Why Belarusian journalist Roman Protasevich was snatched from a Ryanair flight
Roman Protasevich knew something was wrong when Ryanair flight FR4978 that was supposed to take him from Athens to Vilnius diverted toward Minsk.
“Don’t do this. They will kill me. I am a refugee,” he reportedly told a flight attendant on Sunday as the airliner headed to the Belarusian capital escorted by a fighter jet.
He had reason to be afraid.
When the Ryanair plane eventually landed in Vilnius with a more than seven-hour delay, he was no longer on board. Both he and a female companion, Sofia Sapega, were reportedly arrested during the enforced stopover — an incident denounced by leaders around the world as a “hijacking.” Ryanair called the forced landing an “act of aviation piracy.”
The measures to seize Protasevich were extraordinary, and they now expose Belarus to the fury of the EU and U.S. and to potential sanctions, but for Alexander Lukashenko, the longtime leader of Belarus, the threat posed by Protasevich and other bloggers and journalists is extraordinary as well.
Protasevich, 26, is among a group of inventive journalists who have detailed the violence used by forces loyal to Lukashenko to help him hang on to power. They’ve also covered the mass protests sparked by the August presidential elections — widely considered to have been stolen by Lukashenko — and also actively coordinated them.
Last year, Protasevich was editor-in-chief of Warsaw-based Nexta Live, a social media channel on Telegram, a cloud-based encrypted messaging application created by two Russian engineers that’s become the favored way of organizing anti-Lukashenko protests.
Nexta Live, which currently has 1.2 million subscribers, was founded by another Belarusian opposition journalist, Stepan Putilo, whose pen name is Svetlov.
“We often remain the only source of information on what’s going on in the country,” Svetlov told POLITICO in an interview from his Warsaw headquarters in late August. Nexta has given instructions on where protesters should gather and warned them of actions by the security forces — providing key direction to an opposition that is largely leaderless as most opposition figures are either under arrest or in exile. [Continue reading…]