WORLD WORLDWIDE EUROPE BELARUS - news journal UPDATE - (en) Belarus, Pramen: TRADING PEOPLE LIKE LITTLE WRAPPERS (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 How to release political prisoners is one of the most complex debates of

our time. On the one hand, diasporas have little or no power to
influence the fate of prisoners, except for support during their time in
prison. On the other hand, some have hopes of releasing hundreds or
thousands of people through diplomatic channels. How realistic this is
can be seen from the example of yesterday's prisoner exchange between
the West and Russia. First of all, we would like to point out that we
are happy about the release of political prisoners from prisons in
Belarus and Russia. But unfortunately, this small drop of joy for the
media and some individuals can hardly affect the systematic nightmare of
repression in modern eastern dictatorships.

Murderers and scammers in exchange for journalists and civil activists
Nothing says more about the nature of the Russian regime than the list
of those whom Putin hugged this night at the airport. Everyone has
already written about Vadim Krasikov - a Kremlin assassin working in the
German capital. It's hard to imagine how many of them are still sitting
around waiting for orders, but Krasikov is just the tip of the iceberg
that the German cops were able to reach. Besides him, there are several
FSB agents and a few hackers on the exchange list. The latter have
hardly worked on FSB assignments in the past, but today, given the de
facto legalisation of cyber fraud in Russia against "enemies of the
nation", it is clear that Putin is counting on the hackers' skills in
the war in Ukraine and the ongoing attempts to sabotage critical
infrastructure in the West.

In addition to journalists and politicians, the list of prisoners to be
exchanged includes Rico Krieger, captured by the Belarusian regime. A
man whose existence almost nobody knew about until a few weeks ago. The
game with the death sentence, pardon and the whole theatre built around
the fate of this man by the Belarusian regime was created according to
all the rules of price inflation during the exchange. Lukashenko's
readiness to kill prisoners for absurd charges, at least in the media
environment, left little chance for the German negotiators - after all
the threats, he had to be included in the list for the exchange. With
this approach Lukashenko once again showed the cruelty and cunning of
his regime. Those who consider the Belarusian dictator a collective
farmer in a leather jacket are deeply mistaken in his ability to work in
the atmosphere of political crisis. Lukashenko's usefulness to the
Kremlin continues to outweigh any attempts of the dictator to play his
own political game. In this part we would like to mention Krieger's
condition by the time of the bargaining - on the video published by the
Russian regime one can quite easily see Krieger's condition at the time
of his release - by his example we can see the situation of thousands of
those whom Lukashenko's regime continues to hold hostage in Belarus'
pre-trial detention centres, camps and prisons.

The absence of prisoners from Belarus with the exception of a German
citizen cannot but refresh the perception of reality for the Belarusan
diaspora - in the war with the Russian regime, the interests of
Belarusians take a back seat. The capture of Putin's or Lukashenko's
agents somewhere in Western countries is unlikely to seriously affect
the state of political prisoners, while individual releases show an
example into the future for authoritarian regimes - foreigners today are
a valuable commodity on the prisoner exchange market. Western
politicians are in no hurry to exchange FSB officers for ordinary
citizens of the Russian Federation or Belarus. The situation changes
quickly when Germans, Americans or citizens of other Western countries
are captured. In the cold war between the West and Russia, Belarusians
are assigned the role of second-rate political subjects. If we really
want to release political prisoners, we should count first of all on our
own forces, and if help comes, we should consider it a pleasant surprise.

https://pramen.io/en/2024/08/trading-people-like-little-wrappers/
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