WARSAW: Belarus’s top jailed opposition leader Sergei Tikhanovsky was freed alongside over a dozen other political prisoners on Saturday in a surprise release hailed as a “symbol of hope.”
His wife Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, who took the mantle of the opposition after his jailing, said the United States helped broker the deal and thanked US President Donald Trump.
Tikhanovsky, 46, had been imprisoned for more than five years.
He planned to run against incumbent Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko in the August 2020 presidential election, but was arrested and detained weeks before the vote.
Svetlana — a political novice at the time of his arrest — took his place in the polls.
