Freed Belarusian opposition leader Siarhei Tsikhanouski has revealed that speaking to his wife after five years as a political prisoner left him “overflowing” with emotions.
In an exclusive interview with TVP World, Tsikhanouski described how, upon his release, he wanted two things: a cup of coffee and his wife’s phone number.
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“They found the phone and gave me the receiver. And that was it…emotions were just overflowing,” he said.
Tsikhanouski was one of the most prominent figures of Belarus’s opposition movement before being arrested five years ago after announcing that he would challenge Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko in the country’s 2020 presidential election – a vote widely considered by rights groups and observers to have been rigged.
Tsikhanouski’s wife, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, went into exile in Lithuania and took up her husband’s mantle as leader of the Belarusian opposition after a court found her husband guilty of organizing mass unrest and inciting social hatred and handed him one of the longest jail terms in modern Belarusian history at 19.5 years.
Psychological torment
Tsikhanouski was released on June 21 as part of an agreement struck between the U.S. and Belarus, which saw 14 political prisoners freed as U.S. special envoy Keith Kellogg met with Kremlin-allied Lukashenko in Minsk.
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“They put me in jail three times, and now they released me three times. The more they imprison me and release me, the more they make me popular, known. They make me a martyr, a hero. And people believe in me, and people are ready to follow me,” he said.
Tsikhanouski also talked about the psychological torment he endured during his imprisonment, saying that prison authorities would arbitrarily add time to his sentence for alleged minor infractions.
“They pressured every day. At first, they gave me 18 years, and then allegedly for bad behavior they added another 18 months… They would come into the prison cell and say it’s not clean enough here. They add 15 days at first…they add another one and a half years, two years of imprisonment. They told me there will be many extensions like that, ‘you will never get out’. And they say it to everyone.”
Tsikhanouski also said that prison guards would taunt him that nobody on the outside knew or remembered him. He was never given any letters despite receiving up to 300 letters a day in a previous stint in the same prison.
Meanwhile, the freed political prisoner expressed his gratitude to Polish President Andrzej Duda and Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski for their part in U.S. and European diplomatic efforts to secure his release, adding that he hopes to thank Prime Minister Donald Tusk personally.
‘My love, I’m free’
Tsikhanouskaya, speaking alongside her husband, told TVP World: “Hope has always been there. But for some reason, we all thought that Siarhei would be one of the last to be released because he is one of Lukashenko’s main enemies.”
“When the phone rang and I heard my husband’s voice – ‘My love, I’m free’ – that was, of course, the moment of highest happiness. I realized that soon we would see him, that the children would be able to hug their father, whom they hadn’t seen for five years,” she added.
However, Tsikhanouskaya highlighted the fact that many of Lukashenko’s political opponents remain jailed in Belarus, including Polish-Belarusian journalist and activist Andrzej Poczobut, who was arrested in 2021 and subsequently sentenced to eight years in a maximum-security penal colony after being found guilty of “inciting and instigating hatred” and “calling for actions against Belarus.”
Tsikhanouskaya told TVP World: “I am very grateful to Siarhei that, despite being physically, emotionally and morally exhausted, he immediately re-entered the struggle. He understands that people need to be pulled out of there. He has been through hell.”
“Everyone has a unique story, and every one of our heroes who is in prison must be released,” she added.
Human rights group Viasna estimates that there are over 1,100 political prisoners in Belarus.
Poland’s Solidarity movement
Asked about the pair’s decision to keep Tsikhanouskaya as head of Belarus’s government-in-exile, despite her husband’s freedom, Tsikhanouski said: “Sviatlana is perfectly suited for diplomatic work in our family. She is more calm. She is good at English compared to me.”
Meanwhile, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya compared the situation in Belarus to that of Poland’s struggle against the Communist regime in the 1980s.
She said: “The path to change can be very short or quite long, as it was with Poland’s Solidarity movement. You believed, you marched, you worked, united… and now, where are you? You are a democratic, sovereign country.”
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