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Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya shows a photo of her husband during a speech in the Czech parliament in 2021

Photograph:

Vondrouö Roman / dpa

Belarusian opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya has published pictures of her imprisoned husband Sergei Tsikhanovsky. On Twitter, she writes that she is relieved to see Sergei "alive and strong".

To this end, Tsikhanouskaya uploaded a video that apparently shows Tsikhanovsky in a Belarusian prison. In a cell with four beds, only one is equipped with an apparently narrow mattress. Tikhanovsky can be seen stretching on the video and sitting down on a small bench to eat. His head is shaved, he wears black clothes, on which a kind of prisoner number is apparently embroidered.

At one point in the video, the date of Wednesday can be seen. However, it is not possible to verify whether these are actually recordings from Wednesday.

On Tuesday, Tsikhanouskaya said she had received an anonymous message about her husband's alleged death. She had not heard from him since March 9, she wrote on Twitter, and his lawyers were denied access. But Tsikhanouskaya also wrote that such rumors were circulating more often.

Prison sentence after presidential candidacy

The well-known Belarusian blogger was sentenced to 2021 years in prison at the end of 18. The state news agency Belta, citing a court in the city of Gomel, reported at the time that Tsikhanovsky had to go to a prison camp under particularly harsh prison conditions for "preparing and organizing mass uprisings."

Tikhanovsky was arrested shortly after announcing his candidacy for the 2020 presidential election in Belarus. Other opposition politicians were also sentenced to prison. In her tweet, Tsikhanouskaya also called for signs of life from Viktor Babariko, who is serving a prison sentence of 14 years, or Maria Kolesnikova, who had worked for a long time as a cultural manager in Stuttgart and was given eleven years.

In his place, his wife Svetlana, who is seen by many as the real winner of the election, which was overshadowed by massive fraud, ran in 2020 and fled to Lithuania. Dictator Alexander Lukashenko was declared the winner of the election, but neither the European Union, the United States nor a number of other states recognized the election.

Hba