The Polish-Belarusian journalist Andrzej Poczobut, the 2025 Sakharov prize winner, has been freed after five years in a Belarusian penal colony as part of a US-brokered multi-country swap deal.

His release has been confirmed by Poland’s prime minister, Donald Tusk, who posted a picture of him on social media, saying: “Andrzej Poczobut is free! Welcome to your Polish home, my friend.”

The release comes as part of a broader attempt to bring Belarus closer to the west, after the US secured the release of 123 prisoners including the Nobel peace prize winner Ales Bialiatski and the opposition figure Maria Kalesnikava late last year and removed some sanctions, including on Belarusian potash, a key export.

Poczobut – a prominent Polish community activist in Belarus and a journalist for Poland’s newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza – was detained by the Belarusian authorities in 2021. He was sentenced to eight years in a penal colony after a process widely condemned as a politically motivated attempt to silence the regime’s critics.

In recent years, there were growing warnings about his deteriorating health, with a UN-mandated report published last month sounding alarm over “prolonged solitary confinement” and “denial of essential medical care” in the prison he was in.

The release is part a US-brokered prisoner exchange involving several other countries: Belarus, Kazakhstan, Moldova, Poland, Romania, Russia and Ukraine. Tusk said it was “the finale of a two-year complicated diplomatic game, full of dramatic twists and turns”.

The talks with Belarus’s authoritarian leader, Aleksandr Lukashenko, often called “Europe’s last dictator”, were led by the US special envoy to Belarus, John Coale, who confirmed that three Poles and two Moldovans were released as part of the swap.

Speaking at a press conference in Warsaw, he said that “basically an argument with Lukashenko is, what are you getting out of this?”

“It hurts you internationally and if Belarus wants to join the family of nations, this kind of things have to stop. If you want to put people into prison for good reason, great, that’s your business, but not for these types of crimes,” he said.

Coale said he was planning to go back to Belarus in “two or three weeks” for further talks with the Belarusian regime.

“The United States has a lot to do on this issue, there’s 800 to 900 political prisoners left to get out of Belarus, and we haven’t stopped our work at all until we get every last one of them,” he said.

Poland’s president, Karol Nawrocki, credited by Coale for his role in the swap, thanked the US president, Donald Trump, “for bringing out the release of our compatriot”.

Separately, the foreign minister, Radosław Sikorski, said Poczobut’s release was a symbol of Poland’s commitment to look after Poles abroad and to the freedom of the media.

He also praised the US-Polish relationship, stressing the exchange would not have happened without the US involvement, and thanked Trump.

Russian state media reported that a jailed Russian archaeologist and historian, Alexander Butyagin, wanted by Ukraine for excavations in Russian-occupied Crimea, was released by Poland as part of the swap.

In 2025, Poczobut was awarded the European parliament’s Sakharov prize for freedom of thought, with the body’s president, Roberta Metsola, hailing him and co-winner Mzia Amaglobeli from Georgia as “two journalists whose courage shines as a beacon for all who refuse to be silenced”.

“Both have paid a heavy price for speaking truth to power, becoming symbols of the struggle for freedom and democracy,” she said.

On Tuesday, she responded to his release by saying it was “wonderful news”. “Very happy to see Sakharov prize laureate Andrzej Poczobut free,” she said.

Poczobut’s longtime employer, Gazeta Wyborcza, celebrated the release on its website, saying: “Andrzej Poczobut is finally free! The dictator has released our colleague from the penal colony.”

The newspaper’s deputy editor-in-chief, Bartosz Wieliński, posted a picture with Poczobut, captioned: “The first kilometres of freedom. We’re heading to Warsaw.”

Morgan McSweeney has admitted that Foreign Office officials came under intense pressure to expedite Peter Mandelson’s posting as UK ambassador to Washington, but denied they were forced to “skip steps” in security vetting to do so.

Keir Starmer’s former chief of staff, who resigned earlier this year over the scandal, acknowledged that he had asked the then top official at the department, Philip Barton, to conduct the process “at pace” but not to do anything “improper”.

In a rare appearance before MPs on Tuesday, McSweeney said: “There is a real difference between asking people to act at pace and asking people to lower standards. We never did that. We never asked people to skip steps at any part of the process … It was all about, can we do this at pace, not, can we do anything improper.”

He insisted he had not been involved in Mandelson’s vetting process, nor had he asked officials to “ignore procedures, request that steps should be skipped or communicate explicitly or implicitly that he should be cleared at all costs” as that would have been “unacceptable”.

