Europe’s narrowing menu on policy towards Belarus

Vilnius, Lithuania - Mat 18 2025: Protest supporting Belarus against ongoing repressions and call for free with photos of imprisoned Belarusians. Photo: Michele Ursi / Shutterstock

Since declaring its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, Belarus has repeatedly faced sanctions from the European Union. Rather than remaining static, the EU’s sanctions regime evolved significantly, following the rhythm of oscillating Minsk-Brussels relations and complementing a broader “Belarus strategy”. Today, the EU’s approach has narrowed to a sanctions-only framework, limiting Brussels’ influence and weakening its leverage over Minsk. However, if strategically redeployed and reinforced by Washington, this leverage could underpin a recalibrated Belarus strategy capable of producing a genuine triple-win.
 

Although Belarus largely remained absent from the foreign policy priorities of the European Community – later to become the EU – in the early 1990s, it signed a Partnership and Co-Operation Agreement (PCA) with EU member states in 1995, following similar agreements by Ukraine, Russia and Moldova. This agreement, however, never entered into force. In response to Belarus’s 1996 constitutional referendum, seen as evidence of the country’s democratic backsliding, the EU imposed its first-ever sanctions against Belarus in 1997: the European Parliament suspended PCA ratification, withdrew support for Belarus’s membership in the Council of Europe, and urged the Belarusian authorities to “respect basic democratic and human rights”.

Building on this initial response, Brussels adopted a hardline, conditional approach towards Minsk, making democratic reforms a prerequisite for deeper integration. Alongside this, it embraced a dual-track approach: supplementing top-down measures – such as sanctions or diplomatic pressure – with bottom-up engagement, most notably support for civil society and opposition actors. By 2004, this model had fully crystallized, coinciding with the EU’s eastern enlargement, which made Belarus its immediate neighbour and revitalized Brussels’s interest in the region through the launch of the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP).

The dual-track model became a hallmark of EU policy during each subsequent phase of diplomatic estrangement. The 2006 presidential elections were no exception, prompting another wave of targeted sanctions and Belarus’s suspension from the EU’s generalized system of preferences in 2007.

Nonetheless, strategic calculations and interests soon altered the EU’s approach. A confluence of geopolitical developments and domestic adjustments – including the fallout of the 2008 Russo-Georgian war, Minsk’s strained energy relations with Moscow, and Lukashenka’s superficial domestic reforms – created an opening for rapprochement by 2008. The EU’s earlier strategy of strict, coercive conditionality gave way to a more pragmatic approach, shifting the focus of EU-Belarus relations towards depoliticized, technocratic areas of mutual interest and placing democratic aspirations on the back burner.

Riding the momentum of renewed engagement with Brussels, Minsk steadily deepened its bilateral ties, securing a place in the newly launched Eastern Partnership programme (EaP). This integration trajectory was briefly disrupted by the 2010 presidential elections, traditionally marked by widespread electoral fraud and repression, which triggered new targeted sanctions and an arms embargo from the EU. Yet by 2012, the EU returned to its previous course. Up to the year 2020 the EU progressively lifted sanctions, restored diplomatic engagement, established new bilateral mechanisms, and reinforced its support for Belarusian civil society. In parallel, Belarus made its own moves: it distanced itself from Russia, gradually released political prisoners, and further solidified its EU engagement by supporting Ukraine’s sovereignty in 2014 – eventually enabling the EU to turn a blind eye to the country’s lack of domestic democratic progress and accept its new status as a peace guarantor and regional mediator. These combined dynamics, accompanied by Minsk’s stalled integration talks with Moscow in late 2019, brought EU-Belarus relations to their diplomatic peak by early 2020.

In sum, prior to the turning points of August 2020 and February 2022, the EU’s sanctions policy toward Belarus functioned as an adaptable element of its dual-track diplomacy, serving as a supplement to broader diplomatic efforts. Generally imposed following the failure of broader conditional incentives or disruptive moves by Lukashenka’s government, sanctions were rarely maintained long term, reflecting the EU’s consistent prioritization of diplomatic engagement and pragmatic concerns over confrontation – much like its policy toward Russia post-2014. Though certain sanctions episodes carried a coercive function, securing concessions like the release of political prisoners or the resolution of the 1998 Vienna Convention breach, others were primarily symbolic and aimed solely at signalling. Still, despite their limited leverage – partly stemming from the recurring pattern of sanctions’ imposition and lifting, and the absence of any economic impact – sanctions continued to function as both a deterrent and a tool for engagement in the EU’s broader strategy towards Belarus.

When the menu changed: sanctions after August 2020

The current structure of the sanctions regime against Belarus was largely consolidated over the course of 2020, 2021 and 2022. In a striking resemblance to the 2010 elections, the presidential vote of August 2020 led to mass peaceful protests and was met with police brutality, violence, and human rights violations. In reaction to the unprecedented domestic upheaval, the EU imposed a series of targeted sanctions, disrupting the prior trend of rapprochement. The initial package was adopted in October 2020, with subsequent rounds soon following. Although these measures were not intended to have any direct material impact, they nevertheless sparked a cycle of retaliatory diplomatic measures: Belarus downgraded its involvement in the Eastern Partnership, halted the EU-Belarus Coordination Group and the human rights dialogue, and accelerated its turn toward Russia – a pivot that would soon appear all-encompassing.

