Trump’s envoy returns to Minsk for talks with Lukashenko on freeing political prisoners

MINSK — U.S. envoy John Coale, tasked by President Donald Trump with negotiating the release of political prisoners in Belarus, returned to Minsk on Tuesday for his first talks in six months with President Alexander Lukashenko.

Lukashenko’s administration’s official Telegram channel published a photo of Coale’s arrival in the Belarusian capital. Coale opened negotiations with Lukashenko — a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin — last year and has so far secured the release of hundreds of prisoners in exchange for easing U.S. sanctions on Belarus.

But according to the human rights group Viasna, Belarusian authorities still hold more than 900 political prisoners. Lukashenko rejects that definition, calling the convicts “lawbreakers” and “bandits.”

The Belarusian opposition in exile has welcomed Coale’s diplomacy as a vital humanitarian intervention, but accuses Lukashenko of arresting new prisoners to replace those freed. Human rights activist Ales Bialiatski, freed last year and then expelled from the country, told Reuters: “It is essentially a clean exchange. A trade is happening — hostages for sanctions relief — but this does not change the fundamental nature of the Belarusian regime.”

“The machinery of repression keeps working. Every week we see new political prisoners and new methods of repression,” Bialiatski added.

Meanwhile, United Nations experts found on Tuesday “systematic” violations of international human rights obligations at every stage of the judicial process in Belarus — arbitrary arrests, torture, denial of legal safeguards, closed trials and continued harassment of former prisoners. Belarus’s mission in Geneva did not respond to a request for comment.

Source: Reuters