His evidence to the foreign affairs select committee came after Barton told the MPs there “absolutely” was pressure from Downing Street over the pace of vetting. Olly Robbins, his sacked successor, has previously told the committee he felt “constant” pressure to get Mandelson into post.

McSweeney told MPs that learning the extent of Mandelson’s ongoing links with Jeffrey Epstein – after he had been questioned about red flags raised by the due diligence process and sent to Washington – was like a “knife through my soul”.

He admitted he should have asked civil servants in the Cabinet Office’s propriety and ethics team (PET) to seek clarification with Mandelson at that stage, rather than doing so himself, given their own relationship.

“When I look back on it, I certainly think it would have been much, much better if I’d asked PET to ask those follow-up questions. I guess my thinking at the time was, I’d put follow-up questions to him in writing … he would feel more obligated to give truth and the full truth,” he said.

“The nature of the relationship that I understood he had with Epstein was not a close friendship. [It] was a passing acquaintance that he regretted having and that he apologised for. What has emerged since then was way, way, way worse than I had expected at the time.”

McSweeney said Starmer would not have gone ahead with the appointment had he known the full truth. “The prime minister did not have enough information because Mandelson did not share the necessary information with him. He had ample opportunity to do so and did not.”

He acknowledged that withdrawing Mandelson’s appointment over his failure to get security clearance would have been “embarrassing” for the government, but “far preferable” than allowing it to proceed.

Many Labour MPs are angry that Downing Street, which had been aware at the time that Mandelson was close enough friends with Epstein to stay overnight at his house, decided to send him to Washington regardless.

McSweeney admitted he had made a “serious error of judgment” in advising Starmer to appoint Mandelson, but that he had felt his “experience, relationships and political skills”, including on trade, could serve UK interests as Donald Trump re-entered the White House.

In his own evidence to the committee, Barton said No 10 seemed “uninterested” in the vetting process around Mandelson’s appointment, and said there were no avenues for him to express his concerns.

Asked if he was under pressure to get the vetting done quickly, he said: “Absolutely … I don’t think anyone could have been in any doubt in the department working on this that there was pressure to get everything done as quickly as possible.”

He denied having received any phone call from McSweeney – long rumoured – which had asked him to “just fucking approve it”. McSweeney told MPs that such Westminster rumours were “corrosive” to faith in the political system.

Barton, who left the Foreign Office in January, said he was unaware of No 10’s intention to appoint Mandelson until a day before the announcement. “I wasn’t involved, I wasn’t told a decision was coming,” he said.

Barton told the committee he believed his concerns about Epstein were shared by the national security adviser, Jonathan Powell.

But he said the “die was cast” and there was no possibility of advising against the appointment. He told the committee it was unusual to announce the appointment before vetting had been completed. “The normal order is vetting then announcement,” he said.

Barton said he had been in discussions with the former ambassador Karen Pierce about extending her appointment in the US, but he was presented with the Mandelson appointment “and told to get on with it … There was no space for dialogue.”

Barton said he was well aware of the “toxic” nature of the Epstein connection from his time in the US and his understanding of American politics. “I didn’t know anything that wasn’t in the public domain. Now we know a lot more about Mandelson’s links to Epstein.

“But I had a concern that a man who, demonstrably from the public record at the time … had a link to Epstein. [I knew] that Epstein, through the presidential election campaign in the US and more generally in US politics, had been and was a controversial figure, and I was worried that this could become a problem in future.”

He said there was “no space or avenue or mechanism for me to put that on the table” even though he said he was aware of tweets from those close to Trump reminding the incoming president about Mandelson’s negative comments about Trump.

“I’d been deputy ambassador in Washington and therefore occasionally chargé [d’affaires, a diplomat who acts as the head of a diplomatic mission in the absence of an ambassador], and I knew very well [that] to do the job effectively, you have to be party to some of the deepest secrets that the UK government holds. But I also recognise that the situation was unusual,” he said.

Asked if Number 10 was “dismissive” of the vetting, Barton said: “The word I would use is uninterested. I think people wanted to know that all the practical steps required for Mandelson to arrive in Washington on or around the inauguration date. It needed to be completed at pace.”

But he said McSweeney did not call to insist he approve the appointment. “It’s been floating around the media since last September. There’s different versions, sometimes involving swear words, sometimes not. And I’ve really racked my brains and I cannot recall Morgan McSweeney swearing in a meeting at me or indeed in general.”

