In an interview with Radio Svaboda, the winner of the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize, the editor-in-chief of the Russian newspaper "Novaya Gazeta", Dmitri Muratov, expressed the opinion that the Belarusian authoritarian leader Alexander Lukashenko was behind the sentence to Ales Bialiatskyi and his colleagues.

"I hope that no one has the slightest doubt that it was his trial, and not the verdict of some independent court in Belarus.

This is a personal vindictive, petty, deeply aggressive and doomed trial of

The dictators, to whom Lukashenka belongs, imprison people so that there is no change of power at all.

They defend themselves, instead of condemning

They are not condemning them now, they are preparing for themselves endless and immortal, as it seems to them, power.

But, as you know, it won't happen.

There will be no eternal power, just like eternal life.

Lukashenko will still sit when Bialiatsky leaves," said Russian editor, Nobel Peace Prize laureate