko unapologetic
But the international spotlight was back on Lukashenko after he ordered a MiG fighter to skyjack a civilian plane flying over Belarus so that he could abduct the journalist Protasevich and his girlfriend Sapega, who were both onboard.
The brazen and illegal action will further isolate Lukashenko. Western leaders moved to ban air travel with Belarus and enact tougher economic sanctions so that other dictators won’t be tempted to do this again.
The Belarusian president’s only reliable patron and ally is Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, who stood by Lukashenko after the hijacking.
“Until now, everyone treated Belarusian problems as internal ones,” Belarusian political analyst Valery Karbalevich told the Kyiv Post. “But now Belarus is considered to be a threat to international security.”
Lukashenko, however, remained unapologetic, leading some to predict the appearance of a North Korea-like regime in the center of Europe. He seems to favor isolation from the rest of Europe, with measures to make it harder for dissidents to flee the country. In December, Belarus blocked people from leaving through overland routes other than to Russia, citing the COVID-19 pandemic.
Final break with West
“The level of repression is unprecedented,” Belarusian journalist Vitali Tsygankov told the Kyiv Post. “It can’t even be compared with the late 1990s or 2010. Starting from last fall, repression has only been increasing.”
Analysts say Lukashenko’s latest actions imply a final break with the West, leading to Belarus becoming more dependent on Russia to the point of de facto annexation.
Already, the military and police of the two countries have a high degree of integration and cooperation.
Lukashenko’s ire stems from his refusal to accept the will of the voters or leave power after 28 years.
He claimed to have received 80 percent of the vote when he ran against his rival, Svetlana Tikhanovakaya. Evidence points to her winning with a likely 60 percent of the vote.
The sham election brought hundreds of thousands of protesters out into the streets to demand a new and fair election.
Thousands were arrested. Many were beaten and tortured. At least seven demonstrators have been killed during the protests.
Hijacking
Belarusian journalist Protasevich and his Russian girlfriend Sapega were abducted from the plane traveling from Athens to Vilnius on May 23. The Ryanair plane was forced to land in Minsk after being intercepted by a Belarusian fighter jet. The plane was passing through Belarus’s airspace and was 10 minutes away from the Lithuanian border. Belarusian authorities falsely claimed that the plane had a bomb on it.
In 2020 Protasevich was the chief editor of the Polish-based Belarusian NEXTA Telegram channel, which had been founded by Stepan Putilo. NEXTA, which used to have more than 2 million subscribers at its peak in 2020, was the most influential independent news source during the anti-Lukashenko protests.
Later Protasevich quit NEXTA and became the chief editor of another Telegram channel, Belarus golovnogo mozga (can be roughly translated as “Belarus of the brain” – an allusion to brain diseases), moving from Poland to Lithuania. In November Belarusian authorities charged Protasevich in absentia with organizing riots.
“There were both rational and irrational motives (for the hijacking),” Karbalevich told the Kyiv Post. “The irrational one is revenge. But the authorities were also afraid that (the NEXTA and Belarus golovnogo mozga channels) could mobilize and coordinate protests. It was also a warning for all opposition centers abroad that they have a long reach.”
26-year old Protasevich also used to be a photographer and became an activist in Ukraine during the 2013-2014 EuroMaidan Revolution, which overthrew then President Viktor Yanukovych. Later he cooperated with Ukraine’s Azov battalion as a journalist during Russia’s war against Ukraine, according to Andriy Biletsky, the founder of Azov.
30 of 35 jailed journalists in Belarus
Arrested journalists
The abduction of Protasevich coincided with an all-time high in the repressions against journalists in Belarus.
“All media have been crushed, everything is blocked,” Dzmitry Halko, an exiled Belarusian journalist based in Ukraine, told the Kyiv Post.
Recently the Belarusian authorities cracked down on Tut.by, Belarus’ largest news site. In April tut.by had 3.3 million users, or 63 percent of all Internet users in Belarus.
On May 18, the Belarusian arrested 15 Tut.by journalists on tax evasion charges and shut down their site.
Currently, a total of 35 journalists are in jail in Belarus, according to the Belarusian Association of Journalists.
In December several journalists of the Press Club, a non-governmental organization, were arrested on tax evasion charges. One of them, Ksenia Lutskina, worked at state-run television channel BT until August, when she joined a strike against Lukashenko at BT, became a member of the opposition’s coordination council and announced plans to create an opposition channel.
Another journalist, Andrei Aleksandrov, was arrested in January on charges of violating public order by helping activists pay fines imposed for their participation in protests.