Another major turning point came on May 23rd 2021, when Belarus hijacked a Ryanair flight travelling from Athens to Vilnius and detained prominent opposition journalists upon landing at Minsk Airport. This act of state-sponsored piracy triggered an immediate EU response: by June 4th, Belarusian aircrafts were banned from EU airspace and airports. More importantly, the incident marked the internationalization of Belarus’s domestic repressions, extending the issue into the realm of European security and prompting further sanctions. The most consequential of these, at the time, came on June 24th 2021, targeting key sectors of Belarus’s exports to the EU. This shift effectively expanded the role of sanctions in the EU’s foreign policy toward Belarus to include economic measures with tangible effects on the country’s sensitive sectors. In turn, Lukashenka’s regime retaliated by suspending the readmission agreement and facilitating the transit of migrants into the EU through Belarus – leading the EU to further expand the scope of its sanctions regime, subjecting a wider range of individuals and entities to travel bans and asset freezes.

The transformation of hybrid hostility towards the EU into conventional warfare against Ukraine on February 24th 2022, marked another defining shift. Belarus’s logistical and territorial support for Russia’s strikes and the advancement of its forces during the early stages of the invasion reshaped the EU’s normative and strategic calculus towards the country, marking the opening of a new sanctions track related to Belarus’s involvement in Russia’s unprovoked and unjustified aggression. From then on, a new trend in EU sanctions policy emerged – one in which Belarus was reclassified as part of an adversarial bloc and a Russian outpost. As a result, the EU synchronized its restrictions on Minsk with those imposed on Moscow – yet in certain aspects, the regime applied to Belarus has been even more stringent. This pattern has remained a core feature of EU policy to the present day. 

Alongside the external sanctions track tied to Belarus’s role in Russia’s aggression – a focus that has effectively overshadowed the original justifications for the 2020-2021 sanctions – the EU has continued to pursue an internal track of sanctions targeting human rights violations and repression that persist in the country. Together, these two key dimensions constitute the backbone of the EU’s “Belarus sanctions framework”. Each of the 12 sanctions packages adopted to date has progressively expanded in both scope and intensity – blacklisting new individuals, expanding restrictions on previously targeted sectors, and adding new sectors altogether.

The missing recipe (yet reserved seat)

Sanctions have thus transitioned from being symbolic and situational to gradually supplanting broader diplomatic efforts, evolving into the sole mechanisms of Minsk-Brussels relations post-February 2022. What initially began as a principled, democracy-based conditionality, and later evolved into functional and depoliticized cooperation, has now effectively transformed into a principled confrontation embedded in a broader regional security framework.

Despite the centrality of sanctions in the EU’s Belarus policy and their positioning within the broader domain of geopolitics, they have yielded neither tangible economic disruption nor a measurable behavioural shift in Lukashenka’s regime, completely failing to meet their core objectives since 2020. On the contrary, sanctions and Minsk’s subsequent adaptation strategies may be seen as contributing, among other factors, to worsening human rights conditions and increased government support within Belarus, in turn pushing the country into even tighter dependence on Russia – socially, economically, politically, and militarily – culminating in the country’s new status as a nuclear site on the EU’s doorstep.

Within this new configuration, the EU’s value-based sanctions regime on Belarus has been overshadowed by a security-oriented framework that casts Belarus solely as a co-aggressor, not as a sovereign actor in its own right. This has drawn the EU into a dynamic where outcomes – including Belarus’s further isolation from the EU and its deepening alignment with Russia – are no longer subject to its control. Far from reflecting a coherent broader approach towards Belarus, the prominence of sanctions within the EU’s “Belarus strategy” underscores the absence of one, with sanctions now effectively shaping developments rather than responding to them.

Ironically, it was the EU’s principal transatlantic ally – the United States – whose purely pragmatic and transactional approach, despite Washington’s interest confined narrowly to Belarus’s southern and western neighbours, managed to extract tangible concessions from Minsk. In the Trump administration’s first 250 days, four high-level visits and the lifting of sanctions on Belarus’s national airline – Belavia – led to the release (or, more accurately, the forced deportation to Lithuania) of 71 political prisoners, many of them European or American citizens.

However unprincipled such tactics might appear to Brussels, they were widely applauded across Europe, not least by Belarus’s exiled democratic forces now based in the EU. And as Washington signals a path towards full normalization with Minsk – something Trump’s envoy, John Coale, underscored during his recent visit to the capital on September 11th – the EU finds itself increasingly boxed in. It can either stay the course with a sanctions-only approach or revert to the transactional prisoner diplomacy practiced a decade ago. Neither path, however, spares Brussels the cost to its credibility, values, or leverage over Minsk.

For all its reliance on sanctions, the EU’s structural importance to Belarus endures. Once a key market, investor, and transit hub for Belarus’s third-country trade – and a balancing force within Minsk’s multi-vector foreign policy – the EU still matters. If its leverage is redeployed as part of a broader strategy and complemented by Washington’s sustained regional engagement, it could form the foundation for a recalibrated Belarus strategy – one that moves beyond sanctions alone and is capable of delivering a genuine triple-win for the EU, the US, and Belarusian society.

Vitali Matyshau is a Belarusian civic activist associated with an NGO focused on advocacy, supporting Belarusian political prisoners and their relatives. His academic focus lies primarily in the security of the Eastern European region and Georgia. He is pursuing a master’s degree in International Relations at NMBU, Norway.

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belarus, EU, political prisoners, sanctions