He Stayed in Belarus for His Imprisoned Wife. Now He’s Locked Up, Too.
Two journalists, both in detention for their work, show how President Aleksandr Lukashenko’s repressive machine grinds on despite warming ties with the U.S.
By Valerie Hopkins
How much are you willing to sacrifice for the one you love?
For the Belarusian journalist Igor Ilyash, the answer is at least four years of personal freedom.
His wife, Katsiaryna Andreyeva, who is also a journalist, was arrested in 2020 as she and her colleagues ran a livestream of a protest against Belarus’s autocratic leader, Aleksandr G. Lukashenko.
While hundreds of thousands of Mr. Lukashenko’s critics are estimated to have fled the country as he violently cracked down on dissent against his tainted election victory, Mr. Ilyash stayed. He wanted to make sure he could visit his wife in prison and organize care packages for her, he said in an interview in 2023.
After she was prosecuted in 2022 in a secret trial and sentenced to eight years in prison, they wrote letters to each other, and he was allowed visits, though infrequent, to the women’s penal colony where she was held. They could see each other through a pane of glass and speak on a monitored telephone.
As he continued to work as a journalist, he expected that he, too, would eventually be arrested, he said in the 2023 interview. He started carrying an emergency bag with him at all times. Last October, almost four years after his wife’s arrest, the Belarusian riot police came for him. A judge sentenced him in September to four years in a “strict regime colony,” which is considered harsher than an ordinary penal colony, for his political commentary. Mr. Ilyash was accused of “discrediting the Republic of Belarus” and “repeatedly facilitating extremist activities.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/01/world/europe/belarus-political-prisoners-igor-ilyash-katsiaryna-andreyeva.html