The sister of Maryya Kalesnikava, one of the most prominent political leaders currently jailed in Belarus, says recent months have given her hope her sibling will be released amid recent signs of increasing US engagement with Minsk.
“This is a landmark moment for all Belarusians,” Tatsiana Homich told RFE/RL’s Belarus Service on the eve of the 5th anniversary of Kalesnikava’s arrest on September 7.
“The US started negotiations in early 2025. We’ve already seen the results. Twenty people have been released, Belarussians and foreign citizens, including Syarhey Tsikhanouski,” she said.
US President Donald Trump, who surprised many by speaking to Belarus ruler Aleksandr Lukashenko by phone last month, said he believes the Eastern European nation will be releasing many of the hundreds of political prisoners it is holding.
"I believe they're going to be releasing a lot of those 1,400," Trump told reporters on September 5, adding that it could happen "in the pretty near future." He did not offer details.
Tsikhanouski was arrested as he prepared to run against Lukashenko in a 2020 presidential election.
Kalesnikava was a key campaign leader for his wife, Svyatlana Tsikhanouskaya, when she took up the campaign to oust Lukashenko after Tsikhanouski was incarcerated.
When electoral authorities reported a Lukashenko victory, mass protests swept the country amid widespread allegations that the results had been falsified.
Kalesnikava was arrested as security forces carried out a brutal and sometimes deadly crackdown.
“I’m not currently in contact with Maryya. The last message I received from her was in February — just a couple of sentences,” said Homich. “Communication hasn’t resumed: no phone calls, no lawyer or family visits, no letters.”
She added that Kalesnikava shared a prison cell with other women, following a transfer from a hospital where her father visited her in November 2024.
“At least that’s better than the isolation she had been in for a year and a half since 2023,” said Homich.
Kalesnikava was snatched from the streets of Minsk by masked men along with two staffers. Two days later, she was driven to the border where the authorities told them to cross into Ukraine.
While her colleagues crossed, Kalesnikava tore up her passport. A year later, she was sentenced to 11 years in prison on charges of conspiracy to seize power.
Assault on Democracy
Western reaction to the harsh sentences was quick, with the European Union calling them a "blatant disrespect" of human rights, while the United Kingdom decried Minsk's "assault on the defenders of democracy and freedom."
“So many political prisoners have been in jail for so long,” said Homich. “The whole crisis in Belarus has lasted 5 years now. I am living abroad, and Maryya is in prison.”
But referring to recent prisoner releases, Homich said “recent months have given me hope that more political prisoners will be released, maybe also Maryya, that hundreds will be freed.”
She also pointed to a campaign, launched earlier this year, called Release Now, that is backed by more than 20 non-governmental organizations and human rights groups. Belarussian author Svetlana Alexievich, winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize for Literature, is among those who have signed its petition.
It urges the Belarusian authorities to release what it says are “approximately 1,200 political prisoners” and calls on Western governments to engage in diplomacy on their behalf.
Exiled Belarusian human rights group, Vyasna (Spring), says that since 2020 some 330 political prisoners have been released early by the Belarusian authorities. The authorities, however, imprison more people than they release. Vyasna reported that in June, while 14 political prisoners were pardoned, 29 others were newly jailed.
"Belarus was taken hostage," Tsikhanouskaya said on August 7 at an online briefing held by the Center for European Policy Analysis, a Washington-based think-tank.
"Ahead of the anniversary (of the election), the crackdown has only intensified," she added. "The regime isn't just punishing dissent. It's trying actually to erase the memory of 2020."
Still, Homich urged Western countries to leave no stone unturned to secure prisoner releases.
“Release Now is a manifesto calling for the release of political prisoners, an appeal to European countries to act, to follow the US example,” she said.
“There are no other options at present, there are no prospects for change in Belarus, for democratic change.”
