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Lukashenko pardons 42 people jailed in Belarus for extremism, BELTA reports
Published by Global Banking & Finance Review®
Posted on May 7, 2025
2 min readLast updated: January 24, 2026
Global Banking & Finance Review®
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Published by Global Banking & Finance Review®
Posted on May 7, 2025
2 min readLast updated: January 24, 2026
Belarus' Lukashenko pardons 42 for extremism, a move critics say aims to ease sanctions. Over 1,200 political prisoners remain jailed.
MOSCOW (Reuters) - Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko has pardoned 42 people convicted of "extremist offences", state news agency BELTA reported on Wednesday.
Opponents of Lukashenko, who has been in office since 1994, are regularly accused of extremism-related offences which human rights activists say are trumped up to silence them.
BELTA did not give the names of those pardoned.
The Belarusian opposition in exile says that such prisoner releases are a ploy by Lukashenko to try to win sanctions relief from the West which has imposed restrictions on Minsk over its support for Russia and domestic political situation.
Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, exiled since a 2020 presidential election her supporters say was stolen from her, says more than 1,200 political prisoners are still jailed in the former Soviet state, which rounded up all notable opponents of Lukashenko in a violent crackdown on protests after the 2020 vote.
Lukashenko, a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, extended his 31-year rule in another election in January this year that Western countries called a sham. He denies Belarus holds political prisoners or that his re-election was the result of a flawed process.
Among those still jailed in Belarus are key leaders of the 2020 protests, including banker Viktor Babariko and opposition leader Maria Kalesnikava.
(Reporting by Reuters, Writing by Felix Light; editing by Andrew Osborn)
The article discusses Lukashenko's pardon of 42 people convicted of extremism in Belarus and the political implications.
Critics suggest the pardons are a strategy to gain sanctions relief from Western countries.
Over 1,200 political prisoners, including key opposition leaders, remain jailed in Belarus.
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