Six months ago, he was still behind bars in Belarus. Arrested in May 2020 and sentenced to 18 years in prison, Sergei Tikhanovsky, a well-known Belarusian opposition politician and husband of exiled democratic leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, was released in June. Now reunited with his family in Vilnius, Lithuania’s capital, he closely followed the release, on Saturday, December 13, of 123 political prisoners by the Minsk regime, in exchange for the United States lifting sanctions on potash, a crucial component of the Belarusian economy. “As a former political prisoner, I understand even better than others what they are going through,” he told Le Monde, his gaze sharp behind thin glasses.

In detention, he was “deprived of letters, phone calls and a lawyer.” “My cell was the size of this table,” he said, pointing to the furniture in front of him at the “castle” run by the Dapamoga NGO in Vilnius, where former Belarusian political detainees are welcomed and where he visits regularly. “I had no mattress, no sheets, no personal belongings. It was so cold that I had cramps. And they kept telling me: ‘You’re going to die here.'”

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