RT interviewed Roman Protasevich. The same interviews have been published more than once in Belarusian state media (which are advised by RT employees)

The Russian state television channel RT interviewed Roman Protasevich, former editor-in-chief of the telegram channel Nexta, who is accused in Belarus of organizing mass riots. RT is the first Russian media to talk to Protasevich after his detention in Minsk. But there's not much new in this interview - especially if you've seen other similar conversations before.

Protasevich was detained on May 23, 2021, after Belarusian dispatchers forced a Ryanair plane flying from Athens to Vilnius to make an emergency landing in Minsk due to a bomb allegedly planted on board. Together with Protasevich, his girlfriend, a Russian citizen Sofya Sapega, was detained. They face imprisonment in the case of organizing protests in Belarus.

Already after the arrest, the state media of Belarus showed several interviews of Protasevich, in which he condemned the opposition and his former Nexta colleagues. After the publication of the first material with the participation of the former editor-in-chief of Nexta, Protasevich's father stated that his son was tortured. There are other circumstances indicating that Protasevich did not give these interviews of his own free will: after he was detained in an extreme way, the journalist was placed in the pre-trial detention center of the KGB of Belarus for almost a month; His hands are seen on video footage showing injuries. Now, according to official data, Protasevich, like Sofya Sapega, is under house arrest (at the same time, on August 9, Alexander Lukashenko said that he was "practically free").

This time, RT special correspondent Konstantin Prydybaylo spoke with Roman Protasevich, who covered in detail the events in Belarus in 2020-2021. Here is just one of the most revealing questions from a TV channel employee (we quote it with abbreviations):

Probably worth confessing, since you and I met face to face. I posted a video from your phone not so long ago. It was August 9, the night of August 9-10 [2020]… How do you remember that night?

During the interview, Protasevich and Prydybailo again discussed the protests in Belarus that began after the presidential elections in the country in August 2020. Protasevich agreed to call himself the "organizer" of the protests, but not their "coordinator." He also answered in the affirmative to Prydybailo's question whether he considers himself a "co-author of an attempted coup" in Belarus.

Among other things, Protasevich mentioned plans to launch his own media in Belarus (nothing was known about this before), which "will meet, firstly, the demands of society, and secondly, the demands of the time." According to him, the media will work "in a neutral zone", "so that both officials and the state still become more open to comments, to statements."

Since the beginning of the protests in Belarus in 2020, many journalists left the local state-run media, refusing to continue participating in propaganda work. After that, several dozen employees of the RT television channel arrived in the country as “consultants” for the Belarusian media. Alexander Lukashenko personally thanked them for their help in the information sphere.

“You understand how important you were to us during this difficult period. And what you technically showed, your techies, and journalists, and correspondents, and so on ... and your leader [Margarita Simonyan]. It is very expensive,” Lukashenka himself told Konstantin Prydybaylo on September 1, 2020, despite the attempts of the RT correspondent to object that they “do not replace anyone.”

In September 2020, RT officially announced that 32 channel employees work in Belarus, who “advise Belarusian colleagues on a variety of issues” - but none of the RT employees “work on Belarusian TV.”

During the current conversation with Protasevich, Prydybailo asked the former editor-in-chief of Nexta if he had noticed the arrival of RT in Belarus. “In terms of how noticeable the arrival was, as everyone called it, the “Russian landing”, it simply became noticeable how, firstly, the rhetoric had changed. The feed became much clearer and faster. Because Belarusian state journalism, especially at the time of the August events, turned out to be absolutely toothless and defenseless,” Protasevich said.

On the eve of the publication of Protasevich's interview in RT, on August 10, the state television channel Belarus 1 aired the first interview after the detention of Roman Protasevich's girlfriend, Russian Sofya Sapega. Whether she interacted with the channel's employees of her own free will is also unclear. Among other things, Sapieha stated that during the emergency landing of the Ryanair plane in Minsk, there were no KGB officers of Belarus on board.

Alexander Baklanov