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May 24th, 2021 
Awake Goy 
For 170 passengers, the forced landing of flight FR 4978 to Minsk en route from Athens to Vilnius was a major inconvenience. For one passenger, it was rather more significant.
“A death sentence is waiting for me here,” Roman Protasevich is reported to have told fellow passengers when they asked him why he was shaking as the Boeing 737 descended into Belarus’ main airport.
It is unclear if, indeed, Belarus’ erratic president Alexander Lukashenko will look to invoke the highest sentence against the 26-year old journalist. But Mr Protasevich has plenty of reasons to be concerned.
As a former editor and co-founder of Nexta (“someone”), the pre-eminent opposition platform during last year’s protests, he regularly invoked the autocrat’s ire when he was at his weakest. Now emboldened by Russian support, Mr Lukashenko is looking for revenge.
As the Belarusian opposition staged an improbable campaign to unseat the 26 year dictator following last August’s elections that Lukashenko likely lost by a landslide, Mr Protasevich’s Nexta was the go-to platform for information. It published incriminating videos of state violence and leaked personal details of riot police officers identified in Mr Lukashenko’s brutal crackdown.
So great was Nexta’s Influence on the streets, critics even suggested Mr Protasevich and co-founder Stepan Putilo were, from their small offices in exile in Poland, operating protests like a Black Mirror-type computer game.
During rallies, one post on Nexta was enough to send protesters one way. And another – to turn it back.
In a previously unpublished interview given to this correspondent in August, Mr Protasevich said Nexta had “no option” but to step up and open its resources to the opposition movement. At the time of protests, the publication had already built up a large audience as a modern, application-based media.
A Belarusian dog handler checks luggage from the plane that was forced to land in Minsk
(ONLINER.BY/AFP via Getty Images)
“We realised it was our time,” he said. “Anyone who could be a leader was either in prison or under surveillance. It was our time to step up.”
Mr Protasevich always rejected claims that Nexta directly coordinated the protests. What they did was curate readers’ content and leaks, he said: “We take ideas that people give us, work them up, and present them to the people.”
At the height of the demonstrations, the Nekhta team was receiving 10,000 messages an hour.
Back then, Mr Protasevich predicted the powers of the internet meant that Mr Lukashenko’s time was running out quickly.
“The internet is an untameable instrument to consolidate society and to organise,” he said. “I’ve no doubt Lukashenko will fall — and he will fall within weeks.”
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