By Andrius Sytas, Felix Light and Mark Trevelyan
VILNIUS, Dec 13 (Reuters) – Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko freed 123 prisoners on Saturday including Nobel Peace Prize winner Ales Bialiatski and leading opposition figure Maria Kalesnikava after two days of talks with an envoy for President Donald Trump, a U.S. statement said.
In return, the U.S. agreed to lift sanctions on Belarusian potash. Potash is a key component in fertilisers, and the former Soviet state is a leading global producer.
The prisoner release was by far the biggest by Lukashenko since Trump’s administration opened talks this year with the veteran authoritarian leader, a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Western governments had previously shunned him because of his crushing of dissent and backing for Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Bialiatski, co-winner of the 2022 Nobel peace prize, is a human rights campaigner who fought for years on behalf of political prisoners before becoming one himself. He had been in jail since July 2021.
Also freed were Kalesnikava, a leader of mass protests against Lukashenko in 2020, and Viktar Babaryka, who was arrested that year while preparing to run against the president in an election.
U.S. officials have told Reuters that engaging with Lukashenko is part of an effort to peel him away from Putin’s influence, at least to a degree – an effort that the Belarus opposition, until now, has viewed with extreme scepticism.
Trump’s envoy, John Coale, had earlier told reporters in Minsk: “Per the instructions of President Trump, we, the United States, will be lifting sanctions on potash.”
The U.S. and the European Union imposed wide-ranging sanctions on Belarus after Minsk launched a violent crackdown on protesters following a disputed election in 2020, jailing nearly all opponents of Lukashenko who did not flee abroad.
Sanctions were tightened after Lukashenko allowed Belarus to serve as a staging ground for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
(Reporting by Andrius Sytas in Vilnius, Felix Light in Tbilisi and Mark Trevelyan in London, Editing by Timothy Heritage)
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