“Only the strength of the American state fundamentally changed the Belarusian authorities’ approach to releasing Andrzej Poczobut. It was the Americans who negotiated the ‘five for five’ package,” announced Marcin Przydacz, Head of the International Policy Bureau at the Chancellery of the President.
The release of Andrzej Poczobut
On Tuesday, April 28, a prisoner exchange took place on the Poland-Belarus border under a “five for five” formula, in which the authorities in Minsk released three Polish citizens and two Moldovan nationals. One of those freed was Andrzej Poczobut, a journalist and activist of the Polish minority in Belarus, who had been imprisoned since 2021.
In February 2023, the regime of Alexander Lukashenko sentenced Poczobut to eight years in a high-security penal colony. He was found guilty of allegedly “inciting hatred” and “calling for actions against state security”. He served his sentence, among other places, in the harsh prison in Novopolotsk.
The U.S. envoy for Belarus, John Coale, stressed that “Andrzej was always at the top of the list of people he sought to free.”
“The strength of the American state changed the Belarusians’ approach”
Marcin Przydacz, Head of the International Policy Bureau at the Chancellery of the President, pointed out that “it was the Americans who negotiated the five-for-five package.”
“Of course, the Polish services later carried it out operationally, but it was American involvement that led to the release, and Andrzej Poczobut knows this very well, because the Belarusians themselves told him in prison that ‘you are being released because the Americans applied pressure'” – the politician emphasized.
He recalled that both the current and the previous Polish governments had made efforts to secure Poczobut’s release, however, in his opinion, “only the strength of the American state – resulting from the meeting on September 3 at the White House between Karol Nawrocki and Donald Trump – fundamentally changed the Belarusians’ approach.”