After an unexpected release from prison, Belarus’s ‘First Couple’ try to find a way to carry on

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After five years of meagre meals in his Belarusian prison cell, Siarhei Tsikhanouski began to suspect he might soon be released when the food got better.

For long stretches, the country’s most famous political prisoner was fed so little that he lost half his body weight. But this spring he was suddenly being offered things he hadn’t seen in months: meat, yogurt and butter.

On the outside, his wife Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya – the Lithuanian-based leader of the pro-democracy forces arrayed against dictator Alexander Lukashenko – had no idea what was coming until she received a cellphone call from a Belarusian number. It was her husband. “I’m at the border now. I am free,” he told her, just before crossing from Belarus to Lithuania in the company of U.S. diplomats. It was the first time Ms. Tsikhanouskaya had heard her husband’s voice since he was allowed a brief 2020 phone call from prison.

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Their June 21 reunion in the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius has unleashed a mix of powerful feelings – and introduced a new drama at the heart of the Belarusian democratic movement. It’s a movement that Mr. Tsikhanouski can claim to have helped launch, but one that has coalesced around his wife during his absence.

Mr. Tsikhanouski changed so much during his time in prison that the couple’s 9-year-old daughter didn’t immediately recognize her father. “She remembered her dad as a big, round man with a beard. When she saw me after prison, I was a slim man with no beard. My spouse had to say: ‘That’s your dad,’” Mr. Tsikhanouski recounted in an interview this week, sitting alongside Ms. Tsikhanouskaya at her office in Vilnius. “It was very emotional.”

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Mr. Tsikhanouski and Ms. Tsikhanouskaya have also had to reintroduce themselves to each other. Though they’ve been married for more than 20 years, the world went through extraordinary changes while Mr. Tsikhanouski was in prison. So did they.

When Mr. Tsikhanouski went to jail – early in the pandemic and before the start of the Russian invasion of neighbouring Ukraine – his wife was a schoolteacher and mother of two in their hometown of Gomel.

Five years later, Ms. Tsikhanouskaya is a veteran politician and diplomat, recognized by many as their country’s legitimate president-in-exile. She has addressed the European Parliament and the United Nations Security Council, and received the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought – Europe’s top human-rights award – on behalf of Belarus’s opposition movement (with her jailed husband named among the co-recipients).

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Mr. Tsikhanouski, meanwhile, spent most of the past five years in an isolation cell, deprived even of visits from his lawyer for much of that time.

“Time for myself and for Siarhei passed differently,” Ms. Tsikhanouskaya says, looking at her husband with concerned affection.

“I have a million questions for her,” Mr. Tsikhanouski says, returning the gaze.

One of those questions will be their division of roles as they jointly pursue their shared goal of toppling Mr. Lukashenko. The struggle for democracy in Belarus – a landlocked country of nine million people wedged between Russia, Ukraine and the eastern edge of NATO – was a major international issue in 2020, though the spotlight has since shifted to other crises.

It was Mr. Tsikhanouski, now 46, who set the family on this course by deciding to challenge Mr. Lukashenko’s decades-old grip on power by running as an opposition leader.

Ms. Tsikhanouskaya only entered politics as a stand-in after her husband was jailed, but Mr. Tsikhanouski now says he’s ready to follow her lead. He says he’s happy with a role he jokingly refers to as the “First Gentleman of Belarus,” but makes it clear that he doesn’t report to her. “We co-ordinate our watches,” he says with a laugh. “But I don’t work in Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya’s office.”

The dynamics are complicated enough to breed theories that Mr. Lukashenko decided to release Mr. Tsikhanouski – rather than some of the other 1,100 political prisoners the regime holds in its jails – to create turmoil in the opposition.

“They were sure that Siarhei would argue about the leadership, that he will start blaming the democratic forces and saying that we are too slow,” Ms. Tsikhanouskaya says. “The intention was to split us.”

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Others see it as a signal that Mr. Lukashenko wants to distance himself from ally Russia by showing U.S. President Donald Trump that he, unlike Russian President Vladimir Putin, is willing to make deals. Mr. Tsikhanouski’s release came after a visit to Minsk by Keith Kellogg, Mr. Trump’s envoy to Ukraine.

Mr. Tsikhanouski was a nightclub promoter until 2019, when he launched a YouTube channel featuring clips of him talking to Belarusians about the problems they faced, ranging from potholes to corruption. By the end of the year, the channel – titled A Country Worth Living In – had 140,000 subscribers.

