LAUSANNE, Switzerland—Belarus was stripped of hosting next month’s European track cycling championships on Thursday amid an international furor after a passenger jet was diverted to Minsk so a dissident journalist could be arrested.
The European Cycling Union cited the “current international situation” for canceling the event in Minsk scheduled from June 23 to 27. Organizers are looking for a replacement venue.
European Union leaders called the airplane incident a state-sponsored hijacking. Belarus has been in turmoil since authoritarian leader Alexander Lukashenko claimed victory last August in a disputed presidential election.
The EU advised member-countries’ airlines this week to avoid Belarus airspace and barred the former Soviet republic’s planes from their airports and airspace.
A Ryanair flight from Greece to Lithuania was told by flight controllers, citing a bomb threat, to land in Minsk on Sunday. A passenger, 26-year-old activist Raman Pratasevich, was taken from the plane.
Cycling officials said they are “working on finding an alternative solution” to stage the track championships.
Krasulin said he was arrested and brutally beaten all over his body by police in Belarus for attending a rally in August 2020 that challenged the results of an election keeping authoritarian Lukashenko in power.
Krasulin said security forces threatened to sodomize him with a truncheon for joining the protest. After he complained to authorities about the police actions, they opened a criminal case against him—rather than the security forces—and he decided to flee to neighboring Lithuania.
Until this week, he and other Lukashenko opponents had thought they were safe from the sweeping government crackdown by moving to nearby European Union countries.
“I was a hostage of Lukashenko’s regime, but now the entire European Union is in the same situation,” said Krasulin, a 32-year-old ethnographer and musician. “Torture, brutal repressions and a hunt for journalists have spilled out of Belarusian borders and become a problem for all of Europe.”
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