TALLINN, Estonia (AP) — Belarusian authorities have detained more than 100 relatives of political prisoners in a new wave of arrests ahead of January elections in which authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko is seeking a seventh term, human rights activists said Friday.

The Viasna Human Rights Center said the raids began on Thursday, targeting relatives and friends of political prisoners in various cities across the country. They marked an apparent effort to stamp out any remaining opposition to Lukashenko, who has been in power for more than 30 years.

Exiled Belarusian opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya denounced the latest arrests as a “blow to solidarity among Belarusians ahead of January’s pseudo-elections”.

“The regime is trying to break our solidarity and scare the families who are helping their imprisoned relatives,” she told The Associated Press.

Andrej Stryzhak, head of the BySol group that coordinates assistance to political prisoners and helps evacuate dissidents, told AP that his organization is doing everything it can to help people leave the country if they fear arrest.

“The authorities are trying to destroy a solidarity network that has emerged in Belarus during four years of brutal repression,” he said. “BySol’s evacuation service was operating at full capacity. We have a lot of requests.”

Belarusian authorities responded to the massive protests that were sparked by the widely disputed 2020 vote that gave Lukashenko a sixth term in office with a brutal crackdown that saw around 65,000 people arrested.

Major opposition figures were either imprisoned or fled the country. Human rights activists say Belarus now holds around 1,300 political prisoners and that many of them are denied proper medical care and contact with their families.

The authorities intensified the crackdown ahead of the January 26 elections. A recent wave of arrests also targeted participants in online chats created by residents of blocks of flats in various Belarusian cities.

At the same time, Lukashenko has pardoned 146 political prisoners since July, which observers saw as a signal that he is open to dialogue with the US and the European Union, which have imposed wide-ranging sanctions over his crackdown on dissent. Those freed had health problems, wrote pardon petitions and said they had repented.

Earlier this week, the authorities also permissive jailed activist Maria Kolesnikova, one of the most popular opposition figures, to meet her father after more than 20 months without any communication with relatives or friends.

“The authorities are conducting an information campaign to create the appearance of a ‘thaw,’ which increases the risks for politically active Belarusians,” Stryzhak said.