Law & Order - Minsk Political Unit
From Wall Street Journal - 4 May 2023
Belarusian Blogger Sentenced To Prison (BY ANN M. SIMMONS)
Roman Protasevich, the Belarusian activist who was arrested after the government scrambled a jet fighter to divert his Ryanair flight from Greece, was sentenced to eight years in prison.
The Minsk Regional Court in the Belarusian capital Wednesday found Mr. Protasevich guilty of organizing riots, calling for acts of terrorism and insulting Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, among other crimes, Belarus’s state news agency Belta reported.
The dissident blogger will now stay under house arrest until the court’s verdict comes into force, prosecutor Natalya Sokolova told journalists, the news agency reported, when he will be taken to serve his sentence in a high-security penal colony. She didn’t specify when that would happen.
Mr. Protasevich was one of Mr. Lukashenko’s most ardent critics following the disputed election that returned the Belarusian leader to power in 2020. From his base in Poland, Mr. Protasevich ran an opposition news channel, NEXTA, on the Telegram messaging app, which quickly became one of the most widely viewed news sources in Belarus.
Authorities in Minsk put him on and other NEXTA journalists on a list of people involved in what they described as terrorist activities, and in May 2021 sent a jet fighter to divert the flight on which he was flying from Greece to Lithuania, forcing it to land in the Belarusian capital, where he was detained.
Ryanair CEO Michael O’Leary called the incident “a case of state-sponsored hijacking,” and the move triggered European Union sanctions against Mr. Lukashenko.