Q&A: Andrei Kuznechyk on Life After Prison and What’s at Stake If RFE/RL Is Silenced
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.”
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