'Armenia's Heavy Slap In Lukashenka's Face'

Travel blogger Lapshin spoke about his failed detention at the request of Belarus.

Travel blogger Aleksandr Lapshin was detained at the Yerevan Zvarnots airport on September 21. The reason was a request from Belarus, Lapshin wrote on his Telegram channel.

At first, Lapshin indicated that he was detained "on the basis of a wanted list from Azerbaijan and the Russian Federation." After four hours at the airport, the man was released.

"The request was ultimately from Belarus, as it turned out in this case, not from Azerbaijan. I was misled by one of the police officers at the airport, who literally said 'Nikol Pashinyan [Prime Minister of Armenia. - Ed.] is going to sell you to Aliyev,' Lapshin wrote.

According to him, the Belarusian charges consist of seven articles of the criminal code, including insulting Lukashenka. According to Lapshin, the initiator of his detention was the Ambassador of Belarus to Armenia Aliaksandr Kaniuk, who was previously the Prosecutor General. The blogger notes that "it was he who signed the decree on my extradition to Azerbaijan for visiting Artsakh [the unrecognized Nagorno-Karabakh Republic - Ed.] as a journalist."

"According to my information, he shared with one of the diplomats in Yerevan that he would deal with me and find a way to do it. This is his answer. Konyuk is on the sanctions list of the European Union and the United States for the brutal suppression of peaceful protests in Minsk in the summer of 2020. Thanks to the Armenian justice system, which refused to arrest and extradite me to Belarus," Lapshin wrote.

"Lukashenka, who sold me to Aliyev in 2017 for visiting Artsakh, received a resounding slap in the face from Armenia. And Ambassador Konyuk got a kick in the obese prosecutor's ass," the blogger believes following his release after detention.

Recall that in 2016, the famous travel blogger Aleksandr Lapshin was arrested in Belarus and then extradited to Azerbaijan. The authorities of this country accused the man of illegally visiting Nagorno-Karabakh without permission from Azerbaijan. A year later, Lapshin was sentenced to three years in prison. And on September 7, 2022, the UN Human Rights Committee recognized Belarus' actions as illegal.

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