For years Belarussian opposition figure Roman Protasevich criticized and organized against the Aliaksandar Lukashenka regime online, seeding the Minsk protests in the Spring of 2021. In May 2021, his flight from Athens to Vilnius was diverted into Belarussian airspace and forced by a false bomb threat to land in Minsk, where he and his girlfriend Sofia Sapega were promptly arrested. (Two days later Sapega was filmed confessing herself guilty to crimes that will detain her through the summer.) Protasevich and Sapega remain under arrest in a detention center at the time of this writing despite his making three public television interviews. In each public interview, he has renounced his past crimes, sided with Lukashenka (once crediting his captor with “forgive the phrase, balls of steel”), and breaking down into tears while pleading to be able to return to lead a regular family life, presumably bidding implicitly for the life of Sapega.

What kind of media events are these interviews? What does it mean for an arrested opposition figure to “voluntarily” confess to crimes liable to earn a fifteen-year prison sentence while recanting their ways on live television? Such televised interviews are no mere media events. A media event, according to founding communication scholar Elihu Katz, is conveyed immediately (usually on plausibly live television), is preplanned (such as a coronation like a royal wedding, a conquest like the landing on the moon, or a contest like the Olympics), and is principally driven by a personality or event. While the three Protasevich interviews are certainly “global” enough to provoke broad international condemnation and even sanctions, the event may not necessarily be unusual enough in the history of extra-juridical televised show trails to constitute what McKenzie Wark calls a “weird global media event.”

Perhaps we can consider these interviews a main event of the media circus that is post-Soviet national television, with the protagonist playing the clown, condemning himself and his own opposition in a forced confession whose script, once the spotlight of national attention has been trained on the actor, begins with a dangerous self-condemning contortion that is “voluntarily given.” A media circus differs from a regular media event in so far as its actors know that more than the television audience is judging their performance. Like the main event of a circus, this interview was filmed in a set-apart space with an unnamed interviewer and encircled in blackness, making it impossible to know where the interview took place (likely at a detention center). Like many circus events, production is driven under conditions of compulsion, threat, and abuse; as such, instead of displaying spontaneous personal moments that give live television its cultural gravity, the actors perform under the spotlight prescripted stock characters—such as the clown, the acrobat, or the lion-tamer—to both knowingly entertain a believing public and appease or plausibly deny would-be skeptics, whether internal or external. The audience of a circus differs from the audience of a live interview (such as, say, Oprah Winfrey's now iconic interview with Meghan Markle and Prince Henry Windsor) in whether slip-ups are planned. In the main event of a circus interview, slip-ups may very well be death-defying, but they are already foregone conclusions: Protasevich will weep on national television, the clown puts down himself and everyone else, the acrobat flips, the lion-tamer tames the lion.

In a regular media event, the viewer hopes to glimpse through the cracks of live performance some moment of unplanned personality: not so the negotiated weeping of Protasevich bidding for his and Sapega's life together. Protasevich, even one day after his arrest, appears to have been forced to play the clown perfectly. Despite beginning by declaring that he voluntarily agreed to the interview, he remains a man under detention and interrogation. Protasevich's wrists show evidence of handcuffs, and his forehead may have sustained a blunt-force blow. His parents, who called out the interview as a bluff, have since been condemned, stripped of rank, and forced to leave the country. In a media circus event, the stakes are so high, the script so life-risking, that the grand narrative of the state overwhelms the authenticity of the broken person. The transformational potential of live media events is exhausted, the clown is forced to weep.