One of the leaders of Belarus’s opposition movement, Syarhei Tsikhanouski, has been released from jail after being pardoned after almost five years behind bars.
His wife, the exiled politician Svetlana Tsikhanouskaya, who took over the opposition cause after his jailing, on Saturday shared a video of him smiling and embracing her after his release.
The surprise move came hours after Donald Trump’s special envoy Keith Kellogg visited Minsk and met the authoritarian Belarusian leader, Alexander Lukashenko, in the highest-level contact between Washington and the Belarusian government since the brutal post-election crackdown in 2020.
In total, 14 Belarusian political prisoners were released on Saturday, the Nasha Niva newspaper said.
Tsikhanouski, a former blogger who galvanised anti-Lukashenko sentiment before the rigged 2020 presidential election, was arrested shortly after announcing his candidacy.
He was later sentenced to 18 years in what was widely seen as a politically motivated case of “inciting hatred and social unrest”.
His wife ran in his place and emerged as the leading opposition challenger before fleeing amid a sweeping crackdown to Lithuania, where she has since led efforts to resist the Lukashenko regime.
Svetlana Tsikhanouskaya took over the opposition cause after her husband’s jailing. Photograph: Olivier Hoslet/EPA
“My husband … is free! It’s hard to describe the joy in my heart,” Tsikhanouskaya wrote on X.
Tsikhanouskaya published a video clip showing her embracing her husband.
She thanked Trump and Keith Kellogg and “all European allies” for their efforts to get her husband released. “We’re not done. 1150 political prisoners remain behind bars. All must be released,” she added.
In the summer of 2020, Belarus had its largest protest to date, with more than 200,000 citizens flooding on to the streets to demonstrate the widely disputed president elections in which Lukashenko claimed to have secured 80% of the vote.
The violent crackdown by Lukashenko’s security forces turned him into even more of a pariah in the west, pushing him closer to Moscow and in effect transforming Belarus into a vassal state of Russia – an alliance that proved crucial for Vladimir Putin when the country became a launch point for his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
But in the last year, Lukashenko’s regime has granted pardons to more than 250 political prisoners, a move some view as an attempt by him to ease Belarus’s international isolation.
Several high-profile political prisoners remain behind bars, including Maria Kolesnikova and Viktor Babariko.
In January, Lukashenko secured a seventh five-year term as Belarusian president in a resounding election victory that western governments have rejected as a sham.
