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.
“Each new stage,” Mr. Ilyash told an organization for independent Belarus journalists in 2021, “makes our relationship even deeper.”
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.”
Belarus continues to lock up anyone who criticizes the government, even as the Trump administration rewards Mr. Lukashenko with improved relations. More than 1,200 political prisoners remain jailed in Belarus, including at least 27 journalists among the 83 prosecuted since 2020.
Volha, a supporter of Mr. Ilyash who asked that her surname be withheld because of security concerns, said that the verdict was not a surprise, but that it was still “devastating” because Mr. Ilyash was being punished for his writing.
Now in a pretrial detention center pending a Nov. 14 appeal, Mr. Ilyash, 37, is unable to exchange letters with his wife, who is 31. They communicate through Ms. Andreyeva’s parents and grandparents.
Through them, Ms. Andreyeva sends advice to her husband about handling the psychologically grueling transfer to the penal colony where he will serve his sentence if his appeal fails, Ms. Andreyeva’s grandmother Alla Vaganova said in an interview at her home in Minsk, the Belarusian capital.
“As an experienced inmate, a seasoned prisoner, she writes to Igor: ‘For the transfer, you’ll need socks, a hat, warm thermal underwear,’” Ms. Vaganova said.
Ms. Andreyeva works six and a half hours a day, six days a week, in a factory sewing uniforms for police officers and soldiers, said Irina Slavnikova, a former colleague who had been incarcerated with her. She also occasionally writes poems, including one she sent to her grandparents before Igor’s birthday in July to make sure it would reach him.
Knowing that their words are read not only by their parents and grandparents, but also by prison censors, the couple have found a way to send coded words and inside jokes to each other.
“For now, they just exchange signs of attention, confessions of their feelings and moral support,” said Ms. Andreyeva’s grandfather Sergey Vaganov, who regularly writes to both of them.
“Each of them writes some phrases that are understandable only to them both,” he said.
The couple started dating in 2015, when both were journalists at Radio Liberty, an American state-funded media organization that Belarus has since banned as an “extremist” group. On their first date, Mr. Ilyash recounted in 2021, they narrowly avoided being detained after visiting a polling station on Election Day.
They got married in 2016, on the wedding anniversary of the bride’s parents. Ms. Andreyeva’s real surname is Bakhvalova, but she chose a professional pseudonym to honor her father, Andrei, when she went to work at Belsat TV, a Poland-based network that targets a Belarusian audience.
The couple continued to collaborate professionally, investigating high-level corruption and writing a book about Belarusians who had been involved in the separatist insurgency fomented by Russia in eastern Ukraine starting in 2014. The book, “Belarusian Donbas,” was published in 2020. The following year it was deemed “extremist” and banned.
In 2020, the couple decided they were ready to have children, Mr. Ilyash said in the 2023 interview. They wanted a daughter, Ms. Andreyeva’s grandmother said, and had even picked a name: Sonia.
History intervened. In August 2020, Mr. Lukashenko faced the biggest challenge to his regime in his decades as president. Hundreds of thousands of people protested election results widely deemed to be falsified. For months, Belarusians marched for political change.
Ms. Andreyeva anchored live broadcasts describing the size of the crowds and chronicling the increasing force being used against the demonstrators. She braved attacks on journalists to film the security forces. Her grandparents, at their dacha outside Minsk, pleaded with the couple to leave Belarus.
Ms. Vaganova, her grandmother, recounted how in one broadcast Ms. Andreyeva hid from the riot police in a stranger’s apartment.
“We hear her voice saying, ‘I am lying on the floor and conducting this report,’” Ms. Vaganova said. “Those were horrible days.”
In November 2020, Ms. Andreyeva narrated film showing the security forces assaulted a protester, Roman Bondarenko, who was beaten unconscious and later died. She was arrested that night.
She was first sentenced to two years in prison. State investigators then drummed up new charges in 2022 of “state treason,” which Amnesty International called “bogus.” Her secret trial led to her sentence of the eight additional years. She is not allowed to tell her husband or her parents what her supposed crime was.
Ms. Slavnikova, the former colleague of Ms. Andreyeva’s at Belsat, served a sentence at the same penal colony until being freed in September. She said Mr. Ilyash’s arrest “had a very strong impact” on his wife. Ms. Andreyeva worried about her husband, Ms. Slavnikova said, and about the additional burden placed on her family in caring for two political prisoners. Two years ago, Ms. Andreyeva’s mother was diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer.
Ms. Slavnikova said the release of Sergei Tikhanovsky, a high-profile blogger whose wife ran against Mr. Lukashenko in 2020, had given Ms. Andreyeva hope that she, too, might be freed before her sentence ended. The Trump administration has brokered a series of releases of Belarusian political prisoners.
“This hope gave us new strength that, yes, the process is underway, and we just need to wait a little bit,” Ms. Slavnikova said in a phone interview shortly after her release.
Sergei Sparysh, who spent more than five years in prison for being an active supporter of an opposition politician, was freed in September. He said he hoped for more releases. But “others will be arrested,” he said. “A conveyor belt is working.”
The schedule on display in the Minsk City Court where Mr. Ilyash was sentenced offers support for Mr. Sparysh’s contention. Of nine hearings planned that day, seven of them, including Mr. Ilyash’s, were for political cases.
Mr. Sparysh, 39, recounted horrible treatment in prison, including being deprived of sleep for two weeks straight and spending about 150 days in a punishment cell in solitary confinement. He said political prisoners were forced to wear yellow badges and were treated poorly by the guards. The political prisoners used the bathroom last and ate last in the dining hall, and were assigned the worst tasks, he said.
Similar treatment is likely to await Mr. Ilyash. But he will finally be able to write letters directly to his wife.
Valerie Hopkins covers the war in Ukraine and how the conflict is changing Russia, Ukraine, Europe and the United States. She is based in Moscow.
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