{"id":494389,"date":"2025-10-31T16:04:45","date_gmt":"2025-10-31T13:04:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/reform.news\/?p=494389"},"modified":"2025-10-31T16:50:30","modified_gmt":"2025-10-31T13:50:30","slug":"lukashenka-pratasevich-is-an-officer-of-belarusian-intelligence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/reform.news\/en\/lukashenka-pratasevich-is-an-officer-of-belarusian-intelligence","title":{"rendered":"Lukashenka: Pratasevich Is an Officer of Belarusian Intelligence"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"fb-root\"><\/div>\n<p><b>Alyaksandr Lukashenka<\/b> has described <b>Raman Pratasevich<\/b> as an officer of Belarusian intelligence. He did not specify how long Pratasevich had worked for the intelligence service.<\/p>\n<p><i>\u201cI won\u2019t go into details. Pratasevich is an officer of our intelligence. Did we need to detain him? The question is, why were they flying to Vilnius, didn\u2019t land there, and instead turned around and came to Minsk, landing after a call that there was supposedly some explosive on board\u2026 Well, land then \u2014 you were flying to Vilnius, you were over Vilnius \u2014 land there. But they turned around and came to Minsk. They landed in Minsk. I said: \u2018So, carry out the operation \u2014 he was working under cover among those fugitives. Conduct the operation properly.\u2019 <\/i><\/p>\n<p><em>We had to carry out the operation to detain him, although we didn\u2019t need to detain him. He went to Greece \u2014 he had been summoned there \u2014 reported to our intelligence officers everything that interested us, received an assignment, and was flying back, to where he was working, via Vilnius. They accused us of detaining an opposition figure. But he\u2019s not our opposition figure. We didn\u2019t detain an opposition activist. And then they imposed sanctions,\u201d<\/em> Lukashenka said.<\/p>\n<p><b>Raman Pratasevich<\/b> is a journalist and former editor-in-chief of the Telegram channel Nexta. He was detained in May 2021 after the forced landing of a Ryanair flight traveling from Athens to Vilnius. <b>Sofia Sapega<\/b> was detained along with him. In May 2023, Pratasevich was sentenced to eight years in prison and pardoned later that month. In 2024, a court annulled a large fine imposed on him.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Alyaksandr Lukashenka has described Raman Pratasevich as an officer of Belarusian intelligence. He did not specify how long Pratasevich had worked for the intelligence service. \u201cI won\u2019t go into details. Pratasevich is an officer of our intelligence. Did we need to detain him? The question is, why were they flying to Vilnius, didn\u2019t land there, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":494388,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sharing_image":{"poster":"https:\/\/reform.news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/6904beac9e3f6.jpg","width":1200,"height":630,"template":"691142dd","mode":"auto"},"_sharing_image_fieldset":{"dTVKfmI95PYT":"Lukashenka: Pratasevich Is an Officer of Belarusian Intelligence"},"footnotes":""},"categories":[142339,142338],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-494389","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-main","category-news"],"wps_subtitle":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/reform.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/494389","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/reform.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/reform.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reform.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reform.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=494389"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/reform.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/494389\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reform.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/494388"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/reform.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=494389"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reform.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=494389"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reform.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=494389"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}