Viktar Babaryka, an imprisoned would-be challenger to Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko from whom almost nothing has been heard for a year and a half, has been allowed to meet Belarusian pro-regime blogger Raman Pratasevich at his penal colony, Pratasevich wrote on Telegram on Wednesday.
The former head of a Belarusian bank, Viktar Babaryka attempted to register as a candidate in the 2020 Belarus presidential election, but had his application rejected on a technicality after being judged too great a potential threat to Lukashenko.
Babaryka, who had politically motivated charges for bribery and money laundering pressed against him shortly after his attempt to run for president and is currently serving a 14-year prison sentence, has been denied any contact with his family for a year and a half.
Pratasevich, who shared photographs and video of Babaryka taken at his penal colony in the city of Navapolatsk, said that the main purpose of his visit had been to give Babaryka “news from his relatives”.
“He looks good. We talked a lot, joked, even laughed. He remains cheerful and has lost none of his eloquence,” Pratasevich said.
A former editor of independent Belarusian news outlet Nexta and once an outspoken regime critic, Pratasevich was living in exile until his Ryanair flight from Athens to Vilnius was forced to make an emergency landing in Minsk under false pretences in May 2021 and he was arrested. He was ultimately sentenced to eight years in prison for insulting Lukashenko, but was later pardoned and is now seen as regime-compliant.
This is the second high-profile political prisoner Pratasevich has been dispatched to meet in recent months. In November, he was present when another jailed Belarusian opposition figure, Maria Kalesnikava, was allowed to meet her father in prison, the first contact she’d been allowed with her family for almost two years.
The meeting comes in the run-up to the country’s presidential election on 26 January, for which four candidates have collected the 100,000 signatures required to run against the incumbent Lukashenko, who announced his intention to run for a seventh term in February.