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After 1,175 days in a Belarusian prison, Andrei Kuznechyk, a journalist with the US-funded international broadcaster Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, learned that he was being released just fifteen minutes before it actually happened. “The first feeling was fear,” he said, for his wife and two young children; at the time, he didn’t know that his family had already been transported out of Belarus to nearby Lithuania, where they were waiting to be reunited with him. “The second was incomprehension. Why are the authorities throwing me, a Belarusian, out of my own country?” In prison, Kuznechyk had heard rumblings that Russia had been part of a deal that included the release of Russian political prisoners. “I imagined the possibility of such an event,” he said. “But I didn’t imagine that I would end up in such a scheme.”
Kuznechyk, who works for RFE/RL’s Belarusian Service, known as Radio Svaboda, was initially detained in November 2021 while on a bike ride near his home in the capital, Minsk, and then served ten days in jail on hooliganism charges, which he denied; just as he was set to be released, authorities kept him in prison and added another charge, of “creating or participating in an extremist organization.” In June 2022, in a trial that lasted just one day, a court found him guilty and sentenced him to six years in prison. US officials, Kuznechyk’s employer, and press freedom groups decried the conviction as politically motivated. His plight underscored Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko’s harsh crackdown on independent media.
Last summer, Kuznechyk’s colleague Alsu Kurmasheva was freed from prison in Russia as part of a wider prisoner swap (which included Belarus) overseen by the Biden administration; talks to free other jailed RFE/RL journalists initially seemed to have some momentum, CJR reported earlier this year, but this then appeared to fizzle out. In the end, and perhaps somewhat surprisingly, it was the Trump administration that brokered the deal that led to Kuznechyk’s release, on February 12. He was resettled in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, with his family.
Then, just over a month later, the Trump administration moved to gut the US Agency for Global Media, which oversees congressionally funded but editorially independent news outlets including RFE/RL, Voice of America, and Radio Free Asia. Now the outlets, which in 2024 reached a combined weekly audience of 427 million people worldwide, are at risk of being silenced. (Last week, a US court ruled that USAGM can withhold funds from Radio Free Asia and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks while the agency appeals court orders requiring it to disburse the money; RFE/RL has filed an emergency petition in anticipation of being subject to the same sort of decision, according to a spokesperson.) Kuznechyk is experiencing a complex set of emotions. He says he is relishing his newfound freedom. But the sweetness has partly been tempered by the fact that RFE/RL is fighting for its life—and the knowledge that several of his colleagues remain imprisoned around the world for doing their jobs. Recently, I caught up with Kuznechyk over email and with the help of a translator. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
LS: Only a few months have passed since you were released from prison. How are you doing?
AK: I am still in the euphoria of freedom, of being reunited with my family. And in amazement at how much the world has changed in just three years. This amazement, unfortunately, is not always joyful. There is almost no news about the war in Ukraine from the Belarusian official media. I learned many shocking facts a short time after my release. When we rejoiced in the penal colony for those [Belarusian] political prisoners who were being released, we did not know that even after their release, they remain on blacklists with severe restrictions and under daily control of the security forces. When we heard the news about pardons, we did not know that the steamroller of repression was not going to stop.
Can you tell me about your time in prison? What did a typical day look like for you, and how did you cope?
While imprisoned, I spent time in several places of detention. Typical days varied. When I was in the pretrial detention center, there was a lot of time for reading, whereas when I was in the penal colony, there was almost no time to read. What united these places was a feeling of powerlessness, helplessness to influence anything, bitterness at separation from loved ones; at unjust deprivation of freedom. Wherever I was, I waited for letters every day. Although those on the outside were not able to write to us about the news, because the first addressee was the censor, they tried to console me, to talk about positive moments in family life, children growing up. Somehow seven letters in a row from my wife did not pass censorship. I was beside myself. I can imagine how hard it is for political prisoners who have been deprived of even the opportunity to correspond with their families.
How did I cope? I thought about my family. About going out to them without having changed under the influence of prison rules, without allowing prison realities to enslave my soul. The journalistic habit of trusting only information that you can verify—which is impossible in prison—led me to believe almost nothing, neither propaganda nor exhausting rumors of imminent release, pardon, or amnesty that gave false hope. That is why there were no painful disappointments.
Can you tell me about the moment when you first met your family in Vilnius after being released? How did you feel?
I felt immensely happy and guilty at the same time. Guilty that I missed three years of my children growing up. That my wife had to cope with everything on her own all this time. That now they had to leave their home, relatives, and homeland, and start life from scratch. That they did all this is a great vote of confidence in me and a manifestation of boundless love. I am immensely grateful to them for this.
Calls from some Trump advisers to shutter RFE/RL and VOA began in February, shortly before your release. When did you learn about all that?
I first learned about RFE/RL’s situation from a news broadcast on one of the state TV channels when I was in the KGB pretrial detention center. Then, RFE/RL president Stephen Capus, who met me in Vilnius when I was released and helped me with everything during my first few days of freedom, told me about the organization’s difficult situation on the way to the clothes store the day after my release. It still seems to me that it is a misunderstanding that RFE/RL could close down at a time when its voice is so needed.
