Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya was widely held to have won a contested 2020 presidential election in Belarus in which Lukashenko, the 30-year incumbent, was announced victorious. Lukashenko’s official victory led to widescale protests nationwide, which were violently suppressed, and the opposition leader subsequently fled her homeland for refuge in Poland.
Speaking at a Polish socio-political youth event on Sunday, Tsikhanouskaya expressed gratitude for Warsaw’s stance against Minsk, describing the West’s general response at the time of the 2020 election as being delayed and indecisive. In a subsequent interview with Poland’s state press agency, PAP, she argued that other countries should follow Poland’s lead.
“What Poland is doing now is wonderful, excellent, because it exerts pressure on Lukashenko’s regime and at the same time supports Belarusians,” she said. “Poland can be an example of how to treat Belarus, how to differentiate the Belarusian regime from the Belarusian nation, that the regime needs to be punished, not citizens.”
She went on to say it was important not to tar Belarus and Russia with the same brush as their situations are different, something she said Poland’s government and society understood.
She argued that while sanctions are important, they would not change the situation, as “it is people that change the situation.” In this regard, she said it is crucial to support activists in exile so they can continue their struggle.
On the subject of the war in Ukraine, Tsikhanouskaya stressed the importance of Belarus not being left out of peace negotiations and said Minsk should not only be “on the table, but at the table.”
“But where Belarus cannot be now, our democratic partners should be our voice,” she said. “Don’t forget about Belarus; Belarus is not part of Russia.”
The fate of Andrzej Poczobut
Tsikhanouskaya expressed her disappointment that a prisoner swap between Russia and various Western nations did not include any Belarusian prisoners. The swap, carried out earlier this month, was the biggest exchange of prisoners since the end of the Cold War.
She said she was absolutely certain that in the event of Belarusian prisoners being released, Polish minority activist
Andrzej Poczobut would be on the list due to Warsaw’s strong support for his case.
Poczobut, a journalist for the Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza, and a member of the Union of Poles in Belarus, is serving an eight-year sentence in a labor camp for actions deemed to threaten the state. Dozens of political prisoners were freed by Lukashenko in August, but Poczobut was not among them.
Tsikhanouskaya told PAP that Poczubut was being held in dire conditions because the regime wanted to take revenge on him for refusing to write a letter to Lukashenko requesting a pardon.
“His behavior is really heroic, but people’s health suffers in prison,” she said. “Andrzej Poczobut believes in a democratic world, in powerful democratic tools;, he believes he will be released when the dictatorship is dismantled. He’s not thinking only about himself;, he’s thinking about other political prisoners, about the independence of Belarus. He has two motherlands—Poland and Belarus.”
