Mother of Belarusian volunteer who fought in the Donbas asks Poroshenko to protect her son
The mother of the Belarusian volunteer Taras Avatarov who was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment in his homeland for “smuggling an explosive device” has turned to Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko with a request to stand up for her son before the higher powers, Radio Svoboda writes.
As Lyudmila Pospekh pointed out at a press conference in Kyiv, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko’s visit to Ukraine will begin on July 21.
“I’m asking for help to protect my son. My goal is not so much to tell about the misfortune in my family, and I am proud of my son, but to support those children who currently cannot come or return home to Belarus, and to protect them. It is very hard to protect my son – this depends only on the wishes of the “higher powers”, and so I am calling on the Ukrainian authorities specifically to give attention to those who are defending the integrity of Ukraine,” Pospekh said.
According to her, her son was not arrested in Belarus but was supposedly captured in Kyiv by the Russian intelligence service and transferred by members of the Belarusian KGB, who put him in a car and sent him first to Gomel, and from there by train to Minsk. She notes that Taras was accompanied the entire way to the railway station in the Belarusian capital.
On the basis of conversations with her son, the woman believes that the home-made explosive device which her son was sentenced for was planted on him at the border of Belarus and Ukraine.
Halina Sarochyk, leader of the newly formed Belarusian organization “Syabry” in Kyiv, announced that during Lukashenko’s visit to the capital there will be a picket near the Presidential Administration of Ukraine building. This is where the Belarusian-Ukrainian negotiations will be held.
In May 2016 Avatarov was sentenced to 5 years of imprisonment in a penal colony without confiscation of property for “illegal circulation and smuggling of an explosive device”.
He was arrested on the 26th of November 2015 at the Minsk railway station. Police officers confiscated a homemade grenade, a Makarov signal gun, a bullet proof vest, and a Right Sector volunteer certificate.