In February Yekaterina Andreyeva and Daria Chultsova, journalists at television channel Belsat, were sentenced to two years in jail on charges of “violating public order” by streaming a police crackdown on protesters in Minsk. Andreyeva had also co-written a book devoted to Belarusian volunteers fighting for Ukraine.
Journalist Denis Ivashin was arrested in March on charges of interfering in the activities of the police – a reference to his stories on Ukrainian Berkut police officers joining Belarus’ police force.
Andrzej Poczobut, a journalist and member of Belarus’ Union of Poles, was arrested in March on charges of inciting ethnic hatred and “rehabilitating Nazism.” The irony is that the charges were brought for him supporting the Polish Home Army (Armia Krajowa), an anti-Nazi resistance movement.
In addition, a total of 11 journalists are serving 15-day jail sentences in administrative cases on charges of failing to comply with police officers’ requests.
The Belarusian authorities could also be implicated in killing journalists. In January EUobserver, a Brussels-based English-language publication, and the Belarusian People’s Tribunal, an opposition group run by exiled Belarusian police officer Igor Makar, published a recording of alleged Belarusian KGB officials discussing murdering Belarusian journalist Pavel Sheremet. The recording was made in 2012, four years before Sheremet was killed in Kyiv.
On the night before Sheremet’s murder, Sergei Korotkikh, a Belarusian national who studied at the KGB Academy in Minsk, and other fighters of the Interior Ministry’s Azov battalion visited Sheremet’s house. The violent and controversial background of Korotkikh, a neo-Nazi, has attracted attention to him since then.
On May 24, Lukashenko also signed laws banning the publication of opinion polls not sanctioned by the state and hyperlinks to materials banned by the state. The laws also make it easier to ban online and print media: now they can be blocked by prosecutors and the Information Ministry.
Moreover, the legislation bans foreigners from co-owning media, prohibits journalists from taking part in protests, bans journalists from covering protests not authorized by the government and prevents anyone from helping to pay fines imposed for protests.
The number of political prisoners in Belarus has reached an all-time high.
Currently it is at least 436, according to the Vyasna human rights group. Before 2020 the number of political prisoners simultaneously held in Belarus usually amounted to dozens at most.
On May 25, five people were sentenced by a court to jail terms ranging from four to seven years on charges of preparing riots: Pavel Severinets from the Belarusian Christian Democratic Party; Yevheny Afnagel, Pavel Yukhnevych and Maksim Vinyarsky from the European Belarus party; blogger Dmitry Kozlov, and Iryna Schastnaya, an activist and editor of opposition Telegram channels.
The Stalin-style show trial against the five was completely closed to the public. According to earlier statements by police officials, they were essentially jailed for peaceful opposition activities: calling for protests against the government and criticizing the authorities.
Absurd sentences
Several people have been sentenced to jail terms of up to one and a half years on charges of insulting Lukashenko and other officials. These include Nikolai Chernyavsky, Alexei Romanov, Vladimir Chevazhevsky and Vladimir Shinkevich.
Numerous other people have been sentenced for “insulting” officials to a supposedly lighter form of punishment – one officially called “restrictions on liberty.” It is colloquially known as “chemistry” since in the Soviet Union many who received this sentence worked at chemical factories.
This Orwellian punishment is widely practiced in Belarus: convicts are sentenced to compulsory labor at low-security prisons and can sometimes go out and return with the permission of the authorities. An alternative version of this penalty is essentially partial house arrest with compulsory labor under the strict control of the police.
However, the slightest violations can lead to such convicts being sent to regular prisons.
Meanwhile, a woman from the city of Ivatsevichi faces a jail term for posting a negative emoji in a reference to a police officer on the Internet.
Murders
One of the political prisoners, Vitold Ashurok, died on May 21 in prison. In January he had been sentenced to five years in jail on charges of violating public order and using violence against a law enforcement officer.
In one of his last letters, Ashurok wrote that prison authorities made him and other political prisoners wear yellow badges similar to those worn by Jews in Nazi death camps.
The prison authorities claimed that he had died of heart failure but there is speculation that he could have been killed. When Ashurok’s body was handed over to his relatives, his head had bruises and was bandaged.
Meanwhile, at least seven protesters were killed by the police during large-scale protests in 2020. At least 23 critics of Lukashenko have been killed, disappeared or died in suspicious circumstances since he came to power in 1994.
“(Belarusian) law enforcement agencies consist of people ready to blindly follow any orders and sadists who like violence,” Tsyhankov said. “Starting from July, they were told that they could do whatever they want (to protesters) and that they would not be punished for that.”
