“I will share with you the results of my Office's work in recent days. On Monday, June 14, I addressed the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Danish Parliament, where I spoke about torture in prisons, the attack on TUT.BY and the plane hijacking by the regime. I called on Denmark to support the families of the victims, workers, journalists, bloggers, and human rights defenders and to impose sanctions.
We see that even the expectation of sanctions works – the regime tries to justify its actions, make political prisoners write petitions for “pardon”, hoping that Europe will back down. But the trade of political prisoners is unacceptable – all of them must be released and fully rehabilitated. We insist that this should be a condition for stopping sanctions. And we know that individual and sectoral EU sanctions will be announced next week.
On Monday, I met with the deputies of the French Parliament who had come to Vilnius on a monitoring mission on Belarus. With them, we discussed the organization of a high-level conference to resolve the crisis in Belarus, which has already been supported by the United States, Austria, and other EU countries.
On Monday, June 14, together with Angela Merkel and the two candidates for German Chancellor – Annalena Baerbock and Armin Laschet, I spoke at the Deutsche Welle Global Media Forum. Now the profession of a journalist is one of the most dangerous in Belarus, so I called for support of the portal TUT.by, which had more than three million unique visits per month.
The exhibition of posters of Belarusian artist and designer Vladimir Tsesler was opened in Vilnius the other day, and the project “Miazha” – about Belarusians who had to leave the country after violence and persecution. All these works are displayed on the territory of the former Lukishki prison, which is notorious in our history – under different authorities, such famous Belarusians as Frantsishak Aliakhnovich, Maksim Haretski, Maksim Tank, Branislau Tarashkievich, Baris Keith, and Adam Stankich were imprisoned here. Together with Lithuanian Prime Minister Ingrida Simonyte, we walked through the prison building – and every corridor, every cell spoke in pain to the heart. For my husband and thousands of innocent Belarusians who are in the same conditions.
This is what I said yesterday when I addressed the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Parliament of the United Kingdom at the hearings on Belarus. The parliamentarians asked a lot of questions and were very interested in what was going on in our country. They asked about what the United Kingdom could do to help our country, asked about Russia – I said that the Russians supported us, the Belarusians, but the Kremlin decided to support Lukashenka – which meant paying for the torture of the Belarusians.
Parliamentarians also asked questions about Raman Pratasevich and safety after the plane hijacking, to which I replied that I did not feel safe from the moment I applied to be a presidential candidate to the Central Elections Commission of Belarus. But it doesn’t matter – compared to the danger of political prisoners and hostages. So now we must do everything we can to free them all.
Biden’s meeting with Putin will take place today, and before it, I stated our position to the Biden administration. It consists of 5 main postulates: 1. Lukashenka is illegitimate and must leave. 2. The new presidential election in Belarus must take place in 2021. 3. The protest in our country is not geopolitical. 4. Instead of supporting the regime, Russia may still become part of the solution to the crisis in Belarus. 5. The independence and sovereignty of Belarus cannot be a subject of bargaining”.
