Poczobut is a Hrodna-based activist and journalist. For many years he worked with Polish media, including Gazeta Wyborcza and TVP Polonia, reporting on the situation in Belarus.
For his critical statements about Alyaksandr Lukashenka, who has ruled Belarus since 1994, he had been detained and tried previously, receiving a suspended sentence. As an activist of the
Union of Poles in Belarus (ZPB), an organization unrecognized by the Belarusian authorities and outlawed in 2005, Poczobut, who is passionate about history, devoted much of his time to, among other things, researching the history of Poles in what is today Belarus.
On March 25, 2021, the activist was detained in Hrodna after a search of his apartment, and then taken to a detention center in Minsk. Since May last year, Poczobut has been serving an eight-year prison sentence in a penal colony in Navapolatsk.
Poczobut was held in detention for a long time. First in Zhodzina and Minsk, and then in Hrodna, where he awaited a “trial” after the “investigation” was completed.
In a political trial, the authorities accused Poczobut, a citizen of Belarus and an activist of the Polish minority, of “inciting hatred,” claiming his actions toward cultivating Polishness and publishing articles in the media bore the hallmarks of “rehabilitation of Nazism”. Poczobut was also accused of calling for actions to be taken against the Belarusian state.
The first hearing was held on January 16, 2023, and the verdict was handed down on February 8. Judge Dzmitry Bubenchik, who decided to keep the trial secret, handed Poczobut a sentence of eight years in a strict regime penal colony. The appeal in the Supreme Court was a formality, the verdict was upheld, because
“Belarusian courts do not make mistakes.”
Poczobut has spent the three past years behind bars. Numerous interviewees have repeatedly stressed that he is a
“hostage of the regime,” a “special prisoner of Lukashenka”. It is known that negotiations between Warsaw and Minsk for his release have been taking place and are probably still ongoing.
Alyaksandr Lukashenka hinted that he was treating this prisoner as a political bargaining chip, for example, by saying publicly that he could be exchanged for Belarusian opposition activists who had fled the country for fear of retribution by the regime.
The Polish Foreign Ministry has
repeatedly assured that it is constantly taking steps to secure Poczobut’s release. After the verdict was announced, Poland closed border crossings with Belarus, saying explicitly that it would open it after the authorities in Minsk abandoned their political persecution of Poczobut.
Poczobut’s trial, as well as the repression against Polish organizations in Belarus, were part of the Minsk regime’s confrontational policy towards Poland, which intensified after the
wave of mass protests against the rigged 2020 Belarusian presidential elections in Belarus, and even further after Russia launched its full-scale war against Ukraine. Then as now, Poland was presented by the Belarusian authorities as one of the main enemies of Belarus and a potential source of threat to its security.
Other arrests against Polish activists made in March 2021 included Anna Paniszewa, a Polish minority activist from Brest, as well as Irena Biernacka and Maria Tiszkowska of the banned Union of Poles in Belarus, and the organization’s head,
Angelika Borys.
Biernacka, Tiszkowska, and Paniszewa managed to leave Belarus in 2021 thanks to the efforts of the Polish authorities. However, they are unable to safely return to the country of which they are citizens. Angelika Borys was released from prison in April 2023 after charges against her were dropped. She remains in Belarus.
Poczobut had reportedly been coaxed to appeal to Lukashenka for clemency but denied to do so.
Nobel laureates’ appeal
Poczobut is just one of several thousands of political prisoners held by Lukashenka’s regime, with dozens of thousands of others having fallen victim to political repression.
“Among them are hundreds of journalists, professors, educators, doctors, musicians, workers, and students, public figures and human rights defenders, including the Nobel Peace Prize laureate,
Ales Bialiatski,” the
“Open letter from Nobel laureates to EU leaders to take immediate measures for the release of political prisoners in Belarus” explains.
As the authors of the letter explained, “Europe has not seen a humanitarian catastrophe related to political repression on such a per capita scale as in Belarus” in decades.
They call on governments of all EU countries to take steps that will pressure Minsk into stopping the repressions and releasing all political prisoners held by the regime. But they particularly appeal to the Polish government.
“Poland, as a neighboring country to Belarus, has unique and effective leverage for such action. For example, the
temporary suspension of regular rail freight shipments to the EU from Belarus, including transit from Russia and China, is one such effective leverage,” the letter reads, stressing that
commercial interests “cannot outweigh the issues of their national security and their duty to save innocent people being victimized in Belarus,” as well as the problem of oppression of national minorities.
Among the
28 Nobel laureates who have signed the letter as of the publication of this article, are Svetlana Alexievich, Belarusian laureate of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature; Dmitry Muratov, Russian co-founder publisher and former editor-in-chief of Novaya Gazeta, who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021; and Oleksandra Matviichuk, head of Ukraine’s Center for Civil Liberties, who was one of the co-recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022.
Among the famous Nobel laureates is also South African writer John Coetzee (2003), as well as a host of winners in other categories, such as medicine, economics, chemistry, and physics.
