KYIV, Ukraine While visiting her son in a Belarusian prison, Natallia Makavetskaya saw deep scars on his wrists left by tight handcuffs. She also noticed the yellow tag sewn onto his clothes. The tags mark those jailed for joining demonstrations against authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko and single them out for “particularly harsh prison conditions,”…
Hijack, arrest, torture: Belarusian journalists under attack
The grounding of a Ryanair flight on a fake bomb threat is just the latest escalation of an independent media clampdown in Belarus
25 May 2021
BY VOLHA SIAKHOVICH
Masked law enforcement officers detain a journalist during a protest by opposition supporters at Komarovsky Market in Minsk. Credit: Natalia Fedosenko/TASS/Alamy Live News
The diversion of a Ryanair plane to Minsk over the weekend on the orders of Belaruisan president Alexander Lukashenko and the subsequent detention of independent journalist Roman Protasevich is the latest incident in a clampdown on independent media in the country.
The aerial abduction of Roman Protasevich in Belarus
On Sunday, a commercial Ryanair flight from Athens, Greece, to Vilnius, Lithuania, was nearing its destination when it suddenly changed course. The government of Belarus, an Eastern European dictatorship, had intercepted the flight just before it left the country’s airspace and demanded that it make an emergency landing in Minsk, the capital. Some of the passengers feared that the plane had a problem. In fact, it was carrying a problem for the Belarusian regime: a twenty-six-year-old exile named Roman Protasevich, who cofounded a channel on the Telegram app that has been used to coordinate and journalistically cover mass protests against the rule of President Alexander Lukashenko. After the flight landed in Minsk, Protasevich and his girlfriend, Sofia Sapega, who is Russian, were quickly arrested; the other passengers were held for several more hours, one of them told