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The US Diplomat Superior has slipped quietly into the Bélarus, a police state led by a man strongly insulted for decades in the West, traveling by car through the border for meetings with President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko and the chief of his apparatus KGB security.
It was the first meeting of Mr. Lukashenko with a senior official of the State Department in five years, and the beginning of what could be a very consecutive thawing of frozen relations between the United States and the ally closest to Russia.
The American visit below the radar in Minsk, the Belarusian capital, came on Wednesday one day after President Trump made a long telephone call with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. The two events pointed out Washington’s departure from a policy of several years to try to isolate the leaders in disgrace in the West because of their repressive policies and the war in Ukraine.
After interviews with Mr. Lukashenko, Christopher W. Smith, deputy deputy secretary of state, and two other American officials went to a village near the border with Lithuania. There, graciousness of the Belarusian KGB, three people who had been imprisoned – an American and two Belarusian political prisoners – were waiting to be picked up.
While darkness fell, the Americans and the released prisoners returned through the border to Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital. Speaking outside the United States Embassy there on Wednesday evening, Smith praised the success of what he called “a special operation”, describing the liberation of prisoners as a “huge victory and A response to the agenda for President Trump through force. ”
The next stage, Mr. Smith, told Vilnius on Thursday, to a rally of Western diplomats in Vilnius, is a possible big affair in which Mr. Lukashenko would release a series of political prisoners, including the eminents. In return, the United States would relax the sanctions against Belarusian banks and potash exports, a key ingredient of fertilizer, of which Bélarus is a large producer.
People who relayed Mr. Smith’s account on his talks in Minsk spoke subject to anonymity to discuss a confidential meeting. Mr. Smith himself did not publicly reveal who he met or what was discussed, and the State Department did not answer questions about these details.
The Belarus, who generally delights in any sign that he comes out of his isolation, was also especially silent, although an anchor on state television, Igor Tur, presented a note of mystery, suggesting that Mr. Smith was not the real leader of the American delegation and an older senior official also participated.
Franak Viacorka, the chief of staff of the exile opposition chief Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, who has long called to tackle sanctions, said: “We are very grateful to President Trump that he managed to make things happen . ” But, he added, the sanctions should only be attenuated when “Lukashenko stops repression and new arrests” and “releases all political prisoners, including the best personalities”.
Viasna, a group of human rights that maintains A statement of political prisoners in BélarusPut their number this week at 1,226. Mr. Lukashenko has published more than 200 of them in recent months, including two Americans released since Trump took office, but opposition activists say that Even more people were arrested during the same period.
Tatyana Khomich, a sister of one of the most eminent political prisoners in Bélarus, Maria Kolesnikova, welcomed American awareness of Mr. Lukashenko. “The previous pressure strategy has failed to release political prisoners, stop repression or change the behavior of the regime,” she said.
Mr. Smith also managed the Bélarus policy during the Biden administration and began provisional discussions last year with the American allies on the softening of sanctions, but until this week, he had never traveled to Minsk to meet Mr. Lukashenko.
This “direct diplomatic approach could give concrete results, in particular the release of individual prisoners or even a wider amnesty,” said Ms. Khomich, while loosening the dependence of Bélarus with regard to Russia and “preserve a effect of Lever for the United States and the EU ”
A campaign led by the Americans to isolate and bankrupt Mr. Lukashenko under the Biden administration has produced a series of Western penalties. The sanctions against the potash have reduced a significant economic rescue buoy for the Belarusian sovereign, but gave a windfall to Russia, another large producer, while the world prices increased. A Belarusian potash continued to reach the world markets via Russia, rather than by the previous and cheaper road through Lithuania.
Artyom Shraibman, a political analyst who fled the Bélarus after a brutal repression against the demonstrations in 2020, said that Western sanctions had little impact due to the extensive support of Russia to Mr. Lukashenko. But a release of prisoners in exchange for relaxing sanctions, he said, “would mean that they were finally used with a certain effect”.
“It would be definitively a positive development for the prisoners themselves, their families – and potentially to solve broader problems of the relationship” between Belarus and the West, said Shraibman, a non -resident academic in Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center.
How to manage Mr. Lukashenko has upset Western decision -makers for decades. A master with the maneuver between east and west, and silence his detractors at home, he took power in 1994 and won seven increasingly questionable elections, more recently in January, when he has Claimed 87% of the votes, its largest landslide to date.
In 2005, the American secretary of state at the time, Condoleezza Rice, denounced Belarus as the “last real dictatorship remaining in the heart of Europe” – although it was before Mr. Putin consolidated his control Autocratic of Russia.
Discounted by the longevity of Mr. Lukashenko, now 70 years old, his exiled opponents, like Mr. Putin, often asked for comfort according to rumors that he was seriously ill. But Mr. Smith, briefing of Western diplomats in Vilnius, reported that Mr. Lukashenko has shown no signs of bad health and seemed confident and in full control, several of those who attended said.
From a decade ago, the efforts to isolate Mr. Lukashenko gave way to the commitment, in the midst of the signs that Belarus wanted to avoid becoming too dependent on Moscow, the increasingly dominant neighbor of the country.
While being strongly dependent on Russia for cheap oil deliveries, which he needed to maintain his failing economy afloat, Mr. Lukashenko resisted Mr. Putin’s pressure to fully implement an agreement from the 1990s To form a “state of the union” which, according to him, a province of Russia.
Mr. Lukashenko called on Mr. Putin, who rushed into security advisers to help restore control. Vicious repression followed, with mass arrests and torture of prisoners.
Less than a year and a half later, Mr. Lukashenko allowed Russia to use his country as a staging field for its large -scale invasion of Ukraine, with an aborted push in the south of Bélarus to kyiv.
Mr. Smith, according to diplomats who attended his briefing, said the main American objective was to guarantee the freedom of more political prisoners. He said he had asked Mr. Lukashenko if he was ready to reduce repression and was assured that he was. Another important objective, Smith told diplomats told Mr. Lukashenko a certain breathing outside the orbit of influence of Russia.
Piotr Krawczyk, a former head of the Poland foreign intelligence service who worked with the first Trump administration on Russia’s grip on Belarus, said Bélarus was “part of an American approach to the Russia”.
The United States “faces Russia in Ukraine, Africa, the oil and gas sector and in several other strategic areas,” he said. “Negotiation with Belarus creates an additional lever effect so that the United States can point out to Russia that they should be more attentive to American arguments.”
Mr. Shraibman, the analyst in exile, said that a big question was now knowing how the Kremlin would react to any rapprochement between Belarus and the West. Many Russian officials “would probably panic at the perspective,” he said, but “there is no quick or easy way for the Bélarus to distance himself from Russia given the economic domination of Moscow on the country. “
He added that it was unlikely that President Trump “to have a particular interest in, understanding or a plan for the Belarus”. Even so, he said, the “Factor Trump certainly creates a momentum, because everyone, including Lukashenko, tries to impress the American president and compete for his attention.”
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