But thanks to a strange little loophole of the prison library and the letters his wife sends, Dzyanis still reads, still writes, and holds on to his identity as a journalist. That’s all he gets to do for the next 13 years, as a political prisoner of Alexander Lukashenka’s dictatorship.

Belarus is infamous for its absurd, sometimes almost surreal, crackdown on dissent. People get jailed for things like posting memes in seemingly anti-regime forums or sending around €25 to a Belarusian regiment fighting in Ukraine. But when the spotlight fades, people like Dzyanis become just another name on a list, vanishing into cells and courtrooms without windows.

That’s why I’m writing this. Because Belarus, wedged next to big, bad Russia, has become Europe’s blind spot. And the people inside it – the prisoners, the families, the voices being silenced – deserve more than silence in return. In six steps, I’ll show you what it's like to become a political prisoner in Belarus.

Dzyanis Ivashyn is a Belarusian investigative journalist, political scientist, and economist. Before his arrest, he wrote for Novy Chas, an independent newspaper, and volunteered as editor of the Belarusian-language version of InformNapalm. He documented and debunked state propaganda, Russian and Belarusian alike.

In early 2021, he published an investigation showing that former members of Ukraine’s disbanded Berkut riot police – notorious for brutality during the Revolution of Dignity, also known as Maidan Revolution, in 2014 – had been granted Belarusian citizenship and were now suppressing protests after Belarus’s rigged 2020 election.

The next day, he gave a TV interview about it. And the day after that, the Belarusian KGB arrested him outside his home in Hrodna in western Belarus.

After the arrest, state police raided their home and searched for 'evidence'. When his wife, Volha Ivashyna came home, the officers were already there. “They told me, ‘There’s a lot you don’t know about your husband. Bad things. But we know – we’ve been watching him for years.’ Well, we already knew that,” she says with a dry laugh.

They seized books on Belarusian resistance, Ukrainian history, anti-Bolshevik uprisings, and Maidan memorabilia like pins or a scarf. His CDs, laptop and notebooks, too. All of it was turned into “evidence” that he was essentially spying for Ukraine. The charge of “defaming a police officer” with his article escalated into high treason and 13 years in prison.

The fact that Dzyanis had visited Ukraine many times and participated in both Ukrainian revolutions – in 2004 and 2014 – made it worse. “He was arrested because he supported Ukraine and was always on its side,” Volha says. “His father is Ukrainian, so it’s personal for him. He always felt part of that struggle for truth.”

“They told me he wouldn’t be held long. That he’d wait for trial at home – lies,” Volha explains. The same day Dzyanis was arrested, officers searched his mother’s home, too. Then – his grandmother’s.

Volha started looking for a lawyer. But finding one who truly defends your case in Belarus is another step in this nightmare. Many independent lawyers have been disbarred or jailed for working on political cases. Dzyanis' trial was closed to the public due to alleged ”state secrets”. Belarus takes this dictatorship trait to another level and forces lawyers to sign non-disclosure agreements.

“When this is coupled with a closed trial and a sealed judgment, the trial really is a black box. It is the most extreme violation of the right to a public trial,” Adam Lhedmat, a legal officer from Freedom Now, a human rights group supporting Dzyanis, tells me. For all we know, it could have been just the judge and prosecutor drinking tea together, while Dzyanis is asking for the right to defend himself. That’s how little transparency there is.

It’s hard to say whether lawyers even have a chance to have an impact in these trials. They all seem predetermined. According to Volha, the prosecution even relied on phrases like ”it seems” and ”possibly” as it had no hard evidence.

Dzyanis is allowed to see his lawyer once a month. Other than that, his only real contact with Volha and the outside world is through letters. But those letters arrive opened, already read by censors. So they write carefully. She tells him about her day, her friends, and the books she’s reading. He writes back about his readings, and writes her poems.

He was once allowed one phone call a month, but that privilege was taken away. A lot has changed since his arrest in 2021. Including his attitude. During the first weeks, he wrote to Volha that it was ”very stressful”. She says: ”They tried to scare him. They said I wouldn't wait for him, that I'd meet someone else. Total nonsense. But when your brain is poked like that for months… it's hard.”

Now Dzyanis’s own resilience and optimism are what keep her strong. “He’s braver than those of us waiting for him,” she says. “He writes to me that everything will be okay. That he will  return to me like Odysseus to Ithaca.”Volha is certain that when they finally meet again, the first thing he’ll say is how much he loves her – and then, finally, what really happened to him in prison. Because he can’t write that now.

What we do know is that due to poor prison conditions, he has suffered a cardiac episode – possibly a heart attack – and that he was thrown into solitary confinement several times for speaking Belarusian (shunned by Belarus' authorities).

Volha is now safe in Poland, after Belarusian authorities started targeting her too. There, she works with Freedom Now to campaign for Dzyanis’s release. How can they get him out? The truth is, they can't. Belarus has to let him go. And there seem to be two ways it can happen.

First: sheer luck, a flicker of “Lukashenka mercy”. Over the past several months, the regime released some political prisoners, potentially as a signal to the West that it wants to thaw relations. Second: behind-the-scenes negotiations, usually involving another country requesting a prisoner’s release. But for this to happen, someone must actually demand the release and do something about it.

In 2023, Freedom Now and international law firm Dechert LLP filed a petition to the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention. In May 2024, they got a ruling: Belarus had violated international law by imprisoning Dzyanis. Nothing new, right?

However, the very fact that it's written on official letterhead somewhere matters – foreign officials are much more likely to act on such cases if there is an international ruling that a detention breaks the law, legal officer Lhedmat confirms.

In the best-case scenario, Lukashenka decides holding Dzyanis just isn’t worth the reputation cost – which hasn't happened yet. Surprisingly, there’s hope in the US administration, which recently brokered a deal to release Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya’s husband, Siarhei Tsikhanouski and 14 other political prisoners.

The details are still murky, but one thing is clear: international and NGO pressure works, and Lukashenka is willing to negotiate and release even one of the most prominent opposition leaders.

“If Dzyanis could speak to the whole world right now,” Volha says, “he’d say: The most important thing is the truth. We must hold on to it.” The truth is, Europe too could – and should – do much more for him and those like him.