MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 11th August, 2020) RT and Sputnik Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan on Monday criticized Belarusian authorities for allowing the country's law enforcement officers to detain Russian journalists amid the violent protests.
"What does he [President Alexander Lukashenko] do with journalists? With our journalists? He bites the hand that feeds. They were definitely not sent by [the US] state department, they are not paid by the CIA [the US Central Intelligence Agency], this is just stupid. A person who has been in power for so long, and whose power causes such protests, he can not afford such a nonsense. You cannot do that," Simonyan said in an interview with Solovyov Live show on the Rossiya 1 tv channel.
Simonyan added that three stringers of RT video agency Ruptly had not come into contact yet after being detained in Belarus, and both the media and their families could not reach out to them.
Several Russian media outlets, including Sputnik Belarus, RT, TV Rain, Meduza and Daily Storm, have said that their reporters have been detained in Minsk. According to Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov was personally overseeing how the situation with arrested reporters was unfolding.
Protests were held throughout Belarus on Sunday night after preliminary results showed incumbent President Alexander Lukashenko winning the election with over 80 percent of the vote, while the campaign team of opposition candidate Svetlana Tikhanovskaya has refused to recognize the results.
