Who is Andrzej Poczobut and why did Belarus release him?

Andrzej Poczobut walked back into Poland from Belarus last Tuesday looking nothing like the broad-shouldered and suited journalist that many Polish newspaper readers would have recognised five years ago.

The pictures that quickly circulated of him from a border crossing in eastern Poland showed a gaunt figure with a shaved head.

Five years spent in cold, concrete prison cells, including six months last year in solitary confinement, have made him look older than his 53 years.

His release - part of a 10-person prisoner exchange - was the result of months of extensive negotiations between Polish, American, Belarusian and Russian officials. Romanian and Moldovan negotiators were also involved.

Mr Poczobut had been the Belarus correspondent for Gazeta Wyborcza, one of Poland's leading daily newspapers.

A member of the Polish minority community in Belarus, which makes up about 3% of the country's population, Mr Poczobut had long criticised the regime of Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko and its abuse of human rights.

The journalist had had previous run-ins with Mr Lukashenko, who has ruled Belarus since 1994 and is a staunch ally of Russia.

In 2011, Mr Poczobut was charged with insulting the Belarusian president and received a three-year suspended prison sentence.

"He was not afraid to write the truth about Belarus and name Lukashenko as a dictator, which he was once jailed for," Bartosz Wieliński, the deputy editor of Gazeta Wyborcza and Mr Poczobut's friend, told RTÉ News.

Mr Poczobut continued to work as a journalist, writing about the history of Belarus’s Polish community, including the actions of Polish partisans in his home region of Grodno after it became part of the Soviet Union in 1945.

In the summer of 2020, he wrote about the Belarusian regime’s violent repression of mass pro-democracy protests, after Mr Lukashenko claimed victory in a rigged election.

One year later, Belarusian authorities arrested Mr Poczobut again, and charged him with "inciting hatred on national, religious and social grounds" and threatening Belarus’s national security - charges that Poland said were politically motivated.

In 2023, a Belarusian court sentenced him to eight years in a penal colony.

Mr Wieliński was the only journalist present last Tuesday to witness the prisoner swap.

He said that he was shocked when he saw his friend for the first time in more than five years.

"He was just so skinny from the effect of food deprivation," he said.

Mr Wieliński was there at the request of Polish authorities. They needed someone who knew Mr Poczobut personally and could verify that it really was him, and to make sure that the Belarusian side did not exchange someone else for the journalist.

But also, Mr Wieliński was there so that Mr Poczobut would recognise a familiar face who could put him at ease.

Once Mr Wieliński saw his old friend, he confirmed to Polish officers that it was, indeed, Andrzej Poczobut, and the exchange of 10 prisoners - five from each side - proceeded as planned.

Such was the importance of the journalist’s release to the Polish state, that Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk was at the border crossing to greet him once the exchange had taken place.

Mr Tusk quickly posted a picture of him shaking hands with the now-thin journalist on social media with the text: "Welcome home to Poland, my friend."

To get Mr Poczobut freed, Poland handed over Alexander Butyagin, a Russian archaeologist, who was due to be extradited to Ukraine.

Last December, Polish police had arrested Mr Butyagin on Ukraine’s request after it claimed he had conducted an illegal excavation at a site in occupied Crimea.

According to Mr Wieliński, Mr Poczobut and the Russian archaeologist were exchanged at the border at the same time, one heading west, the other heading east.

Belarus returned two other Polish nationals, including a Carmelite priest who Minsk claimed was a Polish spy.

Little detail has emerged about the identity of the four other Belarusian and Russian nationals that Warsaw handed over as part of the exchange.

Russia’s security agency, the FSB, confirmed in a statement this week that it was involved in the operation along with Belarus’s intelligence service, the KGB.

The involvement of the two agencies suggests that those handed over by Poland were highly valued by Moscow and Minsk.

Two Moldovan nationals were also released by Belarus, which the FSB said were Moldovan intelligence officers.

Tuesday’s swap was the latest move by Mr Lukashenko to improve ties with the West.

He and his regime have been heavily sanctioned by the European Union and the United States since 2020 for its violent crackdown against pro-democracy supporters, and its tacit support for Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

In February that year, Russian formations invaded Ukraine from southern Belarus.

But in March this year, Belarus released 250 political prisoners, many of whom left for Lithuania and Poland. Mr Lukashenko had pardoned them after talks with US envoy John Coale.

In return, the US has lifted some sanctions on Belarus, including state producers of potash - which is a main ingredient for producing fertiliser - as well as sanctions on some Belarusian state banks.

Mr Coale and US officials were central to the talks that led to Tuesday’s prisoner exchange and the US envoy gave a joint press conference in Warsaw with Polish foreign minister Radosław Sikorski detailing aspects of the swap.

Kamil Kłysiński, a Polish analyst on Belarus and a colleague of Mr Poczobut, told RTÉ News that the timing of Tuesday’s exchange was "fortunate".

"Andrzej is not a spy and was never involved in any espionage," said Mr Kłysiński, a senior fellow at the Centre of Eastern Studies in Warsaw.

But putting him in "this exchange of spies", was, he said, the "only possibility to get him out".

The release of political prisoners by Mr Lukashenko has not been accompanied by any political reforms or any signs of press freedom in Belarus, and that is unlikely to happen either while he stays in power, or while Vladimir Putin remains the president of Russia.

Few believe that Belarus’s ruler has any agency left when it comes to relations with Moscow.

What Mr Lukashenko wants to get from these prisoner exchanges is a further easing of sanctions and the normalisation of relations with the US to bolster his standing at home.

Washington is considering inviting Mr Lukashenko to the US for a meeting with US President Donald Trump, Mr Coale told The Financial Times last month.

The US envoy said this week that he would visit Belarus again later this month so a further easing of US sanctions against the Minsk regime cannot be ruled out.

Since his release on Tuesday, Mr Poczobut has been receiving medical treatment in a hospital run by the Polish ministry of the interior in Warsaw.

Belarusian authorities have said that the journalist is welcome to return to Belarus, and Mr Poczobut has said that he may try to return. His wife, two children and parents still live there.

That would be a huge risk and one that Polish authorities might not let him take.