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Belarus released 123 political prisoners including a Nobel peace prize laureate on Saturday after the US agreed to lift sanctions on the country’s potash exports.
The deal, announced by President Alexander Lukashenko’s press service, is the largest in a series of mass amnesties this year as Belarus seeks a rapprochement with the US under Donald Trump.
Independent human rights group Viasna said Belarus had freed its co-founder Ales Bialiatski, who shared the Nobel in 2022 with Ukrainian and Russian activists.
Viasna said several prominent leaders of protests against Lukashenko in 2020 had also been freed. Viktor Babariko, a presidential candidate jailed during that year’s campaign, and Maria Kolesnikova, a former flautist who spearheaded the protest, were among those released.
John Coale, US special envoy to Belarus, said Trump had lifted sanctions against the country’s potash industry, one of its major exports.
“As relations between the two countries normalise, more sanctions will be lifted,” Coale told reporters after meeting Lukashenko over two days in Minsk, according to state news agency Belta.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukraine’s president, said five of the freed prisoners were Ukrainian citizens. He said that Kyrylo Budanov, head of Ukraine’s Defence Intelligence Directorate, had assisted the US in facilitating the release. Along with the freed Ukrainians, 109 Belarusian citizens were transported to Ukraine on Saturday afternoon.
Belta said Lukashenko had also pardoned citizens from the US, UK, Australia, Japan, Lithuania and Latvia “recently”.
More than 1,000 political prisoners remain behind bars in Belarus, according to human rights groups.
Lukashenko, who has ruled Belarus since 1994, is one of Vladimir Putin’s closest allies in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Belarus hosted a large contingent of Russia’s initial invasion force in 2022 and struck a deal with Putin to store nuclear warheads in the country.
But the US has sought to court Lukashenko, whom Trump has called “highly respected”, in the hope that the moustachioed former collective farm boss could help to broker an end to the war in Ukraine.
The US eased sanctions against Belarusian airline Belavia in November in exchange for the release of 52 prisoners. These included Siarhei Tsikhanouski, another former presidential candidate whose wife Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya sought to challenge Lukashenko and has since led the opposition from exile.
Tsikhanovskaya told the Financial Times last month that Lukashenko was trying to “fool” the US and had no intention of moving away from Putin, whose support was crucial in cracking down on the 2020 protests.
Coale said on Saturday that Lukashenko had offered “very sound advice” on what the US should do about Russia’s war in Ukraine.
“[Lukashenko] has a long history of relations with President Putin and is in a position to offer him advice. This is very useful in the current situation. They have been friends for many years and have the level of relationship needed to discuss such matters,” Coale said, according to Belta.
Coale also relayed a personal greeting from Trump and his wife Melania to Lukashenko, in which the couple thanked the Belarusian leader for his “hospitality” and “presents”, the news agency said.
Additional reporting by Christopher Miller in Kyiv
