Belarus “unilaterally” released an American woman from detention, the US Secretary of State said Marco Rubio It was announced on Sunday, when the Kremlin was organizing an election, ready to give a strongman President Alexander Lukashenko Another term apart from three decades in power.
Rubio's post on social network X identified the US citizen as Anastasia Nuhfer. It said she was detained during the tenure of former President Joe Biden, but did not specify when or why.
Rubio's statement followed the waves of releases of prisoners of Lukashenka, who was often called “the last dictator in Europe”. Belarus' oldest rights group, Viana, says more than 1,250 people remain in detention for opposing the authorities.
Opponents of Lukashenka, many of whom are in prison or exiled abroad for their relentless crackdown on dissent and freedom of speech, called Sunday's election a sham. The last election in 2020 sparked months of mass protests unprecedented in the Belarusian history.
The US State Department said later on Sunday that Nuhfer was detained in early December 2024. It says that at the beginning of this month, a consular employee from Washington was granted rare access to an American detainee in Belarus.
A former high-ranking Belarusian diplomat told AP that Nuhfer's arrest was connected to the 2020 protests, although he did not provide details. The source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to security concerns, said that Lukashenka himself offered to release the US citizen “as a gesture of goodwill”, refusing to release any Belarusian opposition and human rights defenders.
Nuhfer's release took the public and even Belarusian activists by surprise. Her name was not publicly released and was not included in the lists of political prisoners.
Pawel Sapelka of Viana's rights group said he and his colleagues were not aware of her arrest or her circumstances.
Lukashenko's support for the war in Ukraine has led to Belarus severing ties with the US and the EU, ending its game of using the West to try to win more subsidies from the Kremlin.
But Artom Shreibman, a Belarus expert from the Carnegie Eurasia Center, predicted that Minsk may try to ease its complete dependence on Russia after the elections, once again seeking to appeal to the West.
“Lukashenka's temporary goal is to use the elections to confirm his legitimacy and try to overcome his isolation, to at least start a conversation with the West about easing sanctions,” Schreibman said.
It was unclear what, if any, Minsk was asking in exchange for the release of the US citizen.