In a quiet but consequential shift, Belarusian strongman Alexander Lukashenko and US president Donald Trump have embarked on an unlikely détente. The results have been tangible: scores of political prisoners released, US sanctions eased on key Belarusian industries, and the first meaningful diplomatic opening between Minsk and the West in years.
But for Europe, the moment is unsettling. Lukashenko is routinely described as the continent’s “last dictator,” and since his brutal suppression of the 2020 Minsk protests, the European Union has pursued sanctions and near-total diplomatic isolation — typically in lockstep with Washington.
Now, that unity has fractured. As Lukashenko grows increasingly dependent on Vladimir Putin and hungry for international recognition, Trump has recast engagement with Minsk as a humanitarian success story — one that bolsters his Nobel Peace Prize aspirations and potentially strengthens his hand in Ukraine diplomacy.
Washington’s experiment has forced an uncomfortable question in Brussels: if engagement frees prisoners, what exactly is Europe’s isolation achieving?
EU sanctions at odds with Trump’s thaw
In August, Trump placed a phone call to Lukashenko from Air Force One. In the months that followed, US emissaries delivered birthday cards and cufflinks to the Belarusian leader. Then came a concrete breakthrough: In December, Lukashenko released and forcibly deported 123 political prisoners. In exchange, Washington relaxed sanctions on Belarus’ crucial potash industry.
The humanitarian optics were a win for the White House. For the EU, however, the outcome is murkier.
Since 2020, the EU has imposed harsh sanctions on Belarus in response to fraudulent elections, violent suppression of protests, and persistent human rights abuses. After hundreds of thousands of Belarusians took to the streets, opposition candidate Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya was forced to leave the country.
Analysts, historians, and members of the Belarusian political opposition in exile told The Parliament that Europe must hold its line, regardless of Washington’s pivot.
“Let’s call it good cop, bad cop,” said Franak Viačorka, the chief political advisor to Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, the Belarusian president-elect who was forced out of the country in 2020. “When the Americans are doing humanitarian work, talking to Lukashenko, the European Union is strengthening pressure, and the more pressure Lukashenko has, the more people will be released,” he added.
So far, European leaders seem to agree. Speaking from Brussels in December, Foreign Affairs Chief Kaja Kallas said that the EU must continue isolating “a regime that for four years already has helped Russia prosecute its war of aggression against Ukraine.” Days later, European leaders expanded sanctions further, citing hybrid security threats.
Hanna Liubakova, an exiled Belarusian journalist and non-resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, told The Parliament that Washington is replaying a familiar cycle. Lukashenko, she said, treats political prisoners as a “renewable resource”: release a few to secure sanctions relief, then quietly refill the prisons.
Internal repressions don’t stop, she added, even as the regime benefits.
That said, not all members of the Belarusian democratic opposition agree with a purely punitive approach. Natalya Kovaleva, a fellow at the Russia and Eurasian program at Chatham House, recently wrote that the EU’s refusal to engage with Minsk risks strategic short-sightedness, especially on humanitarian and civil-society issues that could anchor Belarusian society to Europe.
The debate has divided the exile opposition into camps, according to Ingo Petz, a journalist with Dekoder and an expert on Belarus. But beneath the disagreement lies a deeper question: why is Lukashenko engaging with the US now — and what does it mean for the future of Belarus?
A dangerous dependency — and an opening
Lukashenko rose to power in 1994 through democratic elections. Over three decades, he has stayed there through repression, propaganda and an ever-closer alliance with Moscow.
But what surprises some analysts today isn’t his brutality, but his adaptability and savvyness at bending reality to stay in power.
“We've always thought about Lukashenko as a sort of old-fashioned dictator from the past,” said Peter Vermeersch, a professor at KU Leuven specializing in Eastern Europe and Belarus.“But I think if we look back we conclude that he was ahead of his time.”
Under previous US administrations, engagement of this kind would have been hard to imagine.
Evelyn Farkas, executive director of the McCain Institute in Washington D.C. and a former deputy assistant secretary of defence for Russia, Ukraine and Eurasia, said that during the Obama years, policy toward Belarus was in lockstep with Europe, and that it would have been unthinkable to put Obama on the phone with Lukashenko.
“Normally we would never encourage a president to spend time with someone like that,” she said. “We understood that Lukashenko wanted to keep a relationship with the West with the same reason that the Ukrainians wanted it, to maintain some semblance of sovereignty from Russia.”
The Biden administration largely pursued a similar policy of sanctions and pressure on Belarus, although Lukashenko released a few prisoners in the summer of 2024 as part of a larger prisoner swap between Russia and the West.
After crushing protests in 2020, Lukashenko found himself isolated from the West. Moscow stepped in quickly, signing a number of new agreements with Lukashenko to further integrate the two countries. Belarus became central to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, hosting troops and even accommodating Russian nuclear weapons.
“He became a vassal state of Moscow after 2020,” Jan Balliauw, the author of Putin’s Dream and a senior associate fellow at the Egmont Institute, told The Parliament, adding that Lukashenko's ability to maneuver geopolitically since 2020 has been “limited considerably” by his dependence on Putin.
That has made Lukashenko hungry for even symbolic recognition from Trump. Katsiaryna Lozka, a research fellow at the European Policy Centre and Egmont Institute, said it helps explain why Lukashenko was suddenly open to receiving Trump’s emissaries and releasing political prisoners, adding that it also plays well domestically.
“He can say, ‘Look, I'm recognized internationally,’” Lozka said. “That gives him legitimacy.”
It also provides distance from Putin, said Nick Castillo, the editor of the Eastern Neighborhood Bulletin. With the growing threat of Belarus being swallowed by Russia, Lukashenko must fight to maintain even a semblance of sovereignty.
Trump’s unconventional emissary to Belarus, John Coale, has leaned into that opening with a string of trips to Belarus since Trump took office, even throwing back vodka shots with Lukashenko. For now, both sides appear satisfied: Lukashenko gains legitimacy and sanctions relief; Trump can claim humanitarian success.
“As long as this is a humanitarian dialogue, I think this works,” said Liubakova. “The danger is if Lukashenko gets legitimized.”
Belarus and Europe’s unfinished business
Belarus has long suffered from what Lozka called an “invisibility” problem facing many Eastern European countries. For the region, and indeed Belarus, that neglect is becoming harder to justify.
Belarus should become more central to the “whole picture of geostrategy for Europe,” according to Petz. It’s critical that Belarus maintain sovereignty from Russia to keep the possibility of a democratic future in the country alive, he said, while still not rewarding the Lukashenko regime.
For most analysts and opposition figures, EU pressure remains vital, even as Trump pursues his stated goal of releasing all remaining 1,000-plus political prisoners still in Belarus.
“We advise them to continue,” Viačorka told The Parliament when asked about what the Trump administration’s next move should be. “Belarus can be a success story for Trump.”
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