The 'Romeo' who betrayed 'Juliet' to get rid of Lukashenko's prison

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• XAVIER COLÁS

  @xaviercolas

  Riga

Updated Friday,26May2023-00:05

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Who. Roman Protasevich (Minsk, 1995) is an exiled Belarusian opposition activist. He was arrested along with his girlfriend, Sofia, in 2021 when the plane he was flying was forced to land.

What. He has been pardoned by Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko after retracting his criticism and condemning his former partner, who remains incommunicado in prison.

Why. From the dissidence they accuse him of having betrayed his companions, in his environment they believe that he was mistreated.

Ro's post-holiday smile

Man froze when he heard the pilot announce that the plane he was traveling in was deviating from its destination. Like so many Belarusian dissidents,

Roman Protasevich

He would have preferred any other country except his own. Already on the ground, the activist was arrested after

. His imprisonment in that murky 2021 with his girlfriend,

Russia's Sofia Sapega

, turned the two into martyrs, suffering Romeo and Juliet in struggle for democracy. During this time deprived of liberty by the regime of

Alexander Lukashenko

– the dictator who has controlled Belarus since 1994 – has been breaking it little by little so that he retracts his criticisms from before. This week he has been pardoned. Those around him fear that he has betrayed his colleagues by providing information about them.

Protasevich knows that, in exchange for not wearing the prisoner's suit, many in Belarus will make him a traitor. He was editor of the Nexta channel, fighting the Belarusian regime from Poland,

against Lukashenko who started in the summer of 2020.

Outrage with the Belarusian regime rose when he was arrested along with his then-girlfriend in May 2021 after Belarus air traffic control

suddenly divert your flight from Greece to Lithuania to Minsk

. The authorities had falsely reported that there was a bomb on board and even sent a MIG to follow the aircraft.

Earlier this month, he was sentenced to

. But after being pardoned, Protasevich has made statements to state media that would have seemed impossible a few years ago, when he compared Lukashenko to Adolf Hitler. Now he declares himself "incredibly grateful" to his president.

In a country as opaque as Belarus, it cannot be established with certainty whether it has really switched sides. It is public that he has changed partners: last year he broke up with Sapega to marry another, whose name is unknown just as it is not clear how he met her when he was still deprived of liberty. But the stab was not the link, but how he dispatched in his blog the six-year sentence that Sapega is serving in a sad cell: he presented it as a just punishment "for his real activities, not for having a relationship with me." By then he had already gone suspiciously from prison to house arrest.

, while Protasevich has even appeared in public events guarded by men in gray.

Franak Viacorka, collaborator of the Belarusian opposition leader in exile,

Svetlana Tikhanovskaya

, accuses Protasevich of obtaining his pardon thanks to

, which in recent years has not changed its name or methods. A few months after his arrest, Protasevich appeared on state television with bruises on his wrists and a blow to his head, proclaiming the entire wish list of the regime: he confessed that he had organized protests and urged to stop the mobilizations and adopt a "neutral position" towards Lukashenko and his policies. Today for many their path to forgiveness is unforgivable.