Belarus has released five political prisoners in a rare amnesty, nearly four years after the country’s leader Alexander Lukashenko launched a brutal crackdown on domestic opposition.
The 69-year-old, who has led the country since 1994, launched a mass crackdown after he claimed victory in a disputed 2020 presidential election. Thousands of people were arrested in the protests that followed.
On Tuesday, he expressed his intention to release some “seriously ill” prisoners at a press conference with reporters in the capital Minsk.
There are still more than 1,400 political prisoners held in Belarus, according to leading human rights group Viasna.
Three men and two women were released from custody on Wednesday, Viasna said.
Only one person released, Rygor Kastusev, has been identified. The 67-year-old, who ran against Mr Lukashenko in the 2010 election, was detained as part of a wave of arrests in 2021. Viasna said he had previously been diagnosed with cancer.
Confirming his release, Mr Kastusev’s daughter Galina said her father was “very happy to be free”.
“We saw each other, everyone was excited, started crying. We saw he was home, everything was fine,” she said.
Another political prisoner, Irina Schastnaya, was released on June 29. The opposition journalist was arrested in 2021 and sentenced to four years in prison.
The My Country Belarus Telegram channel, which she ran before her arrest, announced her release on Wednesday after she left the country.
Mr Lukashenko said on Tuesday that the amnesty would apply to those he accused of “sabotaging or destroying the country in 2020” and those who were “really sick, mainly with cancer”.
Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, the exiled opposition leader – who many believe defeated Mr Lukashenko in the 2020 election – welcomed the release.
“I am so happy to see these people free and reunited with their loved ones,” she wrote in a post on X, formerly Twitter.
But she stressed that many political prisoners were still being held, noting that more than 200 of them were suffering from “critical health conditions”.
“At least six people have died behind bars. They must be released unconditionally. Their urgent release is not a political issue but a humanitarian one,” she wrote.
Ms Tikhanovskaya’s husband, Sergei Tikhanovsky, is among those still in prison. He was arrested in May 2020, just two days after announcing his intention to challenge Mr Lukashenko in the presidential election.
He has not been heard from for more than a year, and Ms Tikhanovskaya’s spokesman told AFP there was no indication he would be among those released.
There are also concerns for Maria Kolesnikova – an opposition activist who tore up her passport after authorities kidnapped her and took her to the border in an attempt to force her to leave Belarus in September 2020. She was later sentenced to 10 years in prison.
Ms Kolesnikova’s lawyer said earlier this year that he had not had contact with his client since February 2023.
For decades, Mr Lukashenko has sought to pit Russia and the European Union against each other. His established practice has been to release political prisoners to win the support of leaders in Brussels and thaw relations.
But that relationship ended in 2020, after he declared victory in the presidential election and launched a wave of repression.
Since then, Mr Lukashenko has relied on the support of President Vladimir Putin, after the Russian leader agreed to send troops to support his regime as thousands of Belarusians took to the streets in protest.
It seems unlikely that Wednesday’s release of prisoners would signal a return to Mr Lukashenko’s previous efforts to woo the West, given the relatively modest number of prisoners released.
Dozens of detainees remain unaccounted for, while secret police continue to arrest others accused of undermining the regime.
Even on Wednesday, when five detainees were released after years of detention, Viasna still classified eight others as political prisoners.
