Sausage and the Language of Belarusian Dictatorship

Despite being freed by the Belarusian dictatorship, Nobel laureate Ales Bialiatski says the West should recognize hostage diplomacy as a dead end.

By Bartosz Kielak

March 17, 2026

“Does Belarusian give us more sausage?”

It is a question the Belarusian dictator Aliaksandr Lukashenka once put to his own people. What does the Belarusian language actually give you? Does it put more sausage on the table?

Over three decades, the former collective-farm director has built a regime on that logic: national identity is treated as sedition, culture is fashioned into an instrument of control.

The recently freed Belarusian Nobel Peace Prize laureate Ales Bialiatski has spent most of those 30 years organizing resistance, and almost seven of them in jail.

Now a free man in Oslo, the 63-year-old former schoolteacher argues that the European Union and the United Kingdom should not follow Washington’s partial easing of pressure on Lukashenka’s illegitimate regime. “Only the sharp deterioration in Belarus’s economic situation in recent months forced the authorities to look for a way out,” he told this author in an interview. Absent that leverage, he believes, he and others would still be behind bars.

Studying philology in Homel in the early 1980s, he watched Belarusians pushed out of everyday urban life: absent in city schools, erased from universities, and edged out of state institutions. In that environment, a young man who cared about Belarusian poetry was, by that fact alone, “forced to confront political realities.”

Soviet-era Perestroika offered a brief opening. Bialiatski could publish Belarusian works suppressed for decades. But the state’s tolerance was temporary — by 1998, running the Viasna human rights center alongside his post as director of the Maksim Bahdanovich Literary Museum, he was told to choose between the directorship and activism. It was a choice in name only.

That same logic — culture as a security problem — now operates openly inside the penal colonies. Speaking Belarusian can trigger punishment, and sometimes violence: a commandant in Shklow struck an acquaintance of Bialiatski’s several times for addressing him in Belarusian. Beyond prison walls, Belarus maintains an expanding list of “extremist” publications; Bialiatski says one of his own books was among the first on that list a decade ago.

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The regime’s obsession is not just with what people say, but with what they know. On his release in December, guards seized all his correspondence and two manuscripts he had written during his sentence. Where they are now is unclear. His wife wrote to him weekly; in 2025, he received only one of her letters. Belarus has now developed a genre of “prison literature” — words smuggled out, or memoirs written after release. “There are dozens of these books,” Bialiatski said.

Inside the colony, information was rationed. News came through official radio and Russian state television, which Bialiatski watched the way Soviet readers once parsed Pravda: discard the packaging, read the facts underneath. That was how he learned of Alexei Navalny’s death in February 2024. He had no doubts the Russian activist was murdered; other inmates drew the same conclusion. Among political prisoners, the standard greeting was not “good afternoon” but “what is new?” — a daily scramble for information under threat of punishment if caught exchanging it.

Physical pressure reinforced the isolation. In the penal colony, he was placed in SHIZO — a punishment isolation cell — and tortured by cold. In thin clothing, he says, temperatures in autumn and winter fell to 8 °C–10°C (46F-50F). Sleep became impossible: after 15–20 minutes of dozing, shivering woke him as his body cooled. He spent a total of 38 days in SHIZO.

Food worked the same way: enough to keep you standing, not enough to keep you well. Prison meals were of poor quality — mainly groats and watery soups — and portions were small. The last meal was at 4 pm; anyone feeling hungry later in the day had to find food on their own. Yet political prisoners cannot be helped financially, making survival harder. Fruit and vegetables were so rare that, throughout 2025, Bialiatski ate only a single apple. In the colony, he lost about 15kg (33 lbs).

“What is happening in Belarus now is very comfortable for the authorities,” he says. “They do not have any political opponents. They do not have any democratic journalists. They have crushed cultural initiatives, youth initiatives. They now completely hold the ball.”

What disturbs the regime’s comfort is economic pain, and this is why his sanctions argument differs from the view in Brussels. Releases are a tactic for a system designed to run without opposition. Repression continues alongside pardons: new arrests and trials are routine. The point of the prison regime is psychological destruction — “to destroy your sense of self,” as Bialiatski describes it. Behind it, he says, is a policy effectively aimed at unifying Belarus with Russia, “Russification that has continued for the past 200 years.”

The prisoner releases also sit within a broader hybrid-pressure toolkit. Belarus has played a central role in migrant operations against EU borders, in disruptions attributed to balloons entering neighboring airspace, and in enabling Russia’s military attacks and operations to be launched from Belarusian territory. Bialiatski observes that hostage diplomacy is a repeatable method of extracting leverage for an economically destitute, hostile regime.

European sanctions are among the few instruments that reliably change Minsk’s calculus. The Nobel laureate is adamant that they should not be traded for batch releases without measurable change: a halt to repression and the restoration of basic civic space. If sanctions relief becomes the price of freeing hostages, the regime’s incentive is to manufacture more hostages (a tactic favored by Lukashenka’s big brother, Vladimir Putin).

Bialiatski recalls meeting Jan Nowak-Jeziorański, the wartime courier who spent decades in exile working for a democratic Poland. By the time they met, the old man was well past 90, and Poland had long since changed. But before the Iron Curtain fell, nobody knew when — or whether — it would. “One should set fewer deadlines,” Bialiatski says, “and simply continue one’s work.”

Bartosz Kielak is a Polish-born British-educated journalist who writes for The Times and The Sunday Times, focusing on central and eastern Europe. He previously worked for Sky News and the BBC, where he was closely involved in shaping coverage of NATO and the war in Ukraine.

Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.