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Opposition activist Vasil Parfyankow flees Belarus

Vasil Parfyankow, an opposition activist who was released from a correctional facility in Horki, Mahilyow region, on December 5 and placed under “preventive police supervision” after serving out a one-year prison term, has fled Belarus.

The 31-year-old Parfyankow left for Ukraine on December 19, Ilya Dabratvor, deputy chairman of an opposition group called Alternatyva (Alternative), told BelaPAN.

According to him, Mr. Parfyankow had no plans to return to Belarus and was going to “defend Ukraine from the Russian invaders.”

Mr. Parfyankow’s wife and their 11-month-old child reportedly live in Ukraine’s Lviv province.

On December 5, 2013, a district judge in Minsk sentenced Mr. Parfyankow to one year in a high-security correctional institution for allegedly failing to comply with restrictions imposed on him following his release from prison under a pardon from Alyaksandr Lukashenka.

The judge also ordered him to be subjected to forced treatment for alcoholism during his imprisonment.

The activist spent the last several months of his prison term in solitary confinement.

Mr. Parfyankow was one of the 28 people who were sentenced to prison terms in connection with their participation in a protest staged in the Belarusian capital city on the presidential election night of December 19, 2010. He was the first of them to stand trial. In February 2011, he was sentenced to a four-year prison term.

He was granted the presidential pardon on August 11, 2011 and released three days later. // BelaPAN