Forged in the gulag, Belarus's real first couple is reunited

Times

9 hours ago

For Belarus's most prominent political prisoner, liberation from a cockroach-infested cell after years of solitary confinement began with a bag over the head.
Siarhei Tsikhanouski, a charismatic entrepreneur and video blogger with millions of followers, was jailed in the run-up to presidential elections in August 2020 after announcing that he would challenge Aleksander Lukashenko, the country's dictator.
In his absence his wife, Sviatlana, a stay-at-home mother with no political experience, stood instead, and was widely seen as the rightful winner of the subsequent rigged election in which Lukashenko declared victory. Faced with jail and separation from her two young children, she went into exile in neighbouring Lithuania.
Then last month the couple's life took another dramatic twist. As Tsikhanouski was paying a rare visit to the exercise yard on June 20, a guard unexpectedly led him back to his cell. 'He told me to pack my things and gave me two minutes,' he said. 'Then they took me to another cell, put a bag over my head, handcuffed me and threw me into a car.'
The men in the cell were members of the KGB, as the Belarusian security service is still known, who later bundled Tsikhanouski into a minibus that took him and 13 others who had fallen foul of the regime towards Lithuania.
When they arrived at the frontier at about 11am the next day, a different group of men boarded the bus. 'They said: 'Take off the bags. You are now under the protection of American diplomacy. You will be given water and medical care.''
Tsikhanouski's first request was for coffee and a mobile to call his wife, who was surprised to see a Belarusian number flash up on her phone. Sviatlana knew that a prisoner release was about to happen but doubted her husband would be among those freed.
'He is considered to be the biggest enemy of Lukashenko and I was sure that he would be released only among the last of the political prisoners,' she said. 'Joy overwhelmed me. I didn't know what to do.'
Sviatlana was nevertheless shocked by her husband's appearance when he emerged from the minibus a few hours later near the American embassy in Vilnius and hugged her. Once weighing more than 21st, he was now below 13st and in poor health for a man of 46. 'If I had just been walking past him on the street rather than getting out of the bus, I don't think I would have recognised him,' she said.
The pair make a slightly unlikely couple as they sit in a meeting room in the anonymous block on the edge of Vilnius that has become one of two bases for the Belarusian opposition, who are split between the Lithuanian capital and Warsaw.
Tsikhanouski's cheeks are sunken and his hair, which was shaved to the skull in jail, has barely grown back. His red T-shirt hangs loosely off him. A different man from the robust figure in family photographs, he talks quickly, as if he is making up for time lost in jail — especially during the final two years and three months, when he was denied contact with the outside world.
By contrast, Sviatlana, 42, his wife of just over two decades, looks the part of the assured stateswoman she has become over the past five years, with her neat black bob, elegant pink jacket and perfectly manicured nails.
As we speak, she flips effortlessly between Russian and the English she learnt when she was sent aged 12 on a trip to Ireland for children from parts of Belarus affected by the disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine nine years earlier.
Security for our meeting is tight. Aides are still reeling from an interview the couple gave earlier in the week to two young men claiming to be journalists who asked strange, provocative questions apparently intended to drive a wedge between them and their Lithuanian hosts.
They called the police, who found that the men had been hired for $100 over Telegram, the messaging app, presumably by the KGB.
The prisoners' release was part of a US-brokered deal under which Lukashenko, who has run Belarus since 1994, was rewarded with a meeting the same day with Keith Kellogg, Donald Trump's special envoy for Ukraine, that he could show off on Belarusian state television. More prisoners are expected to be released next month, although in the meantime another 28 have been detained.
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Yet three week later, it remains unclear why the Belarusian leader chose to include the man who mocked him so mercilessly in his videos among the initial 14 — most of whom had foreign passports — rather than any of the country's estimated 1,100 other political prisoners, who are thought to include two Britons, whose names have not been released.
Among those still held is Maria Kolesnikova, a flautist turned opposition activist who was one of a pair of women working with Tsikhanouskaya on her election campaign. Veronika Tsepkalo, the other woman, fled abroad to avoid arrest.
One theory is that Lukashenko may believe that by releasing Tsikhanouski, a larger-than-life figure, he will provoke disagreement between the couple, and the opposition as a whole, over who is now the boss.
