LONDON: The wife of a Belarusian dissident who disappeared after flying to Turkiye three months ago says she is pinning her hopes of finding him on US President Donald Trump’s new special envoy to Belarus.
Anatol Kotau, 45, flew into Istanbul from Warsaw early on the afternoon of Thursday, August 21. In the following hours, he exchanged a series of Telegram messages with his wife Anastasia in Poland and promised to let her know where he would be staying.
He never did. Then he stopped responding to her.
After many weeks of fruitless efforts to trace him, Kotau’s supporters say they fear he may have fallen into the hands of the Belarusian KGB security service or Russia’s FSB.
As Trump’s envoy John Coale prepares for a new round of negotiations with Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko to seek the release of political prisoners, Anastasia told Reuters she hoped that her husband’s release could form part of a deal.
