By Gram Slattery and Humeyra Pamuk
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -A senior Trump administration official is planning to travel to Belarus in the coming days to meet the country’s president, according to four sources briefed on the matter, as ceasefire talks between Ukraine and Russia remain deadlocked.
If the official, Ukraine envoy Keith Kellogg, meets Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, he would be the highest-ranking U.S. official to visit the authoritarian state in years.
The precise agenda of the meeting is unclear, though Kellogg in private has portrayed the trip as a step that could help jump-start peace talks aimed at ending Russia’s war against Ukraine, said two of the sources, who requested anonymity as the trip has not been made public.
The State Department and the Belarusian embassy in Washington declined to comment. Kellogg and the White House did not respond to requests for comment.
Planning for such trips requires careful negotiation, and it is possible the trip could be canceled or modified at the last moment.
In 2020, during Trump’s first term, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo visited Belarus in what was then the highest-level U.S. visit to the eastern European country in over 20 years. The trip was part of a campaign under the first Trump administration to improve relations with Belarus at a time when relations between Minsk and Moscow were at a low point.
Trump’s successor, Democratic President Joe Biden, shifted course after the 2020 Belarusian election, which international observers condemned as neither free nor fair. Massive street protests followed the election and were met with a brutal crackdown, and Belarus was largely shunned by Western countries.
The U.S. suspended operations at its embassy in 2022 as it became clear to Washington that the country would support Russia in its invasion of Ukraine.
Under Trump’s second term, however, the administration has renewed its efforts to establish a working relationship with Belarus.
One U.S. official told Reuters the Trump administration had internally discussed ways to pull Minsk out of Moscow’s sphere of influence and toward Washington’s orbit, if only marginally.
In February, a deputy assistant secretary of state, Christopher Smith, and two other State Department officials traveled to Belarus to retrieve three political prisoners, The New York Times reported at the time. Smith had privately described the trip as the first step of a potential deal that would see scores of political prisoners released in return for an easing of U.S. sanctions, the Times reported.
A separate senior U.S. official pointed to the April 30 release by Belarus of Youras Ziankovich, a 47-year-old naturalized American citizen, as a sign that Lukashenko wanted to improve relations with Washington.
Western diplomats, however, have expressed skepticism about U.S. efforts to court Belarus, which remains firmly aligned and has deep economic links with its neighbor Russia.
(Reporting by Gram Slattery and Humeyra Pamuk; Additional reporting by Steve Holland; Editing by Don Durfee and Leslie Adler)
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