Human rights campaigner Ales Bialiatski fought for decades on behalf of political prisoners in Belarus, earning the Nobel Peace Prize but paying the cost of his own freedom.
The Nobel award in 2022 made Mr Bialiatski a globally recognised symbol of resistance to the authoritarian rule of president Alexander Lukashenko, a close ally of Russia’s Vladimir Putin who during his three decades in power has crushed all opposition in the former Soviet state of nine million people.
Mr Bialiatski’s release on Saturday along with 122 other prisoners, following negotiations with an envoy for US president Donald Trump, marked Mr Lukashenko’s most significant move so far in a strategy of re-engaging with Washington to seek the lifting of economic sanctions.
The wiry, silver-haired Mr Bialiatski (63) was freed just three days after exiled opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya attended this year’s Nobel ceremony carrying a portrait of him “to highlight that this wonderful person is still in prison”.
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Mr Bialiatski was arrested in 2021 as part of a crackdown on mass protests that erupted after Mr Lukashenko was declared the winner of a presidential election the previous year that the opposition accused him of stealing.
While other dissidents fled the country for their own safety, Mr Bialiatski decided to stay.
“He knew all the risks, he was very well aware,” his wife Natallia Pinchuk told Reuters in October 2022 on the day he was awarded the Nobel Prize along with Russian rights group Memorial and Ukraine’s Center for Civil Liberties.
“There were suggestions he should leave. His colleagues were arrested. And he said on principle he was responsible for them and he couldn’t leave in view of this grave situation. How could he leave when they were locked up?”
Receiving the prize on her husband’s behalf in Oslo that December, Ms Pinchuk said Mr Bialiatski dedicated it to “millions of Belarusian citizens who stood up and took action in the streets and online to defend their civil rights”.
In April 2023, Bialiatski was sentenced to 10 years in a penal colony after being found guilty of financial and smuggling charges related to the funding of Viasna, the rights organisation that he founded. He denied the accusations, insisting that they were politically motivated.
Mr Lukashenko pardoned the prisoners after two days of talks with Mr Trump’s special envoy for Belarus, John Coale.
Exiled human rights centre Viasna said those freed on Saturday included Maria Kalesnikava, a flute player who became one of the public faces of pro-democracy protests and was jailed for 11 years in 2021.
Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on X that five Ukrainian citizens were among those freed in the US-brokered deal.
The announcements follow Mr Trump’s push to rebuild ties with the authoritarian Mr Lukashenko, who allowed Russian troops to invade Ukraine from Belarusian territory in 2022. Washington is to lift sanctions on the country’s potash industry.
Potash is one of Belarus’s key exports and its only abundant mineral resource, with Belaruskali, Russia’s Uralkali and North American producers Nutrien and Mosaic the four largest global suppliers. – Reuters, Bloomberg
