Lukashenko frees Nobel winner Bialiatski and key Belarus opposition figures in deal with the U.S.

Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko freed 123 prisoners on Saturday including Nobel Peace Prize winner Ales Bialiatski and leading opposition figure Maria Kalesnikava after two days of talks with an envoy for U.S. President Donald Trump.

In return, the U.S. agreed to lift sanctions on Belarusian potash. Potash is a key component in fertilisers, and the former Soviet state is a leading global producer.

The prisoner release was by far the biggest by Lukashenko since Trump’s administration opened talks this year with the veteran authoritarian leader, a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Western governments had previously shunned him because of his crushing of dissent and backing for Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Bialiatski says human rights struggle will go on

Nine of the released prisoners left Belarus for Lithuania and 114 were taken to Ukraine, officials said.

Bialiatski, co-winner of the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize, is a human rights campaigner who fought for years on behalf of political prisoners before becoming one himself. He had been in jail since July 2021.

Visibly aged since he was last seen in public, he smiled broadly as he embraced exiled opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya on arrival at the U.S. embassy in Lithuania.

Bialiatski told Reuters he had spent the previous night on a prison bunk in a room with nearly 40 people, and was still getting to grips with the idea of being free.

He said the goals of the human rights struggle for which he and his fellow campaigners had won the Nobel prize had still not been realised.

“Thousands of people have been and continue to be imprisoned ... So our struggle continues,” he said in his first public comments in the three years since he won the award.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee expressed “profound relief and heartfelt joy” at his release.

Kalesnikava, a leader of mass protests against Lukashenko in 2020, was among the large group taken by bus to Ukraine.

“Of course, it’s a feeling of incredible happiness first of all: to see with your eyes the people who are dear to you, to hug them, and understand that now we are all free people. It’s a great joy to see my first free sunset,” she said in a video published by the Ukrainian Telegram channel Khochu Zhit.

It showed her embracing Viktar Babaryka, an opposition politician arrested in 2020 while preparing to run against Lukashenko in an election. Babaryka said his son Eduard was still in prison in Belarus.