A Repressive Russian Ally Feels a Mysterious Thaw From the U.S.

When he was first put into the crimson-colored cell with padded walls, Mikola Dziadok thought that his Belarusian jailers had found a new way of tormenting him.

Soon he was whisked into a van with other political prisoners at the central K.G.B. prison in Minsk, the capital. They were ordered not to look out the windows as the vehicle sped down a highway, past the well-kept pastures of northwestern Belarus and across the border into Lithuania.

Suddenly, the van stopped by the side of the road. The doors flung open, and a man addressed them. “Hi, I am John Coale,” the man said, according to Mr. Dziadok. “President Trump sent me to free you all.”

Mr. Coale, a Trump administration envoy, had helped broker the release of 52 Belarusian political prisoners. His appearance in the country last month was the latest chapter in the United States’ unlikely rapprochement with Belarus, an autocratic Eastern European country that is a client state of Russia, which sees itself as fighting a war against the West.

Ties between the United States and Belarus have been in a deep freeze for years because of Belarus’s political repression and its assistance in the Russian invasion of Ukraine. There is no public indication that the administration is pushing Belarus to change course on either of these issues, and analysts say it is unclear what the United States hopes to get out of the thaw. The State Department did not respond to a request for comment.

Keith Kellogg, special envoy to Russia and Ukraine — and Mr. Coale’s boss — has said that the administration wants to make Belarus a conduit for messages to Russia as Mr. Trump tries to bring peace in Ukraine. Mr. Kellogg described the prisoner releases as an unexpected side benefit, though they have given Mr. Trump a chance to burnish his humanitarian credentials.

Mr. Coale has framed the diplomacy as reflecting Mr. Trump’s open-arms approach to adversaries that want to discuss normalizing relations. Mr. Trump has shown a particular affinity for strongmen like Belarus’s longtime ruler, Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, whom he has called a “highly respected” and “powerful” president. In most of the West, Mr. Lukashenko is reviled as a dictator who continues to run a police state and arrest political opponents, with more than 1,200 still in prison.

For Belarus, analysts say, the warming relations are an easy win for Mr. Lukashenko. He has won concessions from the United States, including the lifting of sanctions on the Belarusian national airline, which some analysts say could benefit both Belarus and Russia. Closer U.S. ties could also serve as a hedge for Belarus as its economic lifeblood, Russia, suffers a slowdown.

When Mr. Dziadok, 37, was freed last month after spending a total of almost 10 years in prison for his antigovernment activity, he was euphoric. “I was shouting, ‘God bless America,’” he said in an interview in Vilnius, Lithuania, where he was taken after being released. “I was so happy. At that moment, I loved the whole American administration.”

He quickly added, “But only for that moment.”

Releasing Mr. Dziadok and the dozens of others was a “huge humanitarian win for the American administration,” said Artyom Shraibman, a Belarusian political analyst at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center. Yet the diplomacy could be described as “exchanging hostages for goodies,” he said, calling it a “very, very big and hard moral question.”

Sergei Antusevich, a former labor union leader in Belarus who was released from prison last year, was blunter. “This deal actually encouraged human trafficking,” Mr. Antusevich said. “People were actually sold for Boeing parts and aircraft maintenance.”

The Trump administration is renewing a normalization effort that came to a halt in 2020, when Mr. Lukashenko, aided by Mr. Putin, suppressed protests against what Western governments called a sham election that kept the Lukashenko regime in power. Two years later, the freeze deepened when the Belarusian leader allowed the Kremlin to use his country as a staging ground for the invasion of Ukraine.

Signs of a turn in U.S. policy emerged shortly after Mr. Trump was inaugurated in January, when a top State Department official, Christopher W. Smith, traveled to Minsk. Mr. Coale and his boss Mr. Kellogg have since made several trips to Belarus, carrying gifts like a letter from Mr. Trump and White House cuff links.

In addition to announcing the lifting of sanctions against the Belarusian airline Belavia last month, Mr. Coale expressed hope of reopening the U.S. Embassy in Minsk, which closed days after the war in Ukraine began in February 2022.

Mr. Antusevich, the former labor union leader who was released last year, recounted a meeting with a fellow activist, Aleksandr Yarashuk, after Mr. Yarashuk was freed last month. He said that when he embraced Mr. Yarashuk, it felt as if he were hugging “half a person, because there are just bones left.”

The day before Mr. Yarashuk and the others were released, a political prisoner died in detention, the ninth in five years, according to Viasna, a human rights watchdog whose founder, Ales Bialitski, is also in jail.

To some observers, Washington’s policy has rewarded Mr. Lukashenko without forcing him to address any of the issues that caused the relationship to crumble in the first place.

Mr. Lukashenko remains “a co-belligerent in a war that Russia itself has said it is waging against the West,” said Nigel Gould-Davies, a senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies and a former British ambassador to Belarus. Minsk has “performed every kind of service for Russia in this war except contributing its own troops,” he added.

“It’s clear why Lukashenko wants this, considering he’s given away nothing of significance and begun to gain things, which will also put him in Russia’s good books,” Mr. Gould-Davies said.

“The puzzle is not why Lukashenko is doing this, but why Trump is,” he added.

According to Mr. Gould-Davies, the lifting of sanctions on the Belarusian airline could give Russia access to urgently needed spare parts for its aircraft, as well as servicing and maintenance. But aviation experts said they doubted that Mr. Lukashenko would make such transfers because of the penalties he could face for violating sanctions on Russia.

Mr. Lukashenko has said his goal is “full normalization of relations” with the United States, especially in the fields of “politics, economy, trade.”

Some observers argue that he is trying to win back room for maneuvering after becoming fully dependent on Russia in 2020 and that it would be pragmatic for Western countries to engage with him and try to change his behavior.

Years of Western sanctions, including on Belarus’s banks and mineral exports, have only made the country into what Valery Kavaleuski, a former Belarusian diplomat now in exile, “a threat to international peace and security.”

Yauheni Preiherman, director of the Minsk Dialogue Council on International Relations, a group seen as close to the Belarusian Foreign Ministry, said the sanctions had pushed Belarus to retaliate in the security and humanitarian spheres, including by sending migrants toward the borders with Poland, Lithuania and Latvia.

Mr. Preiherman said that Mr. Lukashenko was eager not to be “forgotten” in any peace negotiations between Ukraine and Russia, to ensure that if sanctions were lifted on Moscow they were also lifted on Minsk. He also noted that Belarus had contended with economic strains after an initial lift from its assistance to Russia’s war effort. Hundreds of thousands of Belarusians have emigrated, causing labor shortages.

Still, Mr. Lukashenko has some cards to play. As repeated Russian drone incursions sow alarm in Europe, analysts say he is using the moment to remind the West that his country is the only thing standing geographically between European countries and Russia. Mr. Lukashenko also sees leverage, analysts say, in the fact that Belarus will be a key in maintaining any peace in Ukraine, with whom it shares a 650-mile border.

Mr. Gould-Davies, the analyst and former ambassador, said that Russia would see weakness in the United States’ dealings with Belarus.

“Russia will be taking note,” he said, “of how much America is giving away in return for how little.”

Tomas Dapkus contributed reporting from Vilnius.