Tskihouskaya aims to prove them wrong. Her husband, though 'a natural leader', will settle into the role of 'first gentleman', she believes. 'He fully respects, understands and accepts that I am the president-elect of Belarus. I don't see any competition between us.'
I turn to Tsikhouski for affirmation. 'By my nature, I can't do diplomatic work like my wife,' he admits. 'She's more calm, more practical and has the experience that I don't have.' He has instead resumed his vlogging career. 'My aim is to take concrete steps to make this regime collapse.'
Franak Viacorka, Tsikhanouskaya's chief of staff, thinks that Lukashenko has badly miscalculated, just as he did when he allowed her to run against him in 2020, deriding her as 'this little girl'.
While Tsikhanouski was in jail, she had reason to temper her words and actions out of concern over what the regime might do to her husband. 'Now they don't have this leverage any more,' said Viacorka.
As a couple, they must process their divergent experiences of the past five years. 'I had to sleep on an iron bed,' Tsikhanouski said. 'There was no mattress, blanket, pillow or anything.' Besides the cockroaches, there were mice and rats, which crawled up the pipes. He and his wife wrote letters but were allowed only one brief phone call.
Then in March 2023, for reasons that were not explained, Tsikhanouski was placed completely incommunicado. 'It was hard not to have any news about relatives and friends, not to receive letters and phone calls, or meet my lawyers,' he said. 'I was not even allowed a priest to confess or receive communion.'
Conditions improved after the death in February 2024 of Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader, in a Siberian labour camp. Tsikhanouski's jailors appear not to have wanted to lose him too, especially after he managed to convince them his health was worse than it really was — which may have helped secure his release.
All this time, his wife was left alone to look after the children, while pursuing a career on the world stage that she never sought or prepared for, meeting the likes of Joe Biden, Emmanuel Macron and Boris Johnson, who 'adopted' her husband after he was jailed.
Initially she told her son Karnei, who was then aged seven, and her daughter, Ahniya, then four, that their father was away on a business trip.
'Then, as it became more and more obvious that it might take a while, I told them the truth: that their dad was a hero who 'wanted a better life for you in Belarus. He was sent to jail for this'. And they've known ever since.'
She urged them not to tell their friends at their Russian-speaking school. A few days after Tskihanouski's release, Ahniya, who had not at first recognised her father, asked her mother if she could tell people he was back. 'It was very important for her to be able to say she now had a father,' she said. Her son, meanwhile, was relieved he was no longer the only man in the house. 'It had been such a weight on him.'
Even now, for security reasons, Tsikhanouskaya advises the children not to reveal the identity of their parents. 'They are within the risk zone,' she said.
The pair are now looking forward to spending time together with their children. What comes next for Belarus is less clear.
Lukashenko rode out the biggest protests in the country's history after the election in 2020, which at one point drew 200,000 people on to the streets. This January he won a seventh consecutive term with an implausible 87 per cent that will take him to 2030, when he will be 75.
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'All these years, Belarus has been like a big gulag,' Tsikhanouskaya said. 'Lukashenko is a dictator, he intimidates people and repressions have never stopped, even for a single day.
'But the situation has changed for him. He realises that during these five years he did not manage to persuade Belarusians to like him again, love him again or trust him again.' Lukashenko also allowed Vladimir Putin to drag Belarus into a supporting role in his war against Ukraine, which has gone down badly with his people.
The old guard, known as 'bisons', who have been with the former Soviet-era state farm boss since he was elected as the new country's first president, remain loyal. But younger members of his inner circle are beginning to lose faith and are leaking information to the opposition, such as details of sanctions busting, which they dutifully pass on to their Western allies.
Rather than oust Lukashenko through an uprising, the couple hope to encourage these waverers to join a national dialogue — similar to the one that ended Communism in Poland in the late 1980s. 'We are not threatening to hang them from the streetlamps,' she said. 'We tell them that Lukashenko will die one day and they have to think about themselves.'
Encouraged by Kellogg's visit, Tsikhanouskaya and her supporters are looking to America to make this happen. Although the couple have yet to talk to President Trump, they would like to meet him — if only to thank him for Tsikhanouski's release.
'It's very difficult for Trump to deal with Russia, but Belarus is like low-hanging fruit for him,' she said. 'The Belarusian people are united around the idea of change. Trump has the power and leverage to bring it about.'