Jailed Belarusian dissident Kalesnikava permitted visit from father

Jailed Belarusian dissident Maria Kalesnikava, a key figure in the opposition movement to President Alexander Lukashenko, was permitted to meet her father on Tuesday, the first time any picture of her has been seen in well over a year.

A picture of Kalesnikava with her father appeared on the Telegram messaging app, posted by Roman Protasevich, a former jailed dissident who now says he is acting as an intermediary between authorities and Belarusians living in exile abroad.

A second photo showed a smiling Kalesnikava on her own. Associates of the dissident said the photos appeared to have been taken in a prison hospital.

"The regime showed Maria. She's alive and we are happy about that," Franak Viacorka, an aide to exiled opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, said in a text message sent to Reuters.

"I think that's the result of the international campaign for Maria and international pressure and solidarity of course."

Viacorka said he saw no sign that Kalesnikava or other leading opposition figures would soon be released.

"It's rather an attempt of Lukashenko to show sort of humanity," he said. "It's crazy, you know, when such situations happen - we're happy that someone is alive."

Tsikhanouskaya ran against Lukashenko in the 2020 presidential election, which triggered unprecedented protests when Lukashenko was officially declared the winner.

Tsikhanouskaya, posting on X on Tuesday, said she was "deeply relieved" to see pictures of Kalesnikava and her father after she was "kept incommunicado for more than 600 days".

Kalesnikava first backed another subsequently jailed opposition candidate in 2020 and switched her support to Tsikhanouskaya.

She was seized on the street after the election by masked officers and taken to the Ukrainian border, but thwarted an attempt to deport her by ripping up her passport. She was jailed for 11 years on charges including conspiracy to seize power.

Kalesnikava's sister, Tatsiana Khomich, told Reuters in September that Kalesnikava was ill while being held incommunicado and had lost a lot of weight.

Lukashenko, a close ally of Kremlin leader Vladimir Putin, has been in power since 1994 and is running for a seventh term in January. He has pardoned small groups of inmates jailed on charges related to extremism, most on grounds of ill health.

He told the BBC last month he might consider pardoning Kalesnikava if she were to petition him.