Protasevich told who transferred money from Russia to Nekhta
The Nekhta telegram channel, which coordinated mass protests in Belarus last August, received regular funding from Russia.
One of the founders of Nekhta, Roman Protasevich, who was detained at the Minsk airport 10 days ago in an international scandal, spoke about this in an interview with the Belarusian state TV channel ONT, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
“Initially, the Nekhta project lived solely through the sale of advertising. At the same time, advertising posts as the largest player on the market naturally cost good money. There was no talk of any grants then. There was an advertisement, and at one point Stepan (Putilo, head of Nekhta - ed.) launched reader donations. It seems to me that this is a normal means of monetization. Readers are absolutely free to support the editors.
The first point of conflict was soon after (this will sound very interesting) the Russian financing of the Nekhty project. Russian money was indeed present. Initially, when reader donations were opened, small deposits were received – up to $20. It was the month of July. Two weeks after it was launched, Stepan himself boasted: a Russian company regularly makes large transfers to us. And he showed on his monitor: plus 3 thousand euros, plus five thousand euros - but constantly. At least once a week,” Protasevich said.
According to the extremist, he was interested in a generous donor and checked the company sending large sums on the Internet. It turned out that it is owned by a competitor of the Russian oligarch, Mikhail Gutseriev (a personal friend of Alexander Lukashenko, who helped Belarus with oil supplies during disputes with the Kremlin).
“The name of the company was directly indicated there, I can’t remember it exactly. But it was connected with the Urals and mining. I decided to search the Internet and came to the conclusion that the owner of this company is a fairly well-known Russian oligarch. But something else is more interesting: he is a direct competitor of another Russian businessman, Mikhail Gutseriev.
Later, we published information about the founding convocation of Slavkali, about the movements of Mr. Gutseriev on the plane, and some other internal documents. This was not random information received from anonymous sources, from readers. This is information that Stepan personally sent to the work chat and said that this should be published. I then said out loud: you understand that this is more like industrial espionage and not journalism,” Protasevich said.
He believes that cooperation with the Russian oligarch was not limited to the transfer of several thousand euros
“Later, Stepan almost certainly met with this Russian oligarch; he flew to Warsaw. Stepan was worried then, he was looking for suits. He practically did not come to the editorial office for three days. He only appeared in a brand new, expensive suit for a couple of minutes,” said Protasevich.
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