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The recording was shown Wednesday night on a one-hour show on ONT state television. Pratasevich, 26, also says in the post that protests against the authoritarian Belarusian President Aliaksandr Lukashenko are now futile due to his severe crackdown, and suggests that the opposition wait for a more favorable time.
The program said Belarusian officials were unaware that Pratasevičius was on a Ryanair plane flying from Athens to Vilnius on May 23, which air traffic controllers had directed to Minsk due to a bomb threat.
No bomb was found on the landing plane, but Belarusian officials arrested R. Pratasevičius and his friend, a Russian citizen studying in Vilnius, who was flying in it.
Lukashenko sparked international outrage by ordering a fighter jet to take over the passenger liner. In response, the European Union banned the Belarusian national airline Belavia from entering its airspace, urged European companies not to fly into Belarusian airspace, and issued new sanctions on important sectors of the Belarusian economy.
Mr. Lukashenko, who has 9.3 million. He has ruled Belarus, which has had a population, with an iron fist for more than a quarter of a century, accusing the West of trying to “strangle” his country with sanctions.
After last year’s presidential elections last August, which the opposition and western democracies consider rigged, Belarus has been rocked for months by unprecedented mass protests. Mr. Lukashenko was declared the winner of that vote and secured for the sixth term.
The Minsk regime has taken brutal measures to suppress the protest movement. More than 35,000 were arrested. people, several protesters were killed, and all of Lukashenko’s main opponents were jailed or forced to go abroad.
More than 400 protesters were sentenced to severe prison terms.
Pratasevičius, who left Belarus in 2019, became one of Lukashenko’s main opponents. He ran the popular telegram channel Nexta, which played a key role in organizing anti-government protests, and was accused of inciting mass unrest. He faces up to 15 years in prison for this.
Last week, Lukashenko accused Pratasevičius of inciting a “bloody rebellion”.
In the aforementioned ONT show, R. Pratasevičius acknowledged that the protests had subsided and said that the opposition should wait until economic problems lead to discontent in a large part of society.
“We have to wait for the economic situation to get worse … and people take to the streets for, so to speak, a bowl of soup,” he said.
Lukashenko called the landing of the Ryanair plane a legitimate reaction to a bomb threat. The ONT program appears to be designed to support this position: it stated that Belarusian officials were unaware that R. Pratasevičius was on the plane.
In a video from prison, he says he announced his travel plans 40 minutes before his departure in an online work chat with colleagues, and claims that a person who had a personal conflict with him may have threatened the bomb. Pratasevic said the man, whose name he did not mention, was linked to programmers who had attacked official Belarusian websites in the past and posted bomb threats.
Among the first things I thought of, [buvo, kad] actually, I was just “changed”! I didn’t say that anywhere, and as soon as I said it, I immediately found myself in Minsk. Immediately! ”Said R. Pratasevičius. According to him, he is in conflict with only one person.
R. Pratasevičius’s comments did not explain what kind of personal conflict took place between him and that person.
“When the plane landed, I realized that it was not worth panicking,” he said, adding that when he landed and stopped, he saw well-armed members of the special forces waiting.
The day after the arrest, Belarusian state television showed a filmed statement by R. Pratasevičius. In it, he says monotonously that he confesses to organizing mass riots. His parents, who currently live in Poland, said the confession appears to have been forcibly extracted.
At ONT, R. Pratasevičius said that after the plane landed, he tried to stay away from his girlfriend and hoped officers would not arrest her. Sofia Sapega did not appear in this new program, but last week a recording was filed in prison in which she admits to having edited the Telegram channel “Black Book of Belarus”, which publishes data on the country’s security forces.
Byelorussia’s independent human rights center Viasna on Thursday criticized plans by state media to show an interview with opposition blogger R. Pratasevic, whose dramatic arrest last month sparked outrage around the world.
“Everything that Pratasevičius will say has been said under duress, the least psychological duress,” Alesis Bialiacki, director of Viasna, told AFP.
According to him, the Belarusian security services will force R. Pratasevičius to speak because they threatened him with “false but very serious accusations”.
“Whatever I say now, [tai] it is just propaganda that does not have a correct basis ”, added A. Bialiackis.
