‘Fox News is the channel Trump watches’ Freed Belarusian political prisoner Siarhei Tsikhanouski faces backlash for pressuring wife, opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, to cancel CNN interview
Three months after his release from prison, Belarusian opposition figure Siarhei Tsikhanouski is facing backlash over what many users view as demeaning and controlling behavior towards his wife, opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya. In a livestream earlier this week, he pressured Sviatlana into cancelling a scheduled CNN interview, arguing that it would be counterproductive because it’s not Donald Trump’s preferred channel. Meduza unpacks the controversy.
Belarusian opposition figure Siarhei Tsikhanouski has come under criticism after publicly pressuring his wife, opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, not to participate in a CNN interview, during a livestream event in New York.
Siarhei, who was released from a Belarusian prison in June as part of a deal between Minsk and Washington, was first arrested in March 2020 while collecting signatures for his wife’s presidential campaign. Sviatlana took over his campaign, running against longtime President Alexandr Lukashenko. While independent observers said she won, official results declared Lukashenko the victor, sparking months of protests that the authorities met with a violent crackdown. Sviatlana later fled Belarus and has since led the country’s political opposition from abroad.
On September 24, the couple met with Belarusians in New York and livestreamed the event on Country for Life, the YouTube channel where Siarhei first gained a following in 2019. According to the Belarusian media outlet Plan B Media, Sviatlana had spent the first part of the day at the U.N. headquarters, where she’d met with the presidents of Czechia, Finland, Portugal, and Austria, as well as officials from the U.S., the E.U., and multiple other countries.
Twenty-five minutes after the livestream began, Sviatlana’s team told her it was time for her to appear on CNN for a planned interview. Siarhei strongly objected to this, arguing that both of them should speak with local Belarusians for a full hour as they had planned, rather than cutting the event short for the interview:
That’s not the channel we should be talking to. It’s not Fox News. Fox News is the channel Donald Trump watches, and he’d be glad to see Ms. Tsikhanouskaya on Fox News and release our guys. But if he sees her on CNN, I think it’ll have the opposite effect. And apart from that, we’ve had this meeting planned for a long time. It’s not a good look, it doesn’t seem right, for us to ditch the Belarusians here and run off to CNN, my friends. That’s my opinion.
He added, “All of this is being done by Citizen Franak,” pointing to Sviatlana’s advisor Franak Vyachorka.
Throughout her husband’s needling, Sviatlana remained composed. She eventually told her team to cancel the CNN interview, though Siarhei continued to talk about it for the rest of the livestream.
‘Used as a mascot’
Siarhei’s behavior quickly sparked an online backlash. On Thursday, a day after the livestream, the former political prisoner published an open letter addressing the controversy (though not apologizing).
My rudeness yesterday came out less in my thoughts than in my tone. I know this is a fault I have. That same blunt tone was my main political tool in 2020. The fact that I’m sleep deprived, anxious, and on edge does not excuse my manners yesterday in New York. I was angry about being used. Being used as a mascot. They don’t mention the goals, the schedule of meetings, or the interviews. They don’t ask for my opinion.
He also noted that he often disagrees with Sviatlana’s team. “This is a problem,” he said. “I realize I need to resolve it with minimal cost to our shared cause.”
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In an op-ed for DW, Belarusian journalist Sasha Romanova noted that Belarusian civil society was split, with some viewers seeing the incident as one of a politician publicly humiliating his wife, while others viewed him as standing up for ordinary Belarusians.
“[Siarhei’s] admiration of Trump is no coincidence,” Romanova wrote. “Tsikhanouski likes him not only because he owes his freedom to Trump. He’s also impressed by Trump’s ‘New Sincerity’ style, in which one can be linked to politics and still write everything that comes into their head on social media. This tactic resembles Tsikhanouski’s own.”
Though she cautioned against interpreting the incident as a sign that Siarhei and Sviatlana’s marriage is doomed, Romanova cast the dispute as a function of the way the two opposition figures’ circumstances and roles have changed since Siarhei’s arrest.
One of them has a strategy, a goal, and a team, while the other has nothing except his own talent and an obvious desire to sell himself to the YouTube algorithm as a blogger. That’s what his life consisted of before 2020, and he wants that life back. But Svetlana has been living a different life for five years now, and her goal is to keep Belarus on the global political agenda. Can one of these goals harm the other? Theoretically, yes.
