A court in the Polish capital, Warsaw, on September 6 issued arrests warrants for three Belarusian men over their roles in the forced landing in Minsk of a commercial flight from Athens to Vilnius in May 2021 with dissident blogger Raman Pratasevich aboard.
The Wyborcza.pl website reported on September 6 that the warrants were issued on charges of "capture of an aircraft" and "illegal deprivation of freedom" for the former chief of the Belaeronavigatsia air navigation company, Leanid Churo; the head of the air-traffic control shift, Yauhen Tsyhanau; and an unidentified KGB officer who was present in the air-traffic control booth during the operation to land the Ryanair passenger jet.
The charges were filed after Polish investigators obtained data from a 42-year-old Belarusian dispatcher who fled to Poland in summer 2021.
After the plane was forced to land in Minsk in May 2021, Belarusian police arrested Pratasevich and his then-girlfriend, a Russian citizen, Sofia Sapega.
Pratasevich, who fled Belarus in 2019, worked as an editor at the Poland-based Nexta Live channel on Telegram that extensively covered a violent crackdown on unprecedented protests in Belarus following an August 2020 presidential election that the opposition and Western governments say was stolen by authoritarian ruler Alyaksandr Lukashenka, who has run the country with an iron fist since 1994.
In early May 2023, a Minsk court sentenced Pratasevich to eight years in prison, and his co-defendants, Stsyapan Putsila and Yan Rudzik, who were tried in absentia, to 20 years and 19 years in prison, respectively, on charges stemming from their online coverage of the 2020 anti-Lukashenka protests.
Weeks later, Pratasevich told journalists he had received a pardon from Lukashenka.
Sapega was sentenced to six years in prison in May 2022 on a charge of administering a Telegram channel that published the personal data of Belarusian security forces.
Sapega was released and allowed to return to Russia in June 2023 after Lukashenka pardoned her.
Lukashenka, who denies stealing the election, has cracked down hard on the opposition, whose leading members were either jailed or forced to flee the country out of fear for their safety.