Exclusive: Nobel laureate freed by Trump urges hard line in new Belarus talks

Ales Bialiatski, the Belarusian human rights activist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate freed by President Trump, is grateful for the U.S. intervention that saved his life and hundreds of other political prisoners.

But he is also urging the administration to demand greater concessions from the country’s dictator Alexander Lukashenko in exchange for U.S. sanctions relief, ahead of an expected trip to Minsk this month by Trump’s special envoy to Belarus, John Coale.

Belarusian human rights activists and the diaspora are waiting with “excitement and trepidation,” Bialiatski, 63, said in an interview with The Hill on Thursday.

Bialiatski, founder of the celebrated human rights organization Viasna, was in Washington, D.C., to accept the Democracy Service Medal from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) — the private foundation created and funded by Congress to promote democracy abroad. Trump has tried to defund the NED. 

While Coale’s diplomacy has succeeded in securing the release of hundreds of political prisoners from Belarus in exchange for U.S. sanctions relief and apparent access to a GLP-1 diet drug, the regime has replaced those freed with more political prisoners. 

Lukashenko, in power for more than three decades, has intensified crackdowns on those who support Ukraine in the face of Russia’s full-scale war. Those arrested include independent journalists, academics and people targeted for their sexual and gender orientation. About 900 people are described as political prisoners. 

Any further U.S. sanctions relief should only take place in exchange for the release of all political prisoners and ending unjust detainments, Bialiatski said.

“It’s important to stop the repressions. If the repressions continue, the carousel of prisoners out, and then others in, will continue, and the situation will remain grave,”........

© The Hill