A Belarussian presidential candidate has been sentenced to five years in prison following a trial that he denounced as political punishment for challenging the nation's authoritarian leader.
I thought, most of all, of Oleg Bebenin, Sannikov's press secretary and close friend, founder of the Belarussian citizens' rights group Charter 97, who was found hanged at his dacha in 2010 with unexplained bruises on his hand, chest and back.
A district court in the Belarussian capital Minsk handed out the sentence to Andrei Sannikov after convicting him on charges of staging riots following December's presidential election.
He said the paper's closure "would be a major setback in the development of the free press in Belarus and a great loss for Belarussian society".
The Foreign Ministry has issued a statement condemning the arrest and insists that it warned the Justice Ministry against sharing sensitive information with the Belarusians (this is true, but probably happened some time after the information was handed over, in response to complaints from worried Belarussian NGOs).
(Relations with Belarus are awkward enough already: this week its officials were banned from entering EU countries, after the eviction of several western ambassadors from their homes near Minsk, the Belarussian capital).If he plays his cards right, Monsieur PESC will be a popular figure.
One lot are Belarussian nationalists who see the reversal of Russification as a top priority.
Growing poverty makes people surly, but so long as Russia supplies cheap energy, the economy will not collapse".It is like living in the Soviet Union again," says a leading Belarussian sociologist, revealingly fearful of being quoted by name.
New development is planned for the Gowanus watershed, and a crowd had packed the Belarussian church on Atlantic Avenue to discuss the environmental implications.
Mr. Lukashenko, meanwhile, accused Russian officials of insulting the Belarussian people, saying that he had been forced to seek loans from "strangers" to satisfy Russian demands for immediate payment.
In 2010, the Belarussian opposition leader Andrei Sannikov took part in the country's presidential election.
