A fighter jet under the control of Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, Belarus’ authoritarian leader, forced a commercial airplane passing through the country’s airspace to make an emergency landing on Sunday so that a critic of the regime could be seized and arrested.
On Monday night, the detainee, journalist Roman Protasevich, appeared in a 29-second video that has the trademarks of a coerced hostage video. In it, Protasevich says he’s being treated “as correctly as possible” and admits to organizing “mass riots.”
But Protasevich’s father, Dzmitry, told Reuters that his son appears to have been beaten. “It’s likely his nose is broken, because the shape of it has changed and there’s a lot of powder on it. All of the left side of his face has powder,” he told Reuters. “It’s not his words, it’s not his intonation of speech, he is acting very reserved, and you can see he is nervous,” Dzmitry Protasevich added. “My son cannot admit to creating the mass disorders because he just didn’t do any such thing.”
Amnesty International spokesman Alexander Artemyev told The Washington Post that Protasevich that abrasions and bruises on Protasevich suggest that he’s been subjected to “torture or other ill-treatment.”
President Biden seems to agree. In a statement, he called for Protasevich’s immediate release and noted that the video looks like it was “made under duress.”
The New York Times explains why Protasevich was targeted by the Lukashenko autocracy:
Mr. Protasevich is a co-founder and a former editor of the NEXTA channel on the messaging app Telegram, which has become a popular conduit for Mr. Lukashenko’s foes to share information and organize demonstrations against the government.
He fled the country in 2019, fearing arrest. But he has continued to roil Mr. Lukashenko’s regime while living in exile in Lithuania, so much so that he was charged in November with inciting public disorder and social hatred.
Protasevich’s abduction has worried the airline industry, which was shocked when Ryanair complied with demands to ground a commercial flight.
“We’re in uncharted territory,” Conor Nolan of the Flight Safety Foundation told The Wall Street Journal. “If we lose confidence in the ability to safely fly over states, it’s going to significantly damage trust in international commercial aviation.”