Trump administration deletes sanctions against Belarusian dictator's plane
The U.S. had promised the action in exchange for a prisoner release earlier this fall.
Call it the sanctions version of the toy in a cereal box. On Tuesday, as the U.S. Department of the Treasury announced new sanctions against alleged cybercriminals tied to North Korea, the administration quietly followed through on another promise while attention was diverted elsewhere: lifting sanctions on the personal plane of Belarus’ authoritarian leader Alexander Lukashenko.
This move was in some ways unsurprising. In September, as Reuters reported, Belarus released 52 political prisoners in exchange for the same aviation relief the Trump administration is now granting.
That said, it all adds up to a striking step toward warmer ties between Washington and one of Russia’s closest authoritarian allies, a country whose land Putin used to stage the 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
The lifting of sanctions comes after a friendly visit by a U.S. official to the Belarusian capital of Minsk earlier this fall. There, the envoy, John Coale, spoke of reopening the American embassy and rebuilding the diplomatic relationship between the two countries.
Belarus—which the U.S. Department of State still warns travelers to avoid—has been under Lukashenko’s control since the mid-1990s, when he won a popular election following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Any semblance of democracy vanished soon afterward, as he consolidated power, suppressed free speech and political opposition, and yanked the country firmly into Russia’s orbit (Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine are the world’s three East Slavic nations).
He’s often called Europe’s “last dictator.”
But his regime met an existential threat in 2020, when mass pro-democracy demonstrations broke out across the country after what was widely believed to be another rigged presidential election tilted towards the strongman.
Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, the candidate who challenged Lukashenko in that race, remains in exile.
The brutal crackdown that followed in Minsk led relations between Belarus and the West to crumple. Former President Joe Biden signed an executive order in 2021 to give his administration more latitude to slap sanctions on Belarus.
Now the tide has turned again—with a fleet of aircraft connected to the dictator Lukashenko newly unsanctioned.
American sanctions do remain in place against Lukashenko himself. For now.