One year ago today, all of Spain, and much of Portugal, suffered through a blackout of unprecedented scale and duration. In mere seconds, a cascading sequence of events burst through the grid and created Europe’s first “system black” event in recent memory.

Traffic signals failed, mobile networks stopped working entirely, petrol stations could not pump fuel and supermarkets couldn’t process payments. Madrid’s metro came to a halt and people had to be pulled out of carriages. “People were stunned because this had never happened in Spain,” Carlos Condori, a 19-year-old construction sector worker, told AFP at the time. “There’s no [phone] coverage, I can’t call my family, my parents, nothing: I can’t even go to work.”

Power was mostly restored in the days after, but the political debate – domestic and global – began just hours after the blackout occurred. Spain’s grid collapsed when solar power generation was high, triggering intense discussions around Spain’s transition away from fossil fuelled power and, controversially, nuclear. The media published headlines such as “Renewable energy triggered Spain’s blackouts”, “Spain at risk of fresh net zero blackouts” and “Spain power cut caused by solar farm failures”.

But despite a widespread theory assigning blame to renewables for a lack of “inertia” – the heartbeat of the grid traditionally provided by large spinning masses in fossil fuel and nuclear plants – subsequent investigations have found conclusively that this was not a factor. The final report published by the pan-European grid operator ENTSO-E ultimately blamed the blackout on a “perfect storm” of several governance failures relating in particular to voltage. This is the pressure of electricity on the grid, and when it is too high or too low, power lines and generators tend to automatically disconnect. This in turn triggers a cascading failure through the grid.

And while some might have expected the blackout to lead to a move away from renewables, it is clear the opposite has occurred. A year on, there is no material reduction in Spain’s efforts towards the replacement of its coal and gas-fired power stations with non-fossil alternatives. According to data from global energy thinktank Ember, Spain added 13.8 gigawatts of new solar in 2025, compared with 12.3 gigawatts in 2024, and the country’s highest-ever month of capacity additions was July 2025.

Chris Rosslowe, a senior energy analyst for Europe at Ember, told the Guardian that Spain’s “trajectory towards reducing fossil power and increasing renewables and their enablers has strengthened since the blackout”.

There was some increase in the use of gas-fired power generation post-blackout, running in “reinforced mode” to allow gas plants to help control the grid’s voltage. But this was not a sign that returning to gas is the best long-term course of action. Rather, Rosslowe said, “Spain lacked alternatives”, including large lithium-ion battery storage, or the use of large spinning motors that can provide the same heartbeat of stability to the grid provided by the spinning turbines in coal and gas plants, without the emissions. Rosslowe also highlighted that half of the gas increase in 2025 was simply down to less wind and lower hydro capacity.

One of the reasons voltage oscillated outside normal bounds this time last year was because Spain’s grid operator has traditionally limited the capacity for wind and solar generation to contribute to voltage control. Fakir pointed out this has very recently changed, with renewable technologies providing voltage compensation services since April. She added that “it is unfortunate that a blackout had to occur to change regulation and allow renewables to control grid voltage”.

In the intervening months since the blackout, a devastating conflict has broken out in the Middle East, and the closure of the strait of Hormuz has sent gas prices steeply upwards. But Spain has been relatively protected compared with other countries because of its existing investment in renewable energy. Jan Rosenow, a professor of energy and climate policy at the University of Oxford, said, “wholesale electricity prices would have been 40% higher in the first half of 2024 without the wind and solar growth of recent years”.

The crisis has also flipped the focus back towards reducing reliance on gas in Spain’s grid. José Luis Rodríguez, an analyst and the head of organisation at the Meridiano Institute, said: “All the chatter around renewable insecurity has collapsed with the energy shock that is brewing. The shield of the sun and wind is the only thing guaranteeing relatively affordable energy prices for the majority, unlike elsewhere in the EU, and protecting our economy.”

In 2025, gas was framed as saving the grid from renewables. But in 2026, renewable energy is protecting consumers from the acute impacts of gas. Rosslowe said: “Spain’s average power prices in March (€43 per MWh) were the third lowest in Europe, after Finland and Portugal, twice as low as Germany (€99 per MWh) and three times as low as Italy (€144 per MWh). That’s because of the weakened link between Spanish electricity and gas prices.”

Frustration that it took such an acute blackout catastrophe to spur action to further protect Spain’s power grid users from the gas price crisis is a common theme among energy experts and advocates. But far from any structural return to fossil fuels, the long-term trendlines in Spain all continue to point in the opposite direction, while the political and social fallout from the April 2025 blackout shows that tackling disinformation is as important as fixing the grid.