Unable to broker peace deals in Ukraine and the Middle East, President Trump sent a special envoy to Belarus for talks on Saturday with President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, Russia’s closest ally and a central figure in a decades long struggle between East and West in the former Soviet Union.
Keith Kellogg, a retired lieutenant general and Mr. Trump’s envoy for Russia and Ukraine, held talks with Mr. Lukashenko in Minsk, Belarus’s capital, the first meeting between a senior White House official and the Belarusian strongman in more than five years.
Mr. Kellogg’s visit signaled a sharp turn away from the Biden administration’s policy of trying to isolate and punish Belarus by tightening economic sanctions.
There was no immediate sign that Washington would ease sanctions on Belarus. But John Coale, Mr. Kellogg’s deputy, said the visit to Minsk had secured the release of 14 political prisoners from Belarusian jails. “The United States is now strong so we can get these kind of things done,” Mr. Coale said in a video posted on social media.
The freed prisoners, who arrived in neighboring Lithuania by car on Saturday afternoon, included Sergei Tikhanovsky, a dissident and the husband of the exiled opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya.
Mr. Kellogg met Mr. Lukashenko in the Belarusian leader’s vast, marble-clad official residence, the Independence Palace. “With all the gold here this looks a lot like Mar-a-Lago,” Mr. Kellogg was heard telling Mr. Lukashenko in a video released by Belarusian state media.
Mr. Lukashenko, flanked by the head of his KGB security service, played the jovial host, thanking Mr. Kellogg for coming to Minsk and saying jokingly, “You have made a lot of noise in the world with your visit.”
“Can’t we have a normal dialogue and talk about our affairs — about relations between Belarus and the United States of America?” he added.
Mr. Kellogg was accompanied in Minsk by Christopher W. Smith, a deputy assistant secretary of state who traveled to Belarus in February seeking a grand bargain under which Mr. Lukashenko would release political prisoners in return for an easing of sanctions.
The release of prisoners on Saturday accelerated a slow process in which detainees, including three Americans, have been set free in small groups in recent months. But many more remain behind bars. Viasna, a human rights group that keeps a tally of political prisoners in Belarus, put their number this week at 1,186.
Looming in the background of Mr. Kellogg’s visit was a sensitive question: Can Washington loosen the close partnership between Mr. Lukashenko and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia?
That was the goal when Mike Pompeo, President Trump’s secretary of state at the end of his first term in office, met with Mr. Lukashenko in 2020. That effort collapsed six months later, after the Belarusian leader claimed an implausible landslide victory in an August presidential election and unleashed a vicious crackdown on street protests over a result that was widely seen as rigged.
Mr. Kellogg’s goals appear less ambitious, focused less on pulling Belarus away from Moscow than on securing Mr. Lukashenko’s help in a possible peace deal between Russia and Ukraine.
Belarus allowed Russia’s military to use its territory as a staging ground for the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 but has resisted pressure from the Kremlin to send Belarusian troops into Ukraine.
Balazs Jarabik, a former European Union diplomat who visited Minsk recently, said Mr. Trump’s decision to send his special envoy to Belarus “represents a serious diplomatic upgrade” based on a recognition of Belarus “as a relevant actor in regional diplomacy,” and a shift away from a previous focus on Belarus’s repressive dictatorship.
“Belarus is no longer just a moral cause — it’s a geopolitical challenge,” Mr. Jarabik said, adding that the United States and Belarus have a shared interest in ending the war in Ukraine.
“We live in a very dangerous time, when the crises we face can sharply escalate, grow, if we are not wise and fair,” Mr. Kellogg told Mr. Lukashenko at the start of their talks.
Mr. Lukashenko assured Mr. Trump’s special envoy, that “you will be completely safe on the territory of Belarus” and that “there will be will be no escalation, not only in Belarus but also around us.”
Dependent on Russian energy supplies to keep his country’s ramshackle economy afloat, Mr. Lukashenko took pains ahead of Mr. Kellogg’s visit to assure Moscow that he was not changing sides.
On Friday, he received a visit from Aleksandr I. Bastrykin, the head of Russia’s version of the F.B.I. and a longtime ally of President Putin.
“I want you to understand that in this difficult time, we are with you,” he told Mr. Bastrykin.
How to deal with Mr. Lukashenko has vexed Western policymakers for decades. A master at maneuvering between East and West, and silencing his critics at home, he took power in 1994 and has won seven, increasingly dubious elections in a row, most recently in January, when he claimed 87 percent of the vote, his biggest landslide yet.
Andrew Higgins is the East and Central Europe bureau chief for The Times based in Warsaw. He covers a region that stretches from the Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania to Kosovo, Serbia and other parts of former Yugoslavia.
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