Journalist Andrzej Poczobut freed from prison in Belarus in US-brokered swap deal

The Polish-Belarusian journalist Andrzej Poczobut, the 2025 Sakharov prize winner, has been freed after five years in a Belarusian penal colony as part of a US-brokered multi-country swap deal. His release has been confirmed by Poland’s prime minister, Donald Tusk, who posted a picture of him on social media, saying : “Andrzej Poczobut is free! Welcome to your Polish home, my friend.” The release comes as part of a broader attempt to bring Belarus closer to the west, after the US secured the release of 123 prisoners including the Nobel peace prize winner Ales Bialiatski and the opposition figure Maria Kalesnikava late last year and removed some sanctions, including on Belarusian potash, a key export. Poczobut – a prominent Polish community activist in Belarus and a journalist for Poland’s newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza – was detained by the Belarusian authorities in 2021. He was sentenced to eight years in a penal colony after a process widely condemned as a politically motivated attempt to silence the regime’s critics. In recent years, there were growing warnings about his deteriorating health, with a UN-mandated report published last month sounding alarm over “prolonged solitary confinement” and “denial of essential medical care” in the prison he was in. The release is part a US-brokered prisoner exchange involving several other countries: Belarus, Kazakhstan, Moldova, Poland, Romania, Russia and Ukraine. …