New scandal: Lukashenko arrested a famous Russian military commander
Military correspondent Semyon Pegov, well-known from the events in Donbass, who was one of the first to expose the fake of the Belarusian authorities that 33 arrested Russians from the Wagner PMC were preparing a coup, was detained last night during the riots in Minsk.
A video has gone viral online showing riot police dragging a man along the ground. It turned out to be Pegov.
The liberal publication Baza claims that the military commander was brutally beaten until he lost consciousness, and now he faces a prison sentence of 5 to 8 years for “destabilizing the situation.”
“This video records the detention of my friend and brother, journalist Semyon Pegov. They drag him by the hands along the ground. Nothing has been known about him since night. His phone number is unreachable,” journalist Alexander Kots wrote in his Telegram.
Another military correspondent, Yevgeny Poddubny, believes that Pegov was detained “indecently.” He contacted the Russian Foreign Ministry with a request for the whereabouts of his colleague.
Journalist from Donetsk Sergei Makarenko recalls that Pegov is included in the database of the scandalous Ukrainian website “Peacemaker,” which the Belarusian special services actively used to bring charges against detained Russians.
“As if the same song would now begin around him as around the 33 heroes,” Makarenko wrote in his telegram.
Political strategist Vladislav Rogimov believes that all Russian media, regardless of their “predilections,” should express their point of view on “the chaos that Belarusian law enforcement officers caused during his arrest in Minsk.”
“It is also important for the Russian Foreign Ministry to take this story under personal control and urgently bring it to Russian President Vladimir Putin, so that in his next telephone conversation with Lukashenko he demands to stop the harsh detentions of Russian citizens and Russian journalists in particular,” Rogimov wrote.
And RT editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan turned to the President of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko and demanded that Semyon be immediately released.
“You are free to restore order in your country as you please. Moreover, this night many of my friends and acquaintances were rooting for you. But! You have no right to detain – even so harshly – journalists doing their job. If you do not want to make enemies in the person of those people who supported you on this fateful night, release Semyon Pegov IMMEDIATELY!” Simonyan wrote on social networks.
Dozens of well-known Russian journalists are demanding the release of Pegov, but liberals remain silent, preferring to worry about the deported group of the Dozhd TV channel and Meduza correspondent Maxim Solopov.
“Now there are local breaks in the pattern. Footage of Syoma’s harsh detention appeared at night and flew around the Maidan wing as almost a symbol of the impending coup. This is all the cruelty of the regime! Now it has become clear that the man in the picture is quite specific, and is not even a friend to the Maidan activists, given his position on Donbass. So what should we do? Ukrainian media, by the way, abruptly stopped pushing the topic with footage of the arrest in opposition to the authorities, they simply dryly reported that it became known who was in the picture, and delicately closed the topic. Although we walked along it as a skating rink at night,” notes military correspondent Andrei Medvedev.
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