A European diplomatic staffer in Belarus was among 52 prisoners released on Thursday in a deal brokered by Washington.<\/p>\n
Under the pact, Minsk agreed to free dozens of political prisoners after the U.S. consented to lift sanctions on its national airline.<\/p>\n
Mikalai Khilo, a Belarusian member of staff at the EU\u2019s mission to Minsk, had been sentenced in January to four years in a penal colony<\/a>. Viasna, a Belgian human rights NGO that has tracked his case<\/a>, posited in the wake of his April 2024 arrest that he had been charged with insulting strongman leader Alexander Lukashenko.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A European diplomatic staffer in Belarus was among 52 prisoners released on Thursday in a deal brokered by…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":417161,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5174],"tags":[18991,110744,1111,32,2000,299,5187,1699,4582,2817,2818,12337,9899,48,2663,1199,49,1220],"class_list":["post-417160","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-eu","tag-airlines","tag-alexander-lukashenko","tag-belarus","tag-donald-trump","tag-eu","tag-europe","tag-european","tag-european-union","tag-human-rights","tag-intelligence","tag-intelligence-services","tag-missions","tag-ngos","tag-rights","tag-sanctions","tag-services","tag-united-states","tag-ursula-von-der-leyen"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115188601017166873","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/417160","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=417160"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/417160\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/417161"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=417160"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=417160"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=417160"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}