Blogger Roman Protasevich, who was arrested two years ago after Minsk forced a dissident plane to make an emergency landing in the Belarusian capital, is now praising the regime he once condemned, reports Guardian.

“Don’t do this, they will kill me, I’m a refugee,” Protasevich begged the pilots of the plane he was on, according to the passenger.

A Ryanair flight escorting a Belarusian MiG-29 fighter jet, destined to bring it onto the runway, landed anyway. Pratasevich was immediately arrested.

He was released from custody last week. This month, he was sentenced to eight years in prison for crimes such as inciting terrorism, organizing mass riots and defaming Belarusian President Oleksandr Lukashenka. Then the Belarusian blogger was immediately pardoned, awarded by the Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko for becoming a spokesman for the regime.

If Protasevich is still alive, the price was the dignity of a young activist.

Now the 28-year-old appears regularly on Belarusian state television and other propaganda outlets, playing a new role: a repentant opposition defector who denounces his former allies and praises the benevolence of the Belarusian dictator.

“I am extremely grateful to the country and personally to the president,” he said on camera shortly after his release.

In a lengthy interview on state television, he apologized to police who were “protecting the country” during the 2020 protests, the largest in Belarus since the collapse of the Soviet Union, and said they had been ordered to incite the protests to create a pretext for international sanctions against Belarus.