Mikalai Statkevich was fed through a tube for three weeks in intensive care
«It turns out he was in the same colony in Hlybokaye from which he was taken in September,» Marina Adamovich told «Novaya Gazeta Europa».
Mikalai Statkevich at the Lithuanian-Belarusian border on September 11, 2025.
«Mikalai said that just as he was taken from the colony with a bag over his head, so too on the way back, from the border to the colony, with the same bag over his head and his hands tied. I wrote there, to the colony. I went there three times in these months. And no one told me anything, gave no answer to my inquiries. But he was there all this time.
Mikalai suffered a heart attack on January 21, and that same evening he was taken to Minsk. Mikalai says that doctors truly did everything possible to save his life: three weeks in intensive care, feeding through a tube,» — the politician's wife said.
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The release of Mikalai Statkevich became known yesterday, when his photos appeared at home in Minsk.
The presidential candidate in the 2010 elections was detained on May 31, 2020, while on his way to Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya's rally in Kamarouka.
On December 14, 2021, at a closed trial in Homiel, he was sentenced to 14 years in a special regime penal colony on charges of organizing mass riots. Along with him, other well-known opponents of the authorities were also convicted. He served his sentence in a colony in Hlybokaye, spending the last years incommunicado.
In 2020, he received the Andrei Sakharov Award.
On September 11, 2025, Statkevich was unexpectedly released along with 51 other political prisoners, and they tried to forcibly deport him to Lithuania. Statkevich, however, refused to cross the border and remained in Belarus. After Lukashenka's security forces took him away, nothing was known about his fate.