Berlin strongly condemned Roman Protasevich’s sentence
“The verdict against Roman Protasevich is another example of the Belarusian regime’s ruthless crackdown on democratic forces and independent media.” Thus, at the request of DW, Itamaraty commented on the decision of the Minsk court, which on Wednesday, May 3, sentenced the former editor-in-chief of the Nexta Telegram channel to 8 years in prison.
The German government demanded from the Belarusian authorities an end to systematic repression and the release of political prisoners, whose number, according to comments by the German Foreign Ministry, has already exceeded 1,400 people.
The Nexta case and the Ryanair plane
The Nexta trial began in February 2023. In addition to Protasevich, the founder of Nexta, Stepan Putilo, and the former editor of the Telegram channel, Yan Rudik, passed through him. Putilo was sentenced to 20 years in prison and Rudik to 19 years. They are abroad, they were tried in absentia.
The Belarusian prosecutor’s office had already demanded that Protasevich be sentenced to 10 years, but at the same time asked the court to take into account that the former editor-in-chief of Nexta had fulfilled the terms of the pre-trial agreement, and, therefore, more than half of the maximum sentence could not be assigned to him as a punishment according to a series of articles, and according to a series of articles – no more than two-thirds of the sentence.
Roman Protasevich was detained in Minsk on May 23, 2021, when Belarusian dispatchers forced the Ryanair plane, on which he flew from Athens to Vilnius, to make an emergency landing at the airport due to a message about “mining”. As an International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) investigation later established, the bomb report was deliberately false and was brought to the attention of the crew under the direction of senior Belarusian government officials.
Source: DW
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