By Mark Trevelyan and Andrius Sytas
(Reuters) -In the neutral zone on the border between Belarus and Lithuania, an elderly man maintained a lonely vigil on Thursday.
Opposition politician Mikola Statkevich was the most prominent figure among 52 political prisoners freed earlier in the day by Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko at the request of U.S. President Donald Trump.
He was the only one who refused to cross the border into neighbouring Lithuania, where the released detainees were greeted later by U.S. officials and Belarusian opposition leaders at the U.S. embassy in Vilnius.
It was unclear why Statkevich, 69, had refused to leave. The exiled opposition says freed political prisoners should have the right to stay in Belarus rather than submit to what it says are in effect forced deportations.
“This is a real drama because Mikola Statkevich completely refused to leave Belarus and they are trying to force him out,” a senior opposition official, Franak Viacorka, told Reuters.
“This shows how cruel the regime is, because they didn’t leave any choice to people to stay or to go.”
Opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya posted on X that Statkevich had “reportedly returned to Belarus”.
She called him “a true hero of our people” and wished him “strength, safety and freedom”.
Webcam footage from the border showed Statkevich, dressed in black, sitting on a low wall in the no man’s land between the border posts of the two countries. But in later images, he had disappeared, apparently back to Belarus.
Statkevich himself could not be reached for comment.
“We did not confirm his identity, we did not see his documents. But recently he went back inside the Belarus border crossing point, we do not see him now. He did not enter Lithuania,” a Lithuanian border guard spokesperson told Reuters.
There is a precedent for Belarusian dissidents refusing to be expelled. In 2020, pro-democracy protest leader Maria Kalesnikava became a hero of the opposition when she tore her passport into small pieces to prevent security officers from forcing her to cross the border into Ukraine.
She was not among those freed on Thursday, and remains in jail.
Statkevich, who ran against Lukashenko in a 2010 election, was arrested in May 2020 and sentenced in 2021 to 14 years in a maximum security prison for “organising riots”.
Human rights group Viasna says he fell sick with pneumonia in 2022, has suffered five spells of solitary confinement and been deprived at various times of his right to receive visits and parcels.
(Reporting by Mark Trevelyan in London and Andrius Sytas in Vilnius; Editing by Alexandra Hudson)
