Body
The Trump administration announced it was easing restrictions on a set of Belarus-linked financial and fertilizer-related companies, a step it said reflected improving circumstances and progress in ties between Washington and President Alexander Lukashenko. The changes were announced by the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, which said it and the State Department determined that “circumstances no longer warrant the prohibitions.”
In remarks during a Cabinet meeting on Thursday, President Donald Trump said his administration would roll out “a variety” of policies “to support American farmers” as it wages a war in the Middle East. The administration linked the farm-focused messaging to disruptions to fertilizer supplies caused by the war with Iran, which the report said had limited exports of nitrogen fertilizers made in the Persian Gulf.
The easing centers on Belarus-linked firms tied to banking and the potash fertilizer market. The companies removed from the sanctions list include the Belarussian Bank of Development and Reconstruction and Belinvest-Engineering, along with fertilizer producers Belaruskali, Belarusian Potash Company and Agrorozkvit.
Before Thursday’s announcement, Lukashenko met earlier in the month with Trump’s special envoy for Belarus, John Coale, in Minsk. Coale told reporters at the time that the United States would lift sanctions imposed on two Belarusian state banks and the Finance Ministry and would remove the top Belarusian producers of potash from the sanctions list.
The Treasury Department also issued a general license before the White House event that allows certain transactions with companies that would otherwise be banned under the Belarus sanctions. In its statement accompanying the licensing and removal action, the Office of Foreign Assets Control said it determined, together with the State Department, that circumstances no longer require the prohibitions.
The administration’s move did not mean all penalties tied to the named companies were removed. Treasury said the action does not free up frozen assets tied to those companies, and that broader sanctions remain in place.
In addition to the sanctions changes, the report said the earlier Minsk meeting included a deal in which Lukashenko ordered the release of 250 political prisoners as part of efforts to ease some U.S. penalties. The Thursday announcement came after that sequence of diplomacy, sanctions licensing and removals, and the administration’s farm-oriented framing of the step.