A jailed Belarusian protest leader has said that the regime of President Lukashenko put pressure on her to record a confession before she faces trial on charges of plotting to seize power.
Maria Kolesnikova, 39, a former professional musician, emerged as a protest leader during the presidential election campaign last year and faces 12 years in prison.
In an interview with the independent Russian TV channel Dozhd, Kolesnikova called the charges “absurd” and said they were “evidence of the lawlessness of the police state”.
“The state is terribly afraid of an open trial, where everyone will see that the main danger and threat to Belarusians, Belarus, and national security, is the state itself,” she said.
Asked whether she had been encouraged to co-operate with state investigators in exchange for a lighter sentence, she said she had proposed negotiations aimed at “halting the stand-off in society” and was offered a meeting with Marat Markov, a state TV propagandist.
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Markov is best known for hosting an interview in June with Roman Protasevich, the dissident blogger who was seized in May from a commercial Ryanair flight that Lukashenko forced to redirect mid-air and land in Minsk.
The video interview, and an earlier video confession by Protasevich while in police custody, were widely seen as recorded under duress as part of a campaign to portray the blogger as the instigator of mass unrest.
“I told them Markov is welcome to come, and I’ll share the shocking truth about my abduction, the investigation, and the lawlessness in custody,” Kolesnikova said. “For some reason he’s not coming.”
Her caustic words about the regime are tantamount to a final word in her defence, because her trial began yesterday behind closed doors.
She has languished in a notorious Minsk detention centre since September, when she was abducted by masked men and driven to the Ukrainian border along with two associates. Ordered to cross the border, she tore up her passport in protest, before being driven back to Minsk and jailed.
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Kolesnikova will appear in court with Maxim Znak, 39, a fellow member of the Coordination Council, which was set up after Lukashenko’s disputed election with the stated intention of facilitating a peaceful transfer of power.
As the two activists face a lengthy prison term, another outspoken Belarusian reached safety yesterday. Krystsina Tsimanouskaya, a 24-year-old Olympic sprinter, arrived at Vienna airport, where she had been offered a humanitarian visa after rejecting demands from Belarusian Olympic officials that she return to Minsk from Tokyo as punishment for criticising them on social media.
In Kiev peaceful rallies were held after police began an investigation into the death of Vitaly Shishov, who left Belarus fearing retaliation for his role in anti-government protests last year.
The 26-year-old was found hanged in a Kiev park early on Monday. Friends claim that he was murdered by agents of Lukashenko’s regime who, they allege, had infiltrated the Belarusian diaspora in Ukraine.
The head of Ukraine’s police force said that signs of minor injury had been found on Shishov, including torn skin on his nose and knee. “This is typical in the case of a fall,” Oleg Klimenko said, adding that the police’s working hypotheses were suicide or murder made to look like suicide.
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Shishov’s partner told Ukrainian TV station Hromadske: “I’m 100 per cent sure that this wasn’t suicide.”
