Belarusian protest leader Maria Kolesnikova ripped up her passport to thwart an attempt to deport her to Ukraine, Interfax Ukraine news agency reported yesterday.
Ukrainian Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs Anton Gerashchenko wrote on Facebook that Kolesnikova, who had been missing for the past 24 hours, had successfully prevented “a forcible expulsion from her native country.”
Kolesnikova, a member of the Coordination Council created by the opposition to facilitate talks with long-time leader Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko on a transition of power, was detained on Monday in the capital Minsk, along with two other council members.
Photo: AP
They were early yesterday driven to the border with Ukraine, where the authorities told them to leave Belarus.
Kolesnikova refused and remained on the Belarusian side of the border in the custody of the Belarusian authorities.
Her fate had been a mystery since supporters said that she was snatched in the street by masked men on Monday.
“Maria Kolesnikova was not able to be deported from Belarus as this brave woman took steps to prevent her[self] from moving across the border. She remained on the territory of the Republic of Belarus. Alexander Lukashenko is personally responsible for her life and health,” Gerashchenko said.
Interfax Ukraine quoted a source as saying that Kolesnikova had torn up her passport so that Ukrainian border officials would be unable to let her cross.
Kolesnikova’s whereabouts are unclear.
However, two other opposition figures who had gone missing at about the same time did enter Ukraine in the early hours of yesterday morning, the Ukrainian State Border Guard Service said.
“Kolesnikova has been detained. I can’t say concretely where she is, but she has been detained,” Belarusian Border Guard Service representative Anton Bychkovsky said by telephone. “She was detained in connection with the circumstances under which they [the group] left the territory of Belarus.”
The authorities have applied similar tactics to other opposition figures, seeking to end a month of demonstrations against the re-election of Lukashenko in a vote the protesters see as rigged.
Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, the main challenger to Lukashenko, was pressured to leave Belarus a day after the Aug. 9 vote.
A top associate of Tsikhanouskaya, Olga Kovalkova, on Saturday last week moved to Poland after authorities threatened to keep her in jail for a long time if she refused to leave the country.
Additional reporting by AP
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