As Mr. Tsikhanouski’s popularity grew, so did his problems. Police began stopping his vehicle as he drove around the country filming interviews, and he was repeatedly thrown into jail for 15-day stints of what’s known in Belarus as “administrative detention.” Mr. Tsikhanouski responded by hardening his attacks on the Soviet-style regime. He began referring to Mr. Lukashenko as a cockroach, and handing out bug-squishing slippers to the growing crowds at his public appearances.

On May 5, 2020, the day after he was released from another prison stint, Mr. Tsikhanouski announced he would run for president against Mr. Lukashenko, who has ruled Belarus since the country’s only free and fair election in 1994. A day after declaring his candidacy, Mr. Tsikhanouski was jailed again, a move that prevented him from legally registering as a candidate. Ms. Tsikhanouskaya, then a political novice, registered in his place.

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Mr. Lukashenko initially delighted in Ms. Tsikhanouskaya’s emergence as the leader of the opposition. He said Belarus “wasn’t ready to vote for a woman” and had Mr. Tsikhanouski jailed again on a string of charges such as “organizing riots” and “inciting hatred” that this time grew into an 18-year prison sentence. Two other leading opposition candidates, Viktar Babaryka and Valery Tsepkalo, were also barred from running. Mr. Babaryka received a 14-year jail sentence, and Mr. Tsepkalo fled into exile.

That left Ms. Tsikhanouskaya as the unified opposition candidate in the Aug. 9, 2020 election. Many Belarusians believe she won the race with upwards of 60 per cent of the vote, and consider her their country’s duly elected president. But the regime, which has complete control of the electoral process and media, announced Mr. Lukashenko had won a sixth term with an improbable 80.1 per cent of ballots cast.

Believing Mr. Lukashenko had stolen the election, Ms. Tsikhanouskaya’s supporters launched weeks of protests in Minsk and other cities. The regime responded with repression: Tens of thousands of people were arrested, and Ms. Tsikhanouskaya was forced to flee to Lithuania.

She initially seemed lost in the role of leader-in-exile. In a 2020 interview with The Globe and Mail, she conspicuously named Princess Diana, another woman trapped in circumstances beyond her control, as her political hero. But five years in the job have given her new confidence and poise.

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Where her husband gives off-the-cuff answers, heaping praise on Mr. Trump “the businessman who is good at deals” for his freedom, Ms. Tsikhanouskaya keeps her eye on the longer game. She interjects to point out that it was not just the efforts of Mr. Trump and Mr. Kellogg, but five years of Western sanctions and political pressure on the Lukashenko regime that precipitated the release of Mr. Tsikhanouski and 13 other political prisoners on June 21.

“Of course, we see these diplomatic efforts of President Trump and the U.S. administration to bring people to the roundtable. But without these five years of support from the whole democratic world, it would have been impossible,” she says, taking care to name Canada, Britain and the European Union alongside the U.S.

It’s a thrust-and-parry that repeats itself throughout an hour-long joint interview with The Globe. Ms. Tsikhanouskaya, the diplomat and politician, making sure her less-polished husband doesn’t stray too far off script.

But Mr. Tsikhanouski plans to continue speaking his mind. He says he will soon resume posting anti-regime videos on his YouTube channel, and will expand his efforts to TikTok as well. His goal, he said, is to burst the “information bubble” that Belarusians and Russians both live in, a sphere dominated by pro-regime narratives that allow Mr. Lukashenko and Mr. Putin to rule almost unchallenged.

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Mr. Tsikhanouski says he wants to reinvigorate a struggle that he clearly believes has lost some energy over the past five years. “When people meet me, they say they feel like they’re back in 2020. I reinspire them to fight for our freedom,” he says.

In doing so, Mr. Tsikhanouski makes it clear that he won’t be taking orders from his wife. “I’m going my own path. Not working against or competing with her – it’s about supporting and helping each other.” He’s already planning a solo trip to Canada and the U.S. this autumn to meet with Belarusian exiles and consult with them about next moves.

Though he sounds at times like someone relaunching a political career, Mr. Tsikhanouski, like Ms. Tsikhanouskaya, says he has no intention of running for the presidency again if and when democracy is brought to Belarus.

Both husband and wife say that the hardest part about Mr. Tsikhanouski’s sudden release has been finding time to reconnect as a family. “It’s really hard to make time for talking,” Mr. Tsikhanouski says.

“All this month, we’ve hardly seen each other, and he’s hardly seen the children,” Ms. Tsikhanouskaya agrees. She says she hopes the family can take a short vacation together soon. “We have so much to tell each other.”

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