Lukashenko pardons 15 more prisoners in run-up to Sunday’s Belarusian election

Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko has pardoned 15 unnamed prisoners days ahead of Sunday’s presidential election, state news agency BELTA reported on Friday, as Belarusians prepared for another rigged victory that will hand Lukashenko his seventh consecutive term in office.

Eight of those pardoned were convicted of “extremist crimes”, a charge often used by the Belarusian government to jail political opponents, while the other seven were jailed for drug offences, according to BELTA, which quoted a presidential spokesperson calling each pardon “an act of clemency, a chance to return to normal life and become a law-abiding member of society”.

Early voting has already begun in the Belarusian election, which has been written off as a sham in advance by much of the international community, with an entirely predictable outcome expected on Sunday.

The country’s exiled opposition has indicated that it doesn’t expect similar protests to those that took place in 2020 after Sunday’s election results. Belarusian opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, who ran against Lukashenko in 2020 but was forced into exile in the months after the election, has not called on Belarusians to take to the streets on Sunday, urging them “to keep safe until the real moment of possibility” in an interview with the BBC.

While his ongoing use of repression suggested that Lukashenko was “afraid”, Tsikhanouskaya said, she conceded that signs of imminent political change in the country in the short term were thin on the ground. “People live in constant fear, and the regime is now intensifying the repression,” she said.

Following a wave of mass protests in the country after the contested 2020 election in which Lukashenko claimed to have won a landslide, Belarus saw a crackdown of unprecedented violence on dissenting voices, with hundreds of people imprisoned on trumped-up charges and thousands forced to flee the country to avoid arrest.

In a seemingly major policy change, Lukashenko issued hundreds of pardons for political prisoners last year and human rights centre Viasna estimated on Friday that at least 258 people had gone free over the past year.

However, it was also keen to stress that the number of political prisoners in Belarus remained “consistently high”, with 1,246 people in the country currently serving sentences for political crimes, while the number of politically motivated arrests continues to rise.