The Belarusian regime presented Roman Protassevich in a 29-second video from custody.

In it, the journalist, for whose arrest last Sunday the Ryanair flight FR4978 was rerouted to Minsk with the help of an interceptor shortly before the destination Vilnius airport, said he was in the number 1 remand prison in the Belarusian capital.

Protassevich's parents, who have to live in neighboring Poland for security reasons, received the information shortly before the video was distributed that their son was lying in a Minsk hospital with heart problems.

Friedrich Schmidt

Political correspondent for Russia and the CIS in Moscow.

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    Apparently for this reason those who now have the 26-year-old opponent of the dictator Alexandr Lukashenko in the power, gave him the statement that he had no health problems, not with the heart and not with other organs;

    they deal with him “as correctly as possible and according to the law”, he works with the investigators and confesses to having organized “mass unrest”.

    That is one of the allegations that Lukashenko's judiciary is bringing against Protassevich.

    Independent journalism, critical youth

    But the prisoner's face, facial expressions and gestures belied the directors of the performance: the scratches, the constant wink, the up and down of the clasped hands. After seeing the video, Protassevich's father suspected that his son's nose was broken: it was powdered, its shape changed. The son emphasizes atypical, looks scared, has probably been beaten. The young man, who says he is facing the death penalty in Belarus, doesn't just have to fear for himself: on Sunday, the regime also seized his girlfriend by not even bothering to blame 23-year-old Russian Sofia Sapega.

    When the time comes, Russia swiftly and sharply condemns the arrests of its citizens. But in the Sapega case, Russian authorities did not announce that Belarus had informed them of the arrest until Monday afternoon, after allegations of inaction. Moscow dismisses the event as an "internal matter" for the junior partner, Lukashenko defends against allegations. In addition, people like Sapega, who studies international and EU law in Vilnius, are seen as opponents in Moscow.

    The Russian woman and her Belarusian friend stand for what Lukashenko and his patron, Russian President Vladimir Putin, are fighting: independent journalism, critical youth, a departure from authoritarian structures, change. That explains why Putin's spokesman on Tuesday only expressed the conditional hope that Sapega might be released soon, "of course only if there are no questions for her with regard to compliance with the law," as the German Foreign Minister and the European Council, among others Sapega's immediate release had already demanded. The remand prison in the heart of Minsk, where Protassevich is now being held, is housed in a classicist building from the first half of the 19th century. It is one of the few buildings in Minskthat survived the Second World War and subsequent destruction. The wave of repression since last year, unprecedented even by Lukashenko's standards, has brought many prominent prisoners to the prison.