For journalists like Protasevich, free speech is a matter of life and death

Last August I wrote a column in The Spectator’s US edition urging Donald Trump to take a leaf out of Alexander Lukashenko’s book and campaign for re-election on a vodka-and-sauna approach to managing the pandemic. Belarus was one of a handful of European countries not to impose a lockdown last year, with the President urging his citizens to have plenty of vodka and lots of saunas to avoid infection.

To the consternation of other European leaders, Lukashenko’s laissez-faire approach hasn’t proved a disaster — Belarus’s death toll from the virus currently stands at 2,780, although some people don’t believe the official figures — and I thought it was funny that a politician described as ‘Europe’s last dictator’ and who looks like a Ruritanian despot has turned out to be better at navigating the Covid crisis than many of his more sophisticated peers.