Alexander Lukashenko has held power in Belarus since 1994, longer than any other head of government in Europe, through a combination of Soviet-style state control, systematic political violence, and a security apparatus that human rights organizations have documented committing torture, forced disappearance, and the long-term imprisonment of journalists, activists, and opposition figures. None of that has changed. What has changed is who is calling him a friend.

Earlier this month, President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social thanking Lukashenko for his "cooperation and friendship" following the release of a small number of political prisoners held in Belarusian detention. The phrase "So nice!" closed the message. It is the kind of warm language the current U.S. administration has deployed almost exclusively toward leaders with authoritarian records — and notably absent when addressing democratic allies pressing for accountability.

The prisoner release, while welcomed by the families of those freed, must be weighed against the scale of what Lukashenko's government has built. The Viasna Human Rights Centre, a Belarusian civil society organization whose own founder Ales Bialiatski was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022 while imprisoned by the same government, documented well over a thousand political prisoners held as of early 2025. Releasing a handful under external diplomatic pressure is not a policy reversal — it is a negotiating tactic, and a historically well-worn one.

The Trump administration has also moved to ease sanctions on Belarusian state institutions and companies. Those sanctions were put in place by both the U.S. Treasury and the European Union following the fraudulent August 2020 presidential election, which independent observers and Belarus's own opposition documented as a fabrication, and the subsequent crackdown in which security forces beat, detained, and tortured protesters in the tens of thousands. The sanctions were also deepened after May 2021, when Belarusian authorities scrambled a fighter jet to force a Ryanair flight to land in Minsk so they could arrest dissident journalist Roman Protasevich — an act the International Civil Aviation Organization formally investigated as a violation of international aviation law.

What the White House appears to be constructing is a transactional framework in which Lukashenko exchanges individual prisoners — people he should never have imprisoned — for sanctions relief, diplomatic normalization, and the extraordinary prize of a public embrace from an American president. For Lukashenko, who spent years a pariah even by regional standards, this is a windfall. For the roughly thousand people still in Belarusian political detention, it redefines their imprisonment as leverage rather than injustice.

The European position is visibly uncomfortable. French President Emmanuel Macron and other EU leaders have spent years building a coalition approach to Belarus, conditioning normalization on concrete, verifiable improvements in human rights — not on drip-fed prisoner releases timed to diplomatic moments. Washington moving unilaterally to warm relations not only undercuts that framework but signals to Minsk that it can play the Americans off against Brussels, exactly as the Kremlin has long done in other contexts.

Belarus's relationship with Russia is the other variable that makes this alignment stranger still. Lukashenko allowed Russian forces to stage from Belarusian territory for the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Belarusian infrastructure, logistics corridors, and airspace were integral to the initial assault on Kyiv. Lukashenko has denied being a co-belligerent in the legal sense, but the military geography is not ambiguous. Easing pressure on Minsk while the war in Ukraine continues sends a signal about the administration's actual red lines — or the absence of them.

The argument the White House will make, and is already gesturing at, is pragmatic: engagement produces results, sanctions produce defiance, and getting people out of prison matters more than maintaining principled distance. That argument is not without logic in a narrow sense. But it elides the documented pattern in which authoritarian governments use selective prisoner releases to buy breathing room, then resume arrests once external attention fades. Belarus did exactly this in 2015, releasing political prisoners under EU pressure, receiving a partial sanctions suspension, and subsequently resuming the same practices.

What is happening here is not diplomacy in the traditional sense of mutual concessions toward a stable outcome. It is the United States lending its prestige to a government that shot a civilian airliner out of the sky to arrest a blogger, tortured protesters in industrial quantities, and has operated as a forward base for a war of aggression against a neighboring country. The prisoners who were freed are real people who deserved their freedom. The man who freed them, on his own schedule and at a price, is still the man who put them there.