The human cost of dictatorship: a happy ending but this Belarusian family's life is forever changed

Siarhei Tsikhanouski was in solitary confinement in a Belarus prison for most of the past five years

It is believed to have been as much a surprise to his family as to the rest of the world. Last weekend, political prisoner Siarhei Tsikhanouski, along with 13 other people held captive in Belarusian jails, was suddenly released after five years, following secret negotiations by American diplomats.

Video footage showed him exiting a black car straight into the arms of his wife, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, who was waiting for him in Lithuania, where she has been living in exile since 2020. He has since recounted how guards had put a black bag over his head, before putting him in a minibus with other prisoners, with no idea where he was going, or why.

Mr Tsikhanouski was imprisoned in May 2020, two days after he announced his intention to stand in the Belarusian presidential elections against dictator Alexander Lukashenko, who has ruled the country since 1994. Taken under a technicality of “organising riots” and “inciting hatred”, no one knew whether his incarceration would be short-lived, or if anyone would ever see him again.

READ MORE: How an innocent trip to Belarus made me realise the fragility of press freedom

He has since been held in solitary confinement for most of the past five years. His wife had not heard any news of him at all for the past two years – until this week. Forced to sleep on bare tiles on the floor of his dark, unheated cell, he had to wake up to exercise every two hours during the night to ensure his body temperature did not drop dangerously low.

When he spoke at Sunday’s press conference, his voice sounded strange: creaky, presumably due to lack of use, with only the cell walls to speak to for so long. He said his daughter, who was just four when he was captured, had not known who he was when she was reunited with him last Saturday evening.

I can’t say I’m surprised. Half his previous weight, his head shaved and face exhausted, Mr Tsikhanouski was almost unrecognisable from the strong, smiling, affable man who became the face of opposition Belarusian politics through his popular YouTube channels.

Exiled Belarusian opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya.

I interviewed Ms Tsikhanouskaya three years ago, when I was working as world editor for The Scotsman. The war in Ukraine, when Belarus became a key ally of Russian leader Vladimir Putin, had begun six months earlier, dashing hopes of potential political change in the former Soviet nation.

On her first visit to Scotland to hold meetings with Holyrood politicians, including the then First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, I had a chance to sit down with Ms Tsikhanouskaya in a cafe on Edinburgh’s Royal Mile, where I tried to get to know the extraordinary woman who stepped fearlessly into her husband’s place after his imprisonment.

Then, she told me she was doing what she could to keep her husband’s memory alive, filling their apartment with photographs of him and constantly talking to both their daughter and the couple’s son, now 15, about their father.

Yet, watching the weekend’s footage, I couldn’t help thinking that Ms Tsikhanouskaya has changed as much as her husband in the five years he has been missing – if not more.

Exiled Belarusian opposition leader Sviatlana Tikhanovskaya (R) and her husband Siarhei Tikhanovsky, Belarusian opposition activist released from a Belarusian prison, with a photograph on Mr Tikhanovsky before he was imprisoned. | AFP via Getty Images

A former languages teacher, Ms Tsikhanouskaya had stayed at home with her children for ten years before Mr Tsikhanouski’s imprisonment. Suddenly, she found herself at the head of the pro-democracy movement in Belarus, going head-to-head with Mr Lukashenko in an election which she is widely believed to have won, with 60 per cent of the vote.

Mr Lukashenko, however, didn’t agree and she was forced to flee the country with her family, eventually setting up an opposition government in exile in Lithuania. "I was an ordinary person who didn’t care about the policy of the Belarusian government,” she told me in October 2022, as plain-clothes police officers wearing ear pieces scanned the cafe for potential threats from the next table.

“I took care of my family. I wasn’t involved in politics and didn’t want to be. I didn’t want to understand how everything works, how our foreign policy works, who are our friends and our enemies.

“Lukashenko was sure that I was doing this for fun, because who would vote for a woman? Nobody. For a housewife with no political background?”

Suddenly, she found herself meeting heads of state from across the globe, holding high-level meetings about democracy and human rights. Shortly after her husband’s release, she travelled to the Netherlands, to take part in a Nato summit at The Hague.

The couple’s reunion was not one I would expect even Mr Tsikhanouski had imagined. A couple of hours after his arrival in Lithuania, the pair were filmed hosting the other newly released prisoners at their home, with a formal press conference the next day.

Of course, he knew his wife had stood in the elections and left Belarus: until two years ago, he was receiving semi-regular visits from his lawyer. However, he cannot have envisaged the scale of her current status on the world stage.

That the woman who in her own words, stayed at home to “care for her family” until her husband’s imprisonment, is now a globally recognised politician must come as a shock.

She travels the globe, her social media accounts demonstrating the hard work and effort put into raising the profile of the plight of Belarus. She has had to sacrifice family time. She told me she often only sees her children for one day a week, a stark contrast to the time before her husband’s imprisonment, when she admits she spent “all [her] time” with them.

It is hard not to compare the couple to Russian dissident Alexei Navalny and his wife, Yulia. She has also taken on the political cause fought by her husband – against Putin. Yet the end to their story is very different: Mr Navalny died in an Arctic Circle prison over a year ago.

Mr Tsikhanouskaya has said he believes he owes his life to Mr Navalny’s plight. “When Alexei Navalny died, I thought, that’ll probably be me soon…” he said. “And then something changed. It was clear that someone at the top said, ‘Make sure he doesn’t die here. We don’t need that problem.’”

It seems like a happy ending for the Tskihanouskis – and it is. But the effects of the past five years, on both of them, will take time to play out.