Journalist Ihar Karnei was in a good mood when he set out for the store one Monday morning two years ago after a “happy” summer weekend in the country visiting friends along with his wife, Ina.
He didn’t make it far. Seconds after he stepped out of the apartment, he saw a shadow on the landing -- and was accosted by an officer of the KGB, as the main domestic security agency is still called in Belarus almost 35 years after the Soviet Union’s collapse.
“It turns out there was an ambush by the garbage chute,” Karnei told RFE/RL in an interview. “And he just shows me this little piece of paper, shoves it under my nose [and says] ‘let’s go back in. I have questions for you, and we’ll do a search.'”
After an invasive search of his apartment by several KGB men, Karnei was taken away.
“I even remember what shirt he was wearing,” Ina said. “And I was thinking that we needed to keep this moment in mind, because we didn’t know how long [Ihar would be gone]. Later, the investigator called and said he was being detained for 10 days.”
In fact, Karnei was gone for nearly two years, held in jails and prisons around Belarus -- much of the time in jam-packed cells or grueling solitude -- before he was freed last month and taken to Lithuania in the US-brokered release of 14 prisoners of authoritarian leader Aleksandr Lukashenko’s oppressive state.
Karnei, who worked with RFE/RL for over 20 years, is one of thousands of Belarusians imprisoned on what rights groups say are politically motivated charges since Lukashenko, who has tolerated little dissent in his 31-year rule, stepped up an already persistent clampdown on basic freedoms following a 2020 election that millions say he stole.
'Inhuman Conditions'
Karnei’s ordeal underscores the atmosphere of oppression and injustice that opponents and activists say pervades Belarus. It began with a stint at Akrestsina, a notorious pretrial jail in Minsk where “the conditions…are simply inhuman,” Karnei said.
He was put in a cell less than 6 square meters, and “they pack 10 people in there. We had 10 on average, and the guys said some had even more,” he said. “You just stand in that crowded bus. And so it goes for five, 10, 12 days -- all this goes on endlessly.”
Guards woke the inmates up twice nightly for a roll call, at 2 a.m. and 4 a.m., he said, adding that “it’s physically difficult to stand up because people are packed together like a jigsaw puzzle and it’s hard to get disentangled.”
Inmates stood in line to relieve themselves in full view of their cellmates, Karnei said. Meals were a rushed, nerve-wracking affair, with 1,500 people passing through the canteen in less than a hour amid a “huge commotion,” he said.
“This is the main weapon of any prisoner,” he said, holding up a crude aluminum spoon he kept from his time behind bars. "If you lose it, you will go hungry. You carry it in your pocket day and night -- something that helps you survive.”
In August 2023, a month after his arrest, Karnei learned that the case against him was related to his association with the Belarusian Association of Journalists, which the KGB branded an extremist group earlier in the year.
He was convicted of participation in an extremist group and sentenced to three years in prison in March 2024, and his sentence was extended by 10 months in December.
One of the main pieces of evidence presented against him was a statement he wrote in 1997 asking the recently formed Belarusian Association of Journalists to accept him as a member, he said. It was a detail he found somewhat absurd.
“Gentlemen, a quarter-century has passed, everything was fine for many years: The Association of Journalists was registered, operated, did not interfere with anyone.… Nobody was even interested in it before,” said Karnei, 57.
In any case, he said, during his trial and his time in prison, prosecutors and jailers focused not on the journalists’ group but on his work with RFE/RL, whose Belarus Service is known locally as Svaboda -- Belarusian for “freedom.”
“Svaboda was always mentioned, and this was a difficult factor for me,” he said, suggesting he was singled out because of the state’s false claim that “it meant that I had long since sold out, that I was following not my own will but the will that was imposed on me.”
After Akrestsina, Karnei was sent to a prison in the eastern town of Shklou. In a phenomenon that has persisted since the Soviet era, inmates convicted of “political” crimes, as opposed to violent or financial crimes, were often denied basic privileges such as meetings or even contact with relatives, use of the prison library, sports fields, or exercise machines.
“If you are a believer, you can’t go to church,” he said, while convicted “murderers, rioters, and swindlers” have access to these activities.
Also, prisoners who oppose the government were put in a compromising position when the national anthem was played at the start and end of the day. They were threatened with punishment or continued solitary confinement if they did not hold their hand to their heart as it played.
'Extremely Severe' Atmosphere
Karnei was later moved to a strict-regime prison in the southeastern city of Mazyr. The dilapidated infrastructure there made the Shklou prison seem “like Las Vegas” by comparison, but the atmosphere at Shklou was extremely severe, he said.
Minor instances of perceived disobedience were punished with stints in solitary confinement or in a cell in which there could be multiple inmates and heavier-than-normal restrictions.
Karnei faced particularly tough treatment from a deputy warden he recognized from his trial, where the jailer was one of 22 witnesses for the prosecution, he said.
Ihar and Ina Karnei and their four daughters are among the many Belarusians who have left the country since the 2020 vote, including many who fled for fear of prosecution or worse. More than 65,000 people have been arrested since that election, and many have reported being abused or tortured by officers of the state.
In January, months before his release, Karnei became the third imprisoned current or former RFE/RL journalist to be forced to appear before a state TV camera in what he called “a propaganda film for the KGB.”
The films, in which the journalists are accused of trying to “set Belarus on fire,” were aired on state TV ahead of the January 2025 presidential election.
“My nose almost froze off” during the taping of the program, which “took a long time” in wet, cold weather, said Karnei, who questioned the propaganda value of the videos.
“It should be clear to any idiot that these people are under duress -- that this is not real,” he said.
Lukashenko claimed a seventh term in the January election, which was condemned as a sham by his opponents abroad and many Western governments.
Despite a series of releases in recent months, a total of 1,175 people considered political prisoners by the rights group Vyasna were behind bars in Belarus as of July 1.
One of them is Ihar Losik, an RFE/RL journalist who was arrested just over five years ago.
Aside from being paraded before a camera for one of the propaganda programs in January, Losik has not been heard from in about two years.
