Belarus, Russia’s closest ally, has released an American prisoner and two others from jail, an exiled opposition group said on Wednesday, in the latest sign that the autocratic Belarusian president, Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, was looking for ways to improve frozen relations with the West.
The releases, announced by an opposition group led by Svetlana Tikhanovskaya in Lithuania, a neighbor of Belarus, followed what Western diplomats said was a secret visit on Wednesday to Minsk, the Belarusian capital, by a U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state, Christopher W. Smith. The group did not identify the American who was freed.
The State Department did not respond to messages seeking comment on whether Mr. Smith had traveled to Minsk, in what would be the highest-level visit to Belarus by an American official since Mike Pompeo, a secretary of state during President Trump’s first administration, went there in 2020 seeking to “normalize” ties.
Mr. Smith, a holdover from the Biden administration, last month helped secure the release of another American citizen held in Belarus, Anastassia Nuhfer.
Franak Viacorka, chief of staff to Ms. Tikhanovskaya, said in a video posted on Telegram that he had visited the U.S. Embassy in Vilnius, Lithuania, and picked up one of the people he said had been released, Alena Movshuk, whom he described as an activist.
He did not name the freed American but said the third person set free was Andrey Kuznechyk, a journalist with the Belarus service of Radio Free Europe, an American-funded news organization.
Lithuanian government officials said that an American citizen had on Wednesday entered that Baltic nation from Belarus. They did not give a name, either. They said that Mr. Smith was now in Vilnius and would hold meetings there on Thursday with European diplomats.
Since Mr. Pompeo’s trip to Minsk in February 2020, relations between Belarus and the West have gone from bad to worse, poisoned by Mr. Lukashenko’s brutal crackdown on nationwide street protests following what his opponents and Western governments say was a rigged presidential election in August 2020.
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, which was launched in part from Belarusian territory, frayed relations further. The United States shut its embassy in Minsk soon after the start of the invasion.
In recent months, however, a slow but steady stream of prisoners, mostly people jailed for involvement in the 2020 protests, have been released in what analysts and opposition activists see as an effort by Mr. Lukashenko to get his country in from the cold.
Mr. Lukashenko, long wary of becoming too dependent on Russia for economic and security support, has a long history of maneuvering between East and West, a game that ended abruptly after the post-election crackdown in 2020 but which he now appears eager to revive.
An early opponent in the 2020 race was Sergei Tikhanovsky, but he was arrested shortly after announcing his candidacy and later sentenced to 18 years in prison, where he remains. Ms. Tikhanovskaya, his wife, became a candidate in his place, but she fled the country shortly after the election and was sentenced in absentia to 15 years.
With all of his prominent critics either driven into exile or jailed, and all potential rivals kept off the ballot in a presidential election last month, Mr. Lukashenko cruised to yet another landslide victory, his seventh in a row, with 87 percent of the vote — even more than the 81 percent he claimed in the disputed 2020 election.
