A German citizen who was sentenced to death after being convicted in Belarus of terrorism was pardoned Tuesday in a surprise move by the country’s authoritarian leader, Alexander Lukashenko, Belarusian state media reported.
Krieger’s trial was murky, with no independent media coverage or public evidence presented. He was convicted last month and sentenced to death. He had been shown handcuffed, in tears, pleading with the German government to help him “before it’s too late.”
Lukashenko’s unexpected pardon, just hours after Krieger formally requested it, came as at least seven prisoners charged in political cases in Russia disappeared over the past two days from the penal colonies where they were being held and were moved to undisclosed locations, lawyers and family members said.
Ilya Yashin, a prominent Russian opposition politician serving an 8½-year sentence after being convicted of “spreading fake news” about atrocities by occupying Russian soldiers in the Ukrainian city of Bucha, was removed from a penal colony in the Smolensk region and taken to an unknown location on Tuesday, according to his lawyer.
Also on Tuesday, a 19-year-old dual Russian-German citizen, Kevin Lik, who was recently sentenced to four years in prison for treason, disappeared from a colony in the remote northern Arkhangelsk region. His mother sent a food parcel to the colony but received a message that Lik was no longer incarcerated there.
A few hours later, friends of Daniil Krinari, an artist and antiwar activist, said in a statement on the Telegram messaging platform that he was also moved from a pretrial detention center in Moscow.
Two other prisoners — Ksenia Fadeeva and Lilia Chanysheva — are former directors of regional offices of the late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who died in February in an Arctic prison. Fadeeva and Chanysheva were imprisoned for their work in Navalny’s organization, which has been labeled as extremist by the Russian authorities.
Alexandra Skochilenko, a pacifist artist who was sentenced to seven years for a trivial antiwar protest, was moved to Moscow from a detention center in St. Petersburg, supporters said.
The seventh prisoner to be moved to an unknown location was Oleg Orlov, a 71-year-old human rights campaigner convicted of “repeatedly discrediting” the Russian military in his criticism of the war in Ukraine.
Russian authorities did not provide any explanation for the moves, and it was unclear if they were connected.
Senior Russian officials, including Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, have said that talks are underway about a potential prisoner exchange that would involve the American journalist Evan Gershkovich, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal who was convicted during a hasty trial in Russia this month of espionage charges that he, his employer and U.S. officials called baseless.
There was no confirmation from U.S. or Russian officials that the movement of Russian prisoners was connected to any exchange.
