Lukashenka received WikiLeaks documents in 2010, opposition affected

Photo: kommersant.ru
Photo: kommersant.ru

Alyaksandr Lukashenka received WikiLeaks documents in 2010 which affected the Belarusian opposition, The New Yorker reports.

 

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange “had questionable associations”. Israel Shamir, a Russian with extremist views suspected of having ties to Russian intelligence, visited him in 2010. Assange shared some documents with him.  Assange gave him ‘more than ninety thousand unredacted U.S. diplomatic cables concerning Russia, former Soviet-bloc countries, and Israel’. Shamir sent the materials to Minsk and they reached Alyaksandr Lukashenka who used them to arrest opposition figures. Israel Shamir is refuting the fact. It is known that he sent the mentioned papers to mass media.

The New Yorker quotes a Belarusian activist who told the website Tablet: “I really hate WikiLeaks. How can they do this? The KGB is telling these people, ‘Your name is in the American cables and you are a traitor, an American agent, and you will be treated like an enemy.’ ”

Belarusian activists began contacting WikiLeaks staff ‘in a panic’, and immediately became alarmed. Some wanted to investigate the matter.