Belarus has freed Sergey Tikhanovsky, a key dissident figure and the husband of exiled opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, following a rare visit by a senior US official, Tikhanovskaya\u2019s team announced on Saturday. <\/p>\n
Tikhanovsky, a popular blogger and activist who was jailed in 2020, arrived in Vilnius, Lithuania, alongside 13 other political prisoners, his wife\u2019s team said. The release came just hours after Belarusian authorities announced that authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko met with US President Donald Trump\u2019s envoy for Ukraine, Keith Kellogg, in Minsk. <\/p>\n
A video published on his wife\u2019s official Telegram account showed Tikhanovsky disembarking a white minibus, with a shaved head and broad smile. He pulled Tikhanovskaya into a long embrace as their supporters applauded. <\/p>\n
\u201cMy husband is free. It\u2019s difficult to describe the joy in my heart,\u201d Tikhanovskaya told reporters. But she added her team\u2019s work is \u201cnot finished\u201d while over 1,100 political prisoners remain behind bars in Belarus. <\/p>\n
Tikhanovsky was jailed after announcing plans to challenge Lukashenko in the 2020 election. Following his arrest, his wife ran in his stead, rallying large crowds across the country. Official results of the election handed Lukashenko his sixth term in office but were denounced by the opposition and the West as a sham. <\/p>\n
As unprecedented protests broke out in the aftermath of the vote, Tikhanovskaya left the country under pressure from the authorities. Her husband was later sentenced to 19 1\/2 years in prison on charges of organizing mass riots. <\/p>\n
Other prominent dissidents remain in Belarusian jails, among them Nobel Peace Prize winner Ales Bialiatski, a human rights advocate serving a 10-year prison sentence on charges widely denounced as politically motivated. Also behind bars is Viktor Babaryka, a former banker who was widely seen in 2020 as Lukashenko\u2019s main electoral rival, and Maria Kolesnikova, a charismatic leader of that year\u2019s mass protests. <\/p>\n
Released alongside Tikhanovsky was longtime Radio Free Europe\/Radio Liberty correspondent Ihar Karnei, the US government-funded broadcaster confirmed. Karnei, who had also worked with prominent Belarusian and Russian newspapers, had been serving a three-year service on extremism charges he rejected as a sham. <\/p>\n
RFE\/RL\u2019s Belarusian service had been designated extremist in the country, a common label handed to anyone who criticizes Lukashenko\u2019s government. As a result, working for it or spreading its content has become a criminal offense. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe are deeply grateful to President Trump for securing the release of this brave journalist, who suffered at the hands of the Belarusian authorities,\u201d the broadcaster\u2019s CEO Stephen Capus said Saturday in a press release. <\/p>\n
Karnei was detained several times while covering the 2020 protests. Unlike many of his colleagues, he chose to stay in Belarus despite the ensuing repression. He was arrested again in July 2023, as police raided his apartment seizing phones and computers. <\/p>\n
Belarus also freed an Estonian national who had set up an NGO to raise funds for Belarusian refugees. According to the Estonian Foreign Ministry, Allan Roio was detained last January, and sentenced to 6 1\/2 years in prison on charges of establishing an extremist organization. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Belarus has freed Sergey Tikhanovsky, a key dissident figure and the husband of exiled opposition…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":18169,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18168","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18168","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18168"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18168\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18169"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18168"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18168"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailywashingtoninsider.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18168"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}