The New York Times Indicates Inefficiency Of Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaia's Office

The inactivity of the office causes great dissatisfaction.

While Belarus played a role in the sweeping prisoner exchange last week, none of the 1,400 people classified as political prisoners in the country by a human rights group were freed, write Andrew Higgins and Tomas Dapkus for The New York Times.

The biggest East-West prisoner exchange since the Cold War last week was hailed as a triumph by both Washington and Moscow. But it left the family and friends of a jailed Nobel Prize winner and other imprisoned opponents of Lukashenka, the ruler who has been holding power in Belarus for 30 years, puzzled and bitterly disappointed.

Belarus was involved in the swap, releasing a German citizen who had been sentenced to death. However, unlike Russia, the Belarusian authorities did not release any of the prisoners recognized by the Viasna Human Rights Center as political prisoners.

“We are very saddened that not a single Belarusian was released,” said Alena Masliukova, an activist with Viasna. She added that “there are more political prisoners in Belarus than in Russia, but there was less pressure on Belarus to release political prisoners.”

That may be because Belarus, which has fewer than 10 million people and has been led since 1994 by Lukashenka, is widely viewed as a Russian puppet state and, despite a sustained reign of terror, commands little attention in its own right.

But the absence of Belarusian prisoners from last week’s sprawling exchange has raised questions about why opponents of Mr. Lukashenko abroad, led by Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaia, the self-styled national leader of Belarus, have failed to make the release of prisoners a priority for the United States and other Western governments.

That stands in stark contrast to Russia’s opposition movement in exile, which has campaigned vigorously to have Russian dissidents freed.

Tsikhanouskaia’s office in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, sent a message to Western diplomats last week acknowledging that “there is a perception among part of the society and experts that we have not done enough to prioritize the issue of Belarusian political prisoners to ensure their inclusion” in the prisoner swap. That, it said, was not true.

Among those in prison in Belarus is Tsikhanouskaia’s husband, Siarhei Tsikhanouski.

Also left out of the prisoner swap was Ales Bialiatski, a founder of Viasna who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022. He is serving a 10-year sentence in Belarus for his role in huge, nationwide street protests in 2020, which were triggered by public fury over Lukashenka’s claim that he had won a landslide victory — his sixth in a row — in a fraud-tainted election.

Bialiatski's wife, Natallia Pinchuk, lives in Norway. As part of the exchange, this country released a Russian spy who had masqueraded as a Brazilian. She said it “was heartbreaking for me and for imprisoned Belarusians that none of them was released.” She added that she had had no idea a swap was being negotiated until it took place.

Poland, which, as part of the swap, released a Spanish-Russian journalist arrested in 2022 as a spy near the Polish Ukrainian border, also came away empty-handed. Lukashenka resisted Polish demands to release Andrzej Poczobut, an ethnic Polish journalist and one of the leaders of the Polish diaspora, who was sentenced last year to eight years on national security charges.

“Why is the release of Belarusian political prisoners not a priority for the West?” asked Tattiana Khomich, the sister of Maryia Kalesnikava. Kalesnikava helped lead the 2020 protests and, after being abducted by security forces, tore up her passport to avoid being bundled out of Belarus.

That act of brave defiance made her a hero for many Belarusians and, in the event of her eventual release from prison and forced exile in the West, a potential leader of the fractious opposition movement in exile and rival to Ms. Tsikhanouskaia.

Ms. Tsikhanouskaia, a presidential candidate in the disputed 2020 election, fled to Lithuania soon after declaring herself the victor in the vote. She has struggled in exile to dent the Belarusian dictator’s brutal grip on power and his increasingly close alliance with and dependence on Putin.

Lukashenka has resisted sending Belarusian troops into Ukraine but allowed his country to be used as a staging ground for Russia’s military and, with help from Russian security forces, has snuffed out internal dissent.

Tsikhanouskaia’s supporters have claimed to have been behind attacks on a Russian warplane [the operation in Machulishchy - Ed.] and railway lines inside Belarus, but these were nearly all actually carried out by Ukrainian security services. There is no evidence that the government-in-exile she leads has a significant following inside Belarus.

For some, the absence of Belarusian political prisoners from the swap highlighted the travails of an exile movement that has been supported with millions of dollars in Western aid but had trouble making its voice heard either inside Belarus or in Western capitals.

Tsikhanouskaia lost her main advocate inside the U.S. government in 2022 when the tenure of Ambassador Julie Fisher, who had served since 2020 as the U.S. special envoy for Belarus, ended. Based in Vilnius herself, she had been a loud champion of the exiled Belarus opposition.

In an effort to rally support behind Tsikhanouskaia, more than 200 exiled Belarusian activists gathered in Vilnius last week and declared her “national leader” until Belarus holds free and fair elections, or she steps aside.

That gathering did not include supporters of several jailed opposition leaders who are at odds with Tsikhanouskaia. These include Viktar Babaryka, a popular former banker who has been in jail since 2020 and, according to some analysts, would have the best chance of defeating Lukashenka in a free election. The Belarusian KGB security service arrested him shortly before the 2020 vote to prevent him from running.

Artsiom Schraibman, a Belarusian political analyst now living in Warsaw, lamented that “Belarusian democratic forces” have been “engaging in diplomacy with the West regarding Belarus for many years but have not managed to establish political prisoners as a priority issue.” That, he added, meant that prisoners in Belarus “did not become part of the agenda” before last week’s swap even though Lukashenka was involved and had agreed to release a jailed German, Rico Krieger.

While Russian activists abroad have put the fate of jailed compatriots at the center of their lobbying efforts, the Belarus opposition has focused on toppling Lukashenka.

“Unfortunately, many efforts by democratic forces in recent years have not led to the release of people. For a long time, the priority was regime change, which could lead to the release of all political prisoners,” Kalesnikava’s sister said.

Russian exiles, too, see regime change as their ultimate goal. They were mindful that this would probably take many years, and have lobbied Western governments to try to secure the release of individual prisoners. They played an important role in pushing Washington to take up the cases of jailed Russian dissidents like Vladimir Kara-Murza and Ilya Yashin. They were both released during the last exchange.

Insisting in its message to diplomats that “the issue of political prisoners remains a priority,” Tsikhanouskaia’s office asked Western governments to provide money to fund the International Humanitarian Fund for Victims of Repression in Belarus, a body set up to support former and current prisoners and their families.

But that set off grumbling in some quarters that Ms.Tsikhanouskaia’s team, which already receives lavish financial support from the West, was trying to leverage the prisoner issue to extract more money.

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