This interview is available in Belarusian and is part of a series produced by The Barys Zvozskau Belarusian Human Rights House and Viasna Human Rights Centre in cooperation with Human Rights House Foundation, featuring five Belarusian human rights defenders: Ales Bialiatski, Uladzimir Labkovich, Nasta Loika, Marfa Rabkova, and Valiantsin Stefanovic.

When did you feel truly free again after your release?

Freedom is not only about external circumstances, but also about what you feel inside. The more I reflect on recent events, the more it seems I began to feel free on 17 March 2026 in Homiel, two days before my release.

That day, after work, I was called to headquarters, and the deputy head of the colony started asking me the usual set of questions, things like, “What are your plans after release?” But then suddenly there was a new one: “Would you like to stay in touch with us after your release?”

That really surprised me. Why would they want that? I asked what exactly they were interested in. It was something along these lines: if I met with other people who had been released, what would we talk about? When I asked why they needed this, the deputy head of the colony said he could not disclose that to me. “Then I can’t think about it either,” I replied.

Nobody told me what was going to happen next, but for some reason I already felt this new boldness inside me, and a sense that I had some control over the situation. I continued to follow all the rules, but I was waiting for something to happen.

Three hours later, someone whispered to me that Marfa Rabkova and I had been taken off factory work for the next day. There are only two reasons why you don’t go to the factory: either you are so ill that you are lying flat on your back, or you are being released. But there were no fanfares inside me. There were things I had to get done during that last evening.

Only two days later would I officially hear the words, “You are free”, in English, from John Coale at the Belarusian-Lithuanian border. But by then there was already exhaustion from the journey and from waiting.

Then another feeling washed over me: joy that another 235 people had been released, joy at meeting people who were dear to me. And simply meeting people in general, something that had been severely restricted for the previous three years and almost five months.

So for me freedom is associated with the road and with meetings, phone calls and video messages, a phone in my hands, a keyboard under my fingers, a park in Warsaw, walking through a field outside the city with my friend’s dog.

How difficult was it for you to leave Belarus? Do you hope to return?

It wasn’t difficult for me to leave Belarus, because I didn’t feel I had any agency. They simply took me and threw me across the border, without a passport and without any stories about human rights. Nobody asked what I wanted; nobody offered me anything or set any conditions.

So I just floated along on the wave of other people’s decisions. Towards joy, safety and warm reunions.

It was as if someone suddenly switched off this constant background anxiety, and that blocked my longing for a homeland that had been so unfair to me.

I am in very close contact with people in Belarus. I send appeals there, send letters, pass things on, read people’s posts, and I don’t feel isolated or cut off.

For now, I can see that it is possible to run advocacy campaigns even from exile, as long as I have at least a little support from the people around me.

I would like to return to Belarus one day, but after some time, and when it is genuinely safe for human rights defenders.

Why do you continue to fight for human rights?

During my long years in prison, I kept telling myself two things.

First, this is all a temporary ordeal, just a pause.

And second, this is simply “embedded monitoring”, so that I can study everything more deeply and then do more on human rights in Belarus afterwards.

I understood that my experience as a human rights defender helped me see more and see deeper, ask the right questions and record what mattered.

Now I feel an enormous responsibility for this new professional experience. I really want to change systemic things in Belarus, so intense human rights work is the only obvious path for me.

Because this is what I lived for. This is what I did for almost half my life.

For me, human rights still remain a value-based compass and a legal mechanism on the way towards safety and happiness for everyone.

What gives you hope for the future?

What gives me hope are signs that transformative events may happen soon.

Every day I say my two dreams out loud: that all political prisoners in Belarus will be released, and that the war will end, at least the war next door in Ukraine.

I can see the possibility of these changes already in 2026. I very much hope for them and wait for them.

What also gives me hope is that there are people who are ready to support me in what I want to do and the huge number of ideas I have.

That is the most valuable thing for me now.

What is the most important thing you would like to say to the readers of this piece?

People in Belarus and in other authoritarian countries do human rights work in much more difficult conditions. They are constantly at risk of persecution and cannot directly influence their governments or engage widely with people inside the country.

That is why support from people in other countries is so important to them: donations, support for solidarity campaigns, appeals to your own governments demanding a response to what is happening in Belarus. Only then do we feel that we have something to lean on.

To secure the release of all political prisoners in Belarus, all possible actors need to be involved in the negotiation process. Only this can stop the repression, help bring about a new period of liberalisation, and reduce Russia’s influence in the region.

How effective human rights will be in protecting our security and providing peaceful ways of resolving conflicts depends on each and every one of us.

I love these values and these mechanisms, even though fewer and fewer people support them, even though they face more and more challenges.

Humanity simply has not yet come up with words more universal than those in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

What would you say to human rights defenders from different countries who are currently in prison, including those in Belarus?

I want to tell human rights defenders in prison that what we do is very important, and sometimes that means we have to do some “embedded monitoring” too.

And it will definitely end. You just have to wait and take care of yourself.