![]() ![]() While the Russian and especially Belarusian governments often target specific journalists or publications, Partlett says internet freedom has been strong in Belarus and Russia compared to a country like China.īut now that resistance movements are being so effectively built using internet platforms, that freedom might soon become more compromised.Ī RyanAir flight headed for Lithuania was diverted to Belarus. Because state TV is so controlled, creative and defiant young people flocked to YouTube and Telegram, where they can create their own news channels. "These guys have really figured out how to use the internet to counter these regimes in the last few years," William Partlett, a professor at Melbourne Law School who researches post-Soviet societies, told me on a recent phone call. That these dissidents are being targeted for elimination and imprisonment now, after years in the public eye, is a sign of how threatening their online presence has become to Lukashenko and Russia's president, Vladimir Putin. Online platforms are rattling restrictive regimes in Europe's east: In the aligned nations of Belarus and Russia, heroic activists like Protasevich and imprisoned Russian dissident Alexei Navalny use the twin powers of Telegram and YouTube to expose corruption and governmental malignancy. Police boarded the plane and arrested Roman Protasevich, a 26-year-old journalist who runs Nexta, an anti-establishment news channel that operates mostly on the encrypted messaging app Telegram, where it has over 1.2 million subscribers in a country of about 9 million. As the plane flew over Belarus' airspace, Lukashenko's government sent a MiG fighter jet to ground the flight full of civilian passengers.Īnd what for? To take down a journalist and his Telegram group. ![]() If you're a dictator, what you don't want is the world watching your every move - but that's the attention Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko cast on himself Sunday.ĭubbed Europe's last dictator, Lukashenko earned Belarus a fresh round of local protests and international sanctions when he used military force to ground a RyanAir plane flying between Greece and Lithuania on Sunday. ![]()
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