Former editor-in-chief of NEXTA Roman Protasevich was sentenced on May 3 in Belarus to eight years in prison.
What Roman Protasevich did before NEXTA
Roman Protasevich was born in Minsk in 1995. His mother taught mathematics at the Military Academy, where his father worked at the department of ideological work. While studying at the Lyceum of the Belarusian National Technical University, Roman participated in an international conference on astronautics and wrote a paper on satellite cooling systems; after that, as a gifted child, he was nominated for the President’s Prize, Protasevich’s mother told the Belarusian edition TUT.BY, which was closed in 2021.
He was arrested for the first time at the age of 16. Then, in 2011, silent protests took place in Belarus. On one of them, Protasevich was taken to the police station, but as a minor he was soon released, informing his parents and school about the detention. After that, his nomination for the presidential award was withdrawn. His parents took him from the lyceum and after some time placed him in another school.
In 2011, Protasevich left home and became a member of the opposition youth organization Young Front. In subsequent years, he was repeatedly detained, including for being one of the moderators of the “We are tired of this Lukashenka” group on Vkontakte. In 2012, Protasevich entered the Faculty of Journalism of the Belarusian State University. While studying by correspondence, in the fourth year he trained in the USA for nine months, but upon arrival he was expelled from there.
In 2014 he went to Donbass. The Belarusian authorities and the media close to them claimed that Protasevich fought in Ukraine as part of the Azov battalion (banned in Russia as a terrorist organization). “It is indisputable that this person fully corresponds to the definition of a terrorist, a mercenary militant, a participant in bloody events (as part of the infamous Azov battalion) associated with atrocities and the death of civilians in the south-east of Ukraine,” said the head of the KGB of Belarus Ivan Tertel. The Prosecutor General’s Office of the LPR claimed that from the summer of 2014 to the winter of 2015, he was the deputy communications commander of the second shock-assault company of the Azov battalion.
However, Protasevich was said to have covered the conflict solely as a journalist. “I have been doing journalistic work all these years. Therefore, to say that I am some kind of politician is stupid. Because all this time I worked in the largest Belarusian media. Indeed, while I was young, I was 16 years old, I took part in some opposition movements. But after that, I realized that it was useless, and went into journalism, because I believe that it is journalism that can bring some benefit to society, ”Protasevich said in an interview with journalist Yuri Dudyu (recognized as a foreign agent in Russia) in 2020, already in Poland. Until 2019, he worked in such media as TUT.BY, Komsomolskaya Pravda, Onliner, Radio Svaboda (recognized as a foreign agent), Euroradio.
Work at NEXTA
In January 2020, Roman Protasevich asked for asylum in Poland. There he worked in the NEXTA Telegram channel, which was founded by blogger Stepan Putilo. According to Protasevich, he started working with this channel back in 2019.
The channel became the most read during the August protests after the presidential elections in Belarus in 2020. More than two million people subscribed to it – despite the fact that the population of the republic is 9.5 million. During the protests, it became a kind of news aggregator, photos and videos – Stepan Putilo said that at peak moments the editorial office published up to 200 messages per minute. The channel also featured messages calling for protesters. Its creators directly said that their goal was a change of power in Belarus.
In the fall of 2020, Protasevich announced that he had left the editorial office. He explained this by disagreements with Putilo on the further development of the project. At the same time, the Belarusian Investigative Committee opened several criminal cases against Protasevich – under articles on riots and inciting hatred and discord, the KGB put him on the list of persons involved in terrorism, Minsk demanded that Warsaw extradite the blogger.
In 2021, Protasevich moved from Poland to Lithuania. There, he first joined the headquarters of Lukashenka’s former rival in the elections, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, and later began working in the Belarus Brain Telegram channel.
Under what circumstances was Protasevich arrested?
In the spring of 2021, Protasevich and his girlfriend, Russian citizen Sofya Sapega, went on vacation to Greece. On May 23, they boarded an Irish low-cost Ryanair flight from Athens to Vilnius. Flying over Belarus, the pilots received a message from controllers that the board could be mined. The plane, accompanied by a Belarusian fighter jet, landed at the airport in Minsk.
Information about the bomb was not confirmed, and the plane went on. However, Roman Protasevich and Sofya Sapega were removed from the plane and detained. The actions of the Belarusian authorities were sharply condemned by the leaders of European countries and the United States. In the summer of 2021, the European Union banned all Belarusian air carriers from using its airspace and advised European airlines to avoid flying over Belarus.
In June 2021, Protasevich gave an interview to the ONT channel, in which he stated that Lukashenka acted “like a man with balls of steel.” Then he said that he went to cooperate with the investigation. “These actions of mine, I mean cooperation with the investigation, are connected with the fact that I understand what damage I have caused to the state and the country, and now I want to do everything in my power to correct this situation. My conscience is absolutely clear. I’m not a traitor and I’m not betraying anyone. I am cooperating with the investigation in order to atone for the harm that I caused to the country,” Protasevich said, noting that he has not changed his political views.
A little later, the Belarusian authorities called a press conference, to which they brought Roman Protasevich. It was attended by representatives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Defense, the Ministry of Transport, the border service and the Investigative Committee of the Republic. According to their statements, “there was no interception, forced turnaround from the state border and forced landing of the Ryanair aircraft.”
What Protasevich did in Belarus after his arrest
At the end of June 2021, Protasevich and Sapega were released from the pre-trial detention center – the Investigative Committee reported that they had concluded a pre-trial agreement with the investigation and therefore the preventive measure was replaced with house arrest. A little later, Protasevich opened a new Twitter account and the Sprava Telegram channel, in which he promised subscribers “accurate insiders” and “the opinion of a person who has traveled from all sides of the information barricades” and called on other oppositionists to frankly confess.
However, he soon disappeared from the public field. A few months later, at the beginning of 2022, Protasevich announced that he was starting to work with the Systemic Human Rights Center, which appeared against the background of the migration crisis on the border of Belarus and Poland and demanded that the Polish security forces be held accountable for the treatment of migrants. In the spring, Protasevich said that he had broken up with Sofia Sapega and had already married another girl. According to him, the trip to Greece was “the last attempt to maintain relations” with Sapieha and they made the decision to disperse there.
Sapieha was sentenced to six years in prison in May 2022 on charges of inciting social hatred and illegal collection and dissemination of personal data. She was charged with the administration of the Black Book of Belarus Telegram channel (recognized as extremist in the country), where the personal data of security officials who used force against protesters were published.
How was the trial
In April 2022, the Supreme Court of Belarus recognized the Telegram channels NEXTA, NEXTA Live and Luxta as terrorist organizations. The trial in the “NEXTA case” began on February 16, 2023. Stepan Putilo and Yan Rudik were tried in absentia, Roman Protasevich attended the hearings in person. For them, they requested 20, 19 and 10 years in a high-security colony, respectively. In April, the prosecutor’s office announced that the amount of damage from this case was 30 million Belarusian rubles, and toughened the charges against Protasevich – in addition to organizing mass riots, conspiring to seize power and inciting hostility, he was charged with leading an extremist formation. In total, he was tried on 11 criminal articles.
Speaking on April 26 with the last word, Protasevich said that his “ideological, to some extent gullibility were simply used by other people to achieve their goals, in some cases even selfish goals.” “I was really young, hot and stupid when I thought that I would suddenly take it and be able to change something in Belarus,” he said. “Nevertheless, my sincere desire was to change the life of our people and our country for the better, but I was seriously mistaken, I chose the wrong path” (quoted by BelTA).