Mikalai Statkevich published a message on his Telegram channel in which he thanked everyone who supported him and his wife Maryna Adamovich during the years of his imprisonment.
“Maryna and I sincerely thank everyone who congratulated us on my release, who offered support, and who supported us throughout all these years. This is especially important for us because we know how much effort the ruling regime has made and continues to make to destroy human solidarity,” he wrote.
According to him, while in prison colony staff periodically told him that “everyone on the outside had forgotten about him.”
“I replied that even if that were true, what would it change in my position? But in reality, I never believed in my ‘uselessness,’ because I felt your support both when letters were still reaching me (I know that many people paid for their solidarity with their own freedom), and when I spent three years in complete information isolation. Because your warmth enveloped me. And I felt it almost physically,” the politician said.
Statkevich also reminded readers of those who remain behind bars.
“The more the authorities fear ‘their’ people, the more forces and resources they direct toward destroying solidarity between people, turning them into a herd of frightened loners. But, as we are now convinced, these efforts have failed. Because solidarity was embedded in us at the instinctive level millions of years ago, when our ancestors were not even proto-humans yet. Just like care for children, for example. And no one is capable of destroying that. Otherwise, we would simply cease to be people. Real people… And every time it is so touching, so heart-wrenching, when unfamiliar people (and this is in our thoroughly ‘cleansed’ country!) congratulate us, even cry when they see us together. To tears in our eyes. Thank you, People,” he wrote.
“But it is very painful to think about how many people still remain in prison. We remember them, support their relatives, and do everything for their release. Freedom for all political prisoners,” Statkevich added.
Statkevich was sentenced in 2021 in the so-called Tikhanovsky case to 14 years in prison. In September 2025, he was among 52 political prisoners who were supposed to be taken to Lithuania, but he refused to leave Belarus and ran out of the bus. After that, he was held for several months in a prison in Hlybokaye, which became known only after his release on 19 February. On 21 January he suffered a stroke and now has impaired speech. Statkevich is currently at home in Minsk, but his documents have still not been issued, and his legal status remains undefined.