The uncertain future of released Belarusians

Many of the political prisoners released from prison and expelled from the country at the end of 2025 have not yet had their passports returned by the authorities in Minsk. They remain in a legal limbo, still holding Belarusian citizenship but unable to obtain new documents. Their complaint: “Lukashenko’s gesture was merely for show”.

Minsk (AsiaNews) - Following several agreements with representatives of the US authorities, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko has released several groups of political prisoners, including the leaders of the 2020 protests, Maria Kolesnikova and Viktor Babariko, who have sought to persuade everyone to seek a compromise between the authorities and the opposition. In response, the released dissidents were taken out of the country without their passports being returned, but with simple A4 sheets of paper to certify their identity.

With this sort of certificate, it is not easy to organise one’s life in foreign countries, as their citizenship has not been revoked and remains in limbo, leaving them unsure of where to go or how to proceed. To facilitate their transfer, the United States even suspended sanctions against the airlines Belavia and Bielaruskalia, including the aircraft normally used by the president’s relatives. The largest group of prisoners released was last December, involving 123 people, including Nobel Peace Prize laureate Ales Beliatski, lawyer Maksim Znak and political scientist Aleksandr Feduta.

As some of the former detainees told Currentime, passports were returned only to a few of them after they had been deported from the country, but over 30 of them were left without documents, possessing only the slip printed in Russian. Lukashenko himself, responding to questions from delegates at the National Assembly on 18 December, stated that passports are not being handed over to them in order to deprive them of the possibility of returning legally to Belarus: “They will no longer come here to cause problems for me and for all of you; let us ensure that such situations do not recur.”

The situation is further complicated by the fact that, unlike almost all other countries, Belarusian consulates abroad have for several years now refused to issue passports to compatriots living abroad, and may even confiscate any documents they hold. This creates a legal vacuum, whereby one cannot return home to obtain a passport, nor can one obtain one abroad. One of the former detainees, released on 11 September 2025 and taken out of Belarus, using the pseudonym Andrej (in the hope of a solution), recounts being left in limbo alongside prominent figures such as trade unionists Gennadij Fedynič and Aleksandr Jarošuk, the anarchist Nikolaj Dedok, the blogger Igor Losik and many others.

A large number of those expelled ‘with the slip’ still had documents valid for several years; Fedynič himself had obtained a new passport whilst in a labour camp in 2022, and now finds himself in Lithuania without knowing how to register. Andrej states that ‘at first we weren’t worried; the important thing was to be free… For a few days they put us up in a hotel, but when I tried to rent a flat, the landlady asked me for ID.” It was only thanks to influential friends, including a Lithuanian citizen, that Andrej managed to persuade her to let him rent the flat, until, after a long wait, he was issued with a “transit visa” valid for three years.

According to Dedok, “Lukashenko wanted to make a symbolic gesture, knowing full well that we have no intention of returning to Belarus. In reality, it is a demonstration of impotence: they are erasing us from the Belarusian people, because they don’t know how to respond to our protests”. Most of the former detainees are in the neighbouring countries of Lithuania and Poland, hoping for support from the authorities in Vilnius and Warsaw, who for now remain in a holding pattern, partly because in these countries not all Belarusian citizens can obtain residence permits, as a consequence of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict.