“We never trusted him,” Mr. Sannikov said. “I told friends not to have any dealings with him.”
Nexta, the opposition Telegram channel Mr. Protasevich edited, he said, often “gave mixed directions” to Minsk protesters and “made people run around the city without any purpose.” Nexta at that time also published demonstrably false information that the Belarusian authorities exploited to try to discredit the opposition.
In an interview in Warsaw after the 2020 protests with Yuri Dud, an independent Russian journalist, the founder of Nexta, Stsiapan Putsila, acknowledged that information published by his team was sometimes wrong, including a report that Russian special forces had arrived in Minsk during the unrest, and blamed this on reports sent from inside Belarus that, in the heat of the moment, could not be fully checked. But he insisted that “97 percent” of what Nexta published had turned out to be true.
Exiled political groups often fall into infighting and mutual finger-pointing, a phenomenon that Mr. Lukashenko has encouraged by sending agents to infiltrate and disrupt the activities of opponents outside Belarus. His critics inside the country have nearly all been arrested and given harsh sentences.
Maria Kolesnikova, a fierce opponent of Mr. Lukashenko who refused to go into exile, was jailed for 11 years in September 2021 after a closed trial. The crackdown on dissent continued this year when Ales Bialiatski, 60, a veteran activist who shared last year’s Nobel Peace Prize, received a 10-year sentence.
Mr. Protasevich’s pardon, Mr. Viacorka said, is part of a long and dirty game by the Belarusian authorities to crush the opposition — through brute force at home and more devious methods abroad. According to Viasna, a group that monitors repression in Belarus, the country currently has 1,525 political prisoners.
