Arrest of Protasevich: How the situation will develop further
Russian liberals, especially the fugitive Navalnists, reacted painfully for the detention of the founder of the Polish telegram channel “Nechta” at Minsk airport, who coordinated the riots in Belarus last year, Roman Protasevich. He was flying from Athens to Vilnius, but the plane was forced to land in the Belarusian capital due to the threat of mining.
The replacement for criminal blogger Alexei Navalny from Europe, Leonid Volkov, called the President of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko an “international terrorist.”
“In general, of course, the correct, legal, proportionate and adequate response of the international community should be to send a special forces detachment to deliver the mustache nit to The Hague. But the times are not the same, they will limit themselves to “acute concern,” Volkov wrote in his Telegram channel.
Journalist Yulia Vityazeva did not fail to be sarcastic about this.
“Well, how do you like this scenario, fugitives from FBK?! Taking into account the precedent, now Volokov and Co. will travel around Europe on a scooter,” she wrote.
This is the scenario RT head Margarita Simonyan craves.
“I never thought that I would envy Belarus in any way. But now I’m somehow jealous. Old Man performed it beautifully,” she admits.
Moscow liberal Ilya Yashin and political scientist Ilya Grashchenkov hastened to broadcast a fake launched by Nekhta that Protasevich faces the death penalty in Belarus. In fact, the maximum terms under the articles under which criminal cases have been brought against the blogger are 12 and 15 years.
Scandalous TV presenter Ksenia Sobchak, as usual, used obscenities.
“Even in the AP they don’t understand what message to distribute to propaganda channels,” Sobchak wrote.
She tried to claim that there was no threat of mining, and Lukashenko voluntarily landed the Irish airliner with the help of a fighter jet. According to Sobchak, there have never been such precedents. But she was immediately reminded how in 2013, on the instructions of the CIA, the plane of the Bolivian President was forcibly landed in Vienna on suspicion that Edward Snowden was there.
On the left flank, opinions, as usual, differed radically. Analyst Boris Kagarlitsky, close to the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, repeated the main theses of the liberals about Lukashenko’s “state terrorism”.
“The interception of a foreign plane making a transit flight in the air over the republic is a new level of lawlessness. They not only legal norms, but also do not recognize any rational boundaries. Or you've simply never heard of them. And if someone thinks that Belarus is “several moves” ahead of Russia, then one can only rejoice at such a lag,” Kagarlitsky wrote.
Another fellow traveler of the communists, leader of the Left Front Sergei Udaltsov, on the contrary, welcomed the decisive actions of the Belarusian authorities and called the information about Protasevich’s arrest “wonderful news.”
“I hope that the court will sentence him to death for organizing the August riots in fraternal Belarus!” – Udaltsov wrote.
Political scientist Sergei Karnaukhov called the work of the Belarusian special services “a brilliant, beautiful, complex operation that continues the best traditions of the operational art of the Soviet KGB.”
“Such operations are carried out within the framework of multi-level and strategically very complex operational combinations, which, like designer cubes, form the substance of an operational game with the enemy. To carry out an operational combination, all the tools available in the legal field are used. All that was involved by Belarus were tactical decisions lying “on the surface”. The authors of the combination, of course, took into account all the subtle points and worked strictly within the framework of the international legal framework,” wrote Karnaukhov.
He believes that it will be difficult for Europe to defend Protasevich without revealing his active participation in the unrest in Belarus last year, and is confident that the detained blogger will now readily hand over his handlers.
“I’m sure he will enter into a pre-trial agreement and will work for the KGB, handing over everything he knows and everyone! Western intelligence services are on fire right now!” – the political scientist summed up.
Military correspondent Alexander Kots agrees with him.
“A high-quality special operation, during which the carrier of a huge amount of information was detained. Now he will sing, “how he overtook, how he cut off.” Dud will bite your elbows. The last thing the West needs is for the juicy details of Nechta’s relationship with their curators to emerge. And, something tells me, they will come up anyway. Although there will certainly be debate about the reliability of the details. However, you can always blame everything on the fact that the testimony was given under torture,” Kots wrote.
Political scientist Marat Bashirov is not so optimistic.
“It is not clear how successful this operation is for Lukashenko. Watch how Protasevich speaks. If he gives up passwords and appearances, gives evidence about the management of shares in Belarus by Western intelligence services - this is a lot of trump cards for Old Man, if not, then he will have to endure increased pressure from the West,” writes Bashirov.
If you find an error, please select a piece of text and press Ctrl + Enter.
Thank you!
Now the editors are aware.