Belarusian former presidential candidate Mikalay Statkevich, who has been imprisoned for over 10 years, was released to his home in Minsk after having a stroke in prison, according to his family.
“Dear friends! Mikalay is home! He had a stroke. He is now recovering. For now, he is having problems with speech. Otherwise, everything is fine. Everything will be OK,” Statkevich’s wife, Marina Adamovich, said on Facebook on February 19.
One of the most biggest opponents to Belarus’s longtime strongman leader, Aleksandr Lukashenko, Statkevich was among a group of Belarusians freed in a major release of 52 political prisoners in September 11, 2025.
Ihar Losik, a former reporter with RFE/RL’s Belarus Service, and Alena Tsimashchuk, who had been a journalist fellow at RFE/RL’s headquarters in Prague, were also freed on that day.
Despite years of grim and sometimes sadistic conditions in prison custody as described by those released, Statkevich was the only one who refused to leave the country.
Diplomats and associates tried to dissuade the 69-year-old former presidential candidate from staying in Belarus but were unsuccessful.
A surveillance camera picture, taken on September 11, showed him sitting in a no-man’s land between the borders of Lithuania and Belarus after refusing to leave the country. The image became one of the symbols of resistance to the regime among the country’s opposition supporters.
On September 17, 2025, Lukashenko confirmed Statkevich had again been arrested but said nothing of his whereabouts.
Opposition leader Svyatlana Tsikhanouskaya — whom many Western governments maintain won Belarus’s disputed 2020 presidential election — welcomed Statkevich’s release on February 19.
“Good news! Mikalai Statkevich is alive and finally home in Minsk,” she wrote on X. “A few months ago, he was released thanks to negotiations led by US Special Envoy [John Coale]. But when Mikalai refused to be forcibly deported from Belarus, the regime sent him back to prison.”
“He suffered a stroke behind bars and can barely speak now…. Every political prisoner in Belarus must be released,” Tsikhanouskaya added.
As Statkevich has spent more than 12 of the past 20 years in prison, human rights organizations have recognized him as a political prisoner three times.
“I am ready to sacrifice my freedom to bring my country closer to freedom,” he said in an interview with RFE/RL’s Belarus Service in 2016, after almost five years in prison. “I am fighting for Belarus. I will continue this work as long as I am alive.”
