Where is Viktor Babariko? The political prisoner has disappeared.

When he ran for president of Belarus in 2020, Viktor Babariko, a middleof-the-road successful banker who pledged to bring democracy, separation of powers and term limits after nearly three decades of Alexander Lukashenko’s autocracy, was leading in the polls. Mr. Babariko was summarily arrested before the vote to prevent him from campaigning and subsequently sentenced to 14 years in prison on trumped-up charges of bribery.

Now, he and other prominent political prisoners have vanished.

According to Deutsche Welle, Mr. Babariko was held incommunicado earlier this year. A spokesman, Gleb Germanchuk, said lawyers had received no news about him since February. “Relatives and lawyers are not allowed to see him,” Mr. Germanchuk said. “Recently, he has been constantly in the ShIZO,” or solitary confinement, he added. Then, on April 27, the spokesman told DW that Mr. Babariko was hospitalized in the Novopolotsk penal colony. He reportedly had been beaten so brutally that doctors did not recognize him until they saw his name on the records, and they had to treat a collapsed lung.

Since then, no one has heard from Mr. Babariko and no one knows where he is. His former campaign headquarters lawyer, Ilya Salei, said, “As far as I understand, some kind of campaign is underway to completely isolate political leaders from the outside world and information, to influence them, perhaps not only morally but also physically.”

To make matters worse, the Lukashenko regime has also attempted to neutralize political prisoners’ lawyers. On March 20, according to the human rights group Viasna, six lawyers were arrested after having worked for well-known political prisoners. Among them is Ivan Chyzhyk, the last lawyer to represent Mr. Babariko.

Others have also disappeared. Maria Kolesnikova, the Babariko campaign manager, who later joined Svetlana Tikhanovskaya on the stump — they won the 2020 election, which Mr. Lukashenko then stole from them — is still imprisoned and hasn’t been heard from in nearly three months. Ihar Losik, a popular blogger, also imprisoned, has been out of contact nearly as long. Ms. Tikhanovskaya’s husband, Sergei, who earlier sought to run for president and was imprisoned to knock him out of the race, has also been cut off. Ms. Tikhanovskaya, now living in exile, said Thursday she has not heard from him in two months.

As of May 18, Viasna has identified 1,497 political prisoners in Belarus, and the true total is likely higher. In the past, it was at least possible for lawyers and human rights defenders in Belarus to track their whereabouts. Now the regime appears to be using evermore repressive tactics like those of North Korea, where prisoners are forcibly disappeared for months or years. Meanwhile, Mr. Lukashenko has also kept out of public view in recent weeks, apparently seriously ill.

The entire world should demand that the dictator answer: Where is Viktor Babariko? Show us he is alive. What has become of the others? Belarus’s political prisoners cannot be allowed to vanish.