About the release of Pavlo Spirin after five years of imprisonment became known in January. Now a video of him in Vilnius has appeared.
«Hello everyone. I have finally left Belarus. I am now in Lithuania. A big thank you to everyone for your support, for being with me and with other people all these years, people who didn't get to finish what we were supposed to finish in 2020. But everything is still ahead,» — Pavel says in the video.
The release of 42-year-old political blogger Pavel Spiryn became known in January. He spent over five years in detention; recently, Spiryn was held in Horki in a 'recidivist' colony along with Ales Bialiatski.
Pavel is a lawyer by education. He once worked in a state communal enterprise, but he was fired when he participated in parliamentary elections. After that, Spiryn decided to take up YouTube. His political videos gathered hundreds of thousands of views.
In 2020, the blogger tried to become a presidential candidate, but his initiative group was not registered. Then he became an authorized representative of Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya.
Spiryn was arrested in September 2020. He was sentenced to 4.5 years in a penal colony for 'inciting hatred' against the Belarusian authorities for two YouTube films — one about drug trafficking and another about then-Prosecutor General Aliaksandr Kaniuk. These videos have now been deleted from YouTube.
The blogger served his sentence in a penal colony in Babruysk. Before his planned release, a new criminal case was opened against him for 'disobeying the administration'. Spiryn was sentenced to another year of imprisonment and sent to a penal colony in Horki, where he was held with Nobel laureate Ales Bialiatski.
After serving the additional one-year sentence, Spiryn was released.
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