The Polish-Belarusian journalist Andrzej Poczobut, the 2025 Sakharov prize winner, has been freed after five years in a Belarusian penal colony as part of a US-brokered multi-country swap deal.
His release has been confirmed by Poland’s prime minister, Donald Tusk, who posted a picture of him on social media, saying: “Andrzej Poczobut is free! Welcome to your Polish home, my friend.”
The release comes as part of a broader attempt to bring Belarus closer to the west, after the US secured the release of 123 prisoners including the Nobel peace prize winner Ales Bialiatski and the opposition figure Maria Kalesnikava late last year and removed some sanctions, including on Belarusian potash, a key export.
Poczobut – a prominent Polish community activist in Belarus and a journalist for Poland’s newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza – was detained by the Belarusian authorities in 2021. He was sentenced to eight years in a penal colony after a process widely condemned as a politically motivated attempt to silence the regime’s critics.
In recent years, there were growing warnings about his deteriorating health, with a UN-mandated report published last month sounding alarm over “prolonged solitary confinement” and “denial of essential medical care” in the prison he was in.
The release is part a US-brokered prisoner exchange involving several other countries: Belarus, Kazakhstan, Moldova, Poland, Romania, Russia and Ukraine. Tusk said it was “the finale of a two-year complicated diplomatic game, full of dramatic twists and turns”.
The talks with Belarus’s authoritarian leader, Aleksandr Lukashenko, often called “Europe’s last dictator”, were led by the US special envoy to Belarus, John Coale, who confirmed that three Poles and two Moldovans were released as part of the swap.
Speaking at a press conference in Warsaw, he said that “basically an argument with Lukashenko is, what are you getting out of this?”
“It hurts you internationally and if Belarus wants to join the family of nations, this kind of things have to stop. If you want to put people into prison for good reason, great, that’s your business, but not for these types of crimes,” he said.
Coale said he was planning to go back to Belarus in “two or three weeks” for further talks with the Belarusian regime.
“The United States has a lot to do on this issue, there’s 800 to 900 political prisoners left to get out of Belarus, and we haven’t stopped our work at all until we get every last one of them,” he said.
Poland’s president, Karol Nawrocki, credited by Coale for his role in the swap, thanked the US president, Donald Trump, “for bringing out the release of our compatriot”.
Separately, the foreign minister, Radosław Sikorski, said Poczobut’s release was a symbol of Poland’s commitment to look after Poles abroad and to the freedom of the media.
He also praised the US-Polish relationship, stressing the exchange would not have happened without the US involvement, and thanked Trump.
Russian state media reported that a jailed Russian archaeologist and historian, Alexander Butyagin, wanted by Ukraine for excavations in Russian-occupied Crimea, was released by Poland as part of the swap.
In 2025, Poczobut was awarded the European parliament’s Sakharov prize for freedom of thought, with the body’s president, Roberta Metsola, hailing him and co-winner Mzia Amaglobeli from Georgia as “two journalists whose courage shines as a beacon for all who refuse to be silenced”.
“Both have paid a heavy price for speaking truth to power, becoming symbols of the struggle for freedom and democracy,” she said.
On Tuesday, she responded to his release by saying it was “wonderful news”. “Very happy to see Sakharov prize laureate Andrzej Poczobut free,” she said.
Poczobut’s longtime employer, Gazeta Wyborcza, celebrated the release on its website, saying: “Andrzej Poczobut is finally free! The dictator has released our colleague from the penal colony.”
The newspaper’s deputy editor-in-chief, Bartosz Wieliński, posted a picture with Poczobut, captioned: “The first kilometres of freedom. We’re heading to Warsaw.”