What role has RFE/RL historically played in Belarus in providing independent news to Belarusians?
Radio Svaboda is more than just a source of information that is otherwise unavailable in the country. In Belarus, it has created a Belarusian cultural code; reopened hushed-up pages of history; introduced outstanding writers, musicians, and artists. It is difficult to overestimate the role of Radio Svaboda in preserving the traditions of the Belarusian language. All this is with constant professionalism and journalistic courage. But that is not all. Radio Svaboda has always been more than a media outlet, more than a source of content. It is listened to and read with the hope that someday, sooner rather than later, Belarus will become part of the free world.
What’s at stake if RFE/RL is no longer able to broadcast to Belarus?
Radio Svaboda is a unique media outlet in the modern history and present of Belarus. Its closure would be a gift to the forces that consider objective journalism, democratic values, and uncontrolled, uninfringed Belarusian culture and language a threat to their control over society and its future. Belarusians will lose not only an uncensored media outlet, but also a symbol of hope.
Four of your colleagues at RFE/RL are still imprisoned around the world, as are other journalists from RFE/RL’s sister outlets Voice of America and Radio Free Asia. What’s your message to them?
In prison, I and other political prisoners were told more than once that everyone had forgotten about us, that no one needed us. Some eventually began to believe this. This is not true. They remember you and do what they can to bring the day of liberation closer. Therefore, my message to them is: hold on and take care of yourselves.
What have you enjoyed most since being released from prison? How have you been spending your days?
Most of all, I value time spent with my family: when I can make my son laugh, make my daughter happy, and allow my wife to rest. I like to walk and ride my bike. I enjoy the space, the relief, the architecture of Vilnius, the spring blossoms, the meetings, the music in my headphones, and how everything has changed for the better with technology. And I understand less and less how—in this world successfully moving towards progress, convenience, and beauty—wars can go on and dictatorships can strengthen.
Other notable stories:
- In yet more shocking news about the US Agency for Global Media, Kari Lake, the former local news anchor turned failed political candidate whom Trump has tapped as a special adviser to USAGM, announced last night that she had reached a deal for Voice of America to distribute content from One America News Network, a pro-Trump channel that has settled numerous defamation suits over its coverage of Trumpworld’s lies about the 2020 election. NPR’s David Folkenflik reports that the agreement could help Lake to restore content to VOA while the future of its actual journalists remains in legal limbo. Either way, “the reaction from agency and network veterans was swift and indignant,” Folkenflik writes. Grant Turner, a former USAGM executive, said that Lake’s OAN move “makes a mockery of the agency’s history of independent nonpartisan journalism.”
- CJR’s Meghnad Bose reports on the case of Georgia Dillane, a student at Barnard College, which is affiliated with Columbia University, who covered a pro-Palestinian protest on campus from the studio of WKCR, Columbia’s radio station, then was ordered to share information about the event with administrators. After WKCR pushed back, citing a New York law that protects journalists from having to testify in official investigations, the administration appeared to accuse Dillane of taking part in the protest in violation of a code of conduct, and suggested that she would not be able to graduate if she didn’t attend a meeting about it. In the end, Barnard dropped the demand, and said it had made a mistake. (A second student journalist underwent a very similar ordeal.)
- In media-business news, Jake Lahut, a political journalist who has contributed regularly to CJR (including by writing a profile of an architect of Trump’s digital strategy for our recent package on Trump’s first hundred days), is joining Wired as a senior writer on its politics team. Elsewhere, CNN hired the veteran digital journalist Choire Sicha to oversee editorial features as the network explores building out an online subscriptions business; the Hollywood Reporter has more. And the company that is being built to spin MSNBC and other cable properties away from NBCUniversal, which has heretofore been known as “Spinco,” will adopt the name “Versant,” Mark Lazarus, its CEO, said.
- The Guardian’s Margaret Simons makes the case that Rupert Murdoch’s media empire no longer has the power to swing elections in Australia, after the country’s center-left government beat out the right-wing opposition to remain in power. The idea that no leader can win without Murdoch “hasn’t been the case for at least 15 years and yet we have not broken free from the fear, caution and intellectual paralysis that results from the belief,” Simons writes. Indeed, Murdoch’s properties may even have become “a distorting mirror” for the right, dragging it away from the concerns of “middle Australia.”
- And the highly secretive papal conclave, during which cardinals will vote to elect a new pope following the recent death of Francis, gets underway in the Vatican today. According to Politico’s Ben Munster, some first-time participants have turned to the recent (fictional) Ralph Fiennes movie Conclave for tips as to how it might go down. Already, pre-conclave lobbying has “proved a hotbed of scandal no less sensational than the Hollywood imitation,” Munster writes. Among other things, “hardened Vatican insiders have leaked anonymous barbs against rivals to the Italian press.”
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