Wife of jailed Nobel laureate Ales Bialiatski speaks on her letters to her husband

The wife of the Peace Nobel Prize-winning Belarusian dissident Ales Bialiatski, Natalia Pinchuk, visited Poland on Tuesday. At a press conference in the afternoon, she spoke about the letters she and her jailed husband have been exchanging, and how this correspondence is being monitored.

Pinchuk said that "his correspondence is fully controlled". "My letters arrive sporadically. The same goes with other political prisoners. However, when it comes to other categories of prisoners, the question of correspondence looks completely different, and there are much wider possibilities to correspond with inmates," she explained.

Pinchuk also said "it's hard to speak about what we write". "How to write? It's been a while since together with Ales we've been employing self-censorship in such correspondence, I look out of the window and describe what is happening there. I look at a spider, I describe the spider," she said.

"I look at what makes this life which is completely unrelated to any, not even political or social institutions. So it is a grand attempt to write about life without life," Pinchuk said. She added that "even the letter in which I had described a starry sky was not delivered to Ales". "Apparently, they discerned some hidden sense or pre-established meaning. And even that letter was not delivered to him," said Ales Bialiatski's wife.

Answering further questions, Pinchuk said that recently it had not been possible for her to see her husband. "My last, 1-hour, meeting with him was on November 10. It was the only meeting were allowed to have. Behind a glass and over a phone, a classic prison situation," she said.

Earlier on Tuesday, Natalia Pinczuk had also met with Poland's PM Mateusz Morawiecki and MFA chief Zbigniew Rau.

Nobel Peace Prize winner and human rights activist Ales Bialiatski was sentenced to 10 years in prison on March 3 by a court in his native Belarus which found him guilty of financing protests in a trial condemned by the United States and the European Union as a "sham".

Bialiatski, 60, was awarded the Nobel prize in October for his work promoting human rights and democracy in a country which President Alexander Lukashenko, a staunch ally of Russia, has ruled with an iron hand for nearly 30 years, violently locking up his opponents or forcing them to flee.

Bialiatski, who was arrested in 2021, and three co-defendants were charged with financing protests and smuggling money. Belarusian state news agency Belta confirmed the court had handed down long jail sentences to all the men, including a decade in prison for Bialiatski. He denied the charges against him, saying they were politically motivated.

The other three men convicted were Valentin Stefanovich, sentenced to nine years, Vladimir Labkovich to seven years, and Dmitry Solovyov, who received eight years but was not present in court.