Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced Sunday that an American imprisoned in Belarus will be released amid controversy surrounding the country’s ongoing elections.
Rubio praised President Donald Trump’s leadership and said in a post on X, “Belarus unilaterally released Anastasia Nufer, an innocent American kidnapped under the Joe Biden administration!”
Rubio added that Christopher Smith, the State Department’s assistant secretary for Eastern Europe, policy and regional affairs, said, “Our team has done an excellent job on this.”
“Peace through strength,” wrote Rubio, who served on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for 14 years before becoming President Trump’s new secretary of state last week.
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Marco Rubio during his swearing-in ceremony on Tuesday, January 21, 2025. (Oliver Contreras/Sipa/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Further information about Noufer or her release was not immediately available, as some social media users were surprised that they did not know that Americans had been imprisoned in Belarus during former President Joe Biden’s administration. Not announced.
Meanwhile, national elections will be held in Belarus on Sunday. President Alexander Lukashenko, a ally of Russian leader Vladimir Putin, faces only superficial opposition and is expected to win another term on top of his 30 years in power.
Lukashenko’s more serious opponents, many of whom have been imprisoned or exiled due to his relentless crackdown on opposition and free speech, have called the election a sham election. — Same as the last election in 2020, which sparked months of protests unprecedented in the nation’s history. A country with a population of 9 million.
The crackdown has resulted in more than 65,000 arrests and thousands of beatings, according to the Associated Press, and has drawn condemnation and sanctions from Western countries.
The country holds nearly 1,300 political prisoners, including Nobel Peace Prize laureate Ales Bialiatsky, founder of the Viasna Center for Human Rights.
Since July, President Lukashenko has granted amnesty to more than 250 people. At the same time, authorities have arrested hundreds more in raids targeting relatives and friends of political prisoners in an effort to stamp out dissent.
Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko (center) visits the Minsk Automobile Plant in Minsk, Belarus, on January 21, 2025. (Via AP, Belarusian Presidential Press Office, File)
Viasna said authorities detained 188 people last month alone. Advocacy groups said people who had donated to activists and opposition groups were called by police and forced to sign documents warning them not to take part in unsanctioned demonstrations, the Associated Press reported.
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Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, the exiled opposition leader who defected from Belarus under government pressure after challenging the president in 2020, told The Associated Press that Sunday’s election was a “pointless farce, a Lukashenko ritual.” Ta.
Voters should cross out everyone listed on their ballots, and world leaders are calling for countries where “all independent media and opposition parties have been destroyed and prisons are filled with political prisoners.” She said the results should not be accepted.
“As the no-choice vote approaches, the repression has become more brutal, but Mr. Lukashenko is behaving as if hundreds of thousands of people are still standing outside the palace,” she said. .
The European Parliament called on the European Union to reject the election results. The EU’s top diplomat, Kaja Callas, criticized the vote as a “blatant affront to democracy”.
Belarusian exiled opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya pauses to speak at a press conference before the start of the Belarusian People’s March in Warsaw, Poland, on January 26, 2025. (Agencja) Wyborcza.pl/Robert Kowalewski via Reuters)
Immediately after Sunday’s vote in Minsk, Lukashenko told reporters he was not seeking recognition or approval from the EU.
“The most important thing for me is that the people of Belarus recognize these elections and that they end as peacefully as they began,” he said.
Media freedom watchdog Reporters Without Borders has filed a complaint against Lukashenko at the International Criminal Court over his crackdown on free speech, which has seen 397 journalists arrested since 2020. The newspaper said 43 people were in prison.
Lukashenko became president in 1994, two years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and earned the nickname “Europe’s last dictator.” His iron-fisted rule was cemented by subsidies and political support from close ally Russia.
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Although it has allowed Russia to use its territory to invade Ukraine in 2022 and has accepted some of Russia’s tactical nuclear weapons, it still campaigns under the slogan of “peace and security.” He claimed to have saved Belarus from being drawn into war.
“It’s better to have a dictatorship like Belarus than a democracy like Ukraine,” Lukashenko said.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Daniel Wallace is a breaking news and political reporter for Fox News Digital. Story tips can be sent to danielle.wallace@fox.com and X: @danimwallace.
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