Belarusian political prisoner and former presidential candidate Viktor Babariko has been hospitalised on April 27 after reportedly having been badly beaten, causing his lung to collapse, Kyiv Independent reported on May 4.

Babariko is serving a 14-year sentence on politically motivated charges. He was the front-runner to defeat Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko in the highly charged August 2020 presidential elections that were massively falsified and led to months of mass protests.

Babariko was leading in the polls and collected four times the necessary signatures for his petition to run for president. His campaign manager was Maria Kolesnikova, who went on to join Svetlana Tikhanovskaya to challenge Lukashenko in the vote after all the leading opposition candidates were arrested, including Tikhanovskaya’s husband, who also remains in jail.

Kolesnikova was also later arrested and is also serving a long prison sentence on politically motivated charges. She has also fallen ill and was hospitalised in an intensive care unit in November, but remains in jail.

The former head of Belgazprombank, a local affiliate of Russia’s state-owned Gazprombank, Babariko was also an active philanthropist and art collector, who had broad appeal to Belarus’ middle classes. He helped finance the publication of books by Belarusian Nobel Laureate Svetlana Alexievich and the return of original paintings by Belarusian artists, among other things.

Babariko would have been a good compromise candidate, as he was well-known in Moscow and while he was for liberal reforms he also made it clear that he believed Belarus’ future was in a close relationship with Russia and not the EU.

However, Lukashenko, threatened with losing the election, jailed Babariko on trumped up charges before the election, unleashing a wave of repression as he started to lose control of the situation.

Babariko relatives confirmed that he was admitted to a surgical ward with a collapsed lung. He also allegedly has traces of severe beating, Kyiv Independent  reports. A spokesperson from the penal colony said on April 29 that Babariko is “alive and well.”

His former campaign members said he can’t be transferred from the hospital, as it could pose a real health risk, and added that his whereabouts are unknown.

Authorities raided Belgazprombank during his campaign and arrested him for allegedly conducting a decade-long money-laundering operation and dishing out bribes worth over $12mn. He was sentenced to 14 years in prison a month before the elections were held in 2020.

Amnesty International has called Babariko a "prisoner of conscience, prosecuted solely for the peaceful exercise of his human rights, including freely expressing his political opinions."