As the bus crossed into Lithuania, Mikola Dziadok, newly freed after five punishing years behind bars in Belarus, shouted: “God bless America.”
It was an unlikely cry from a committed anarchist and journalist who had spent almost half of his adult life behind bars for defying Alexander Lukashenko’s regime.
“I was so happy. At that moment, I loved the entire American administration. Only at that moment, of course,” he said with a grin in a Vilnius cafe, his hair still cropped from prison.
Dziadok, 37, was among 52 political prisoners released and deported to exile in neighbouring Lithuania earlier this month – one of the largest such pardons in Belarus’s post-Soviet history, and the latest ploy by Lukashenko, the shrewd authoritarian who has ruled Belarus for decades and close ally of Vladimir Putin, in his effort to improve relations with the Trump administration.
But the prison release, which followed earlier ones, including that of the opposition leader Syarhei Tsikhanouski in June, has come with strings attached. And Lukashenko’s prisons remain packed, with 1,168 political detainees still behind bars, according to the human rights group Viasna – a number that includes its founder, the Nobel peace prize laureate Ales Bialiatski.
Through a series of diplomatic overtures, Lukashenko has nudged Belarus out of years of western isolation that followed his crackdowns at home and support for Russia’s war in Ukraine. Washington’s decision to ease its first sanctions in response to the prisoner release, along with Trump’s hint of a possible meeting with Lukashenko, marked a tangible victory for a leader long treated as a pariah in the west.
But critics now say Lukashenko is wielding political prisoners as bargaining chips – trading their freedom for international concessions while continuing repression at home.
While welcoming Trump’s efforts, several of those released said they were acutely aware of the trade-off.
“The most important thing is not to substitute the liberation of the country [from Lukashenko] with the release of political prisoners,” said Sergei Sparysh, a 39-year-old activist from the Narodnaya Hramada party freed in the same deal.
In an interview in Vilnius, he stressed that the Belarusian authorities had no intention of easing their clampdown on dissent. “Fifty people were freed, but then about 50 new people were imprisoned. What is the point of this? They release us now, and then Trump will bargain over these 50 new people,” he shrugged.
The more than 1,000 political detainees also include Maria Kolesnikova, the musician turned opposition leader who rejected exile by tearing up her passport at the border. Observers say freeing them all at once would strip Lukashenko of leverage.
The repression that filled those cells began during the widely disputed presidential election of August 2020, when hundreds of thousands of Belarusians took to the streets to demand Lukashenko’s exit.
Dziadok and Sparysh were swept up in that wave of arrests, alongside journalists, activists and ordinary citizens accused of “extremism” for a like, a donation or a critical comment online.
On a rare visit by western reporters to Minsk, the Guardian last week attended the trial of Ihar Ilyash, a journalist arrested in October 2024.
His wife, fellow reporter Katsiaryna Bakhvalava, is already serving an eight-year sentence for “high treason” after covering the 2020 protests. Standing motionless inside a glass cage, Ilyash was sentenced to four years on extremism charges for articles critical of Lukashenko.
Freed prisoners say they need no imagination to picture his fate: long years of isolation and inhuman conditions in what many call a prison system more brutal than Russia’s.
“Belarus is a testing ground for repression. First it happens here … then Putin does it a few years later,” said Dziadok. He described gruelling conditions inside Belarus’s prisons, where guards had devised their own chilling vocabulary for torture.
“There is the ‘disco’ – when they beat you with a stun gun while you are cuffed,” he said. “The ‘quick charge’ is a full-power shock. And the ‘lawyer’ is when guards beat you with batons. You say, ‘I want a lawyer’. They reply, ‘here’s your lawyer’.”
Survivors of the system said the torment was as much psychological as physical. “It’s impossible to truly understand it unless you have been through it,” said Sparysh, nervously turning a pen in his hands as he spoke. Midway through the interview, he paused, seeming too unwell to continue before insisting he would.
Sparysh recalled how political inmates were routinely thrown into shizo – tiny solitary punishment cells – for trivial offences such as an unbuttoned shirt or unpolished shoes.
Much of the cruelty, however, was outsourced. A system rooted in Soviet penal traditions set violent criminals against political detainees. “Ordinary criminals are used to bully political prisoners,” Dziadok said.
It is also used to isolate them, former prisoners said. Ordinary inmates were ordered not to speak to political prisoners, and those who did risked swift punishment. “It’s surreal … imagine being in a barracks with 60 people and not one dares to say a word to you,” said Dziadok.
Inmates also face medical neglect. “They don’t treat you until you collapse,” he said of Hrodna prison in western Belarus, where he spent most of his sentence.
He added that the message from the guards was clear: “The more of you die here, the better the situation in the country will be.”
He said: “In my jail alone, four prisoners died. Two from illnesses that could have been prevented. One hanged himself. And one was beaten to death by another prisoner.”
Among them was the 57-year-old artist Ales Pushkin, a cartoonist who once dumped a cart of manure outside the president’s office. “I was sitting in a nearby cell, and heard how it happened,” Dziadok said of Pushkin, who died in 2023 as a result of illness.
Some of the more grim accounts from those recently released describe how inmates with politically charged tattoos were targeted – forced to remove them themselves or held down while guards did it for them.
Lukashenko says Belarus treats inmates “normally”, adding that “prison is not a resort”.
Dziadok and Sparysh are now adjusting to life abroad. Their Belarusian passports were confiscated by the government as part of the release, leaving them without documents.
Staying politically relevant from outside the country, they admit, may prove difficult.
For others, exile was never an option. When the bus came to pick up the freed prisoners from the Lithuanian border, one person was missing.
Mikalai Statkevich, 69, a veteran opposition figure and former general repeatedly jailed for challenging Lukashenko, was brought to the border with the others. But unlike them, he refused to step across. Security footage showed him standing silently for a long moment in no man’s land between Belarus and Lithuania, before turning back to his homeland.
“He had long ago decided never to leave Belarus … A true leader must remain in the country,” said Sparysh, a longtime friend and political ally, holding up the bag of clothes Statkevich left behind when he walked back into Belarusian custody.
Statkevich has not been heard from since and is believed to be back behind bars.
His decision to remain in Belarus underscored the complex choices behind the mass releases: a moment of relief for freed prisoners and their families, but one that many say leaves the machinery of repression intact.
Still, Dziadok said he remained thankful for the US diplomacy that had secured their freedom.
“Regardless of whether I approve of Trump’s views or not, I am truly grateful that thanks to him efforts are being made to free people,” Dziadok said.
But he cautioned that the west should not be “fooled or deceived” by Lukashenko’s tactics, urging Trump to push for a full halt of political repression in Belarus.
“The most important thing right now is saving people, because people are really dying.”
