WARSAW:
Belarus freed top opposition figure Sergei Tikhanovsky and more than a dozen other political prisoners Saturday following an appeal from the White House, Minsk said, a sign of warming ties between Washington and Belarus-ally Moscow.
The release came just hours after US special envoy Keith Kellogg met Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko in Minsk, the highest-profile visit of a US official to the authoritarian state in years.
Tikhanovsky’s wife Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, who took the mantle of the opposition movement after her husband’s jailing, thanked US President Donald Trump directly for brokering the deal.
European politicians and members of Belarus’s exiled opposition also welcomed the news.
The European Union hailed Tikhanovsky’s release as a “symbol of hope” and a leading activist called it an “important moment”.
Tikhanovsky, 46, had been imprisoned for more than five years.
The popular Youtuber had planned to run against Lukashenko in the August 2020 presidential election, but was arrested and detained weeks before the vote.
He was sentenced in 2021 to 18 years in prison for “organising riots” and “inciting hatred”, then to another 18 months for “insubordination”.
Svetlana — a political novice at the time of her husband’s arrest — ran against Lukashenko in his place but lost after what the opposition described as widespread falsification. She later fled Belarus.
