Overview
- John Coale met President Alexander Lukashenko in Minsk on Sept. 15 for their first face-to-face talks in six months and reported an interim agreement to move negotiations forward.
- Under the interim deal Belarus will pardon or release 25 people and the United States will lift sanctions on two Belarusian companies, officials and state media said.
- Rights groups and U.N. experts say some prisoners were collected from penal colonies on Sept. 16, but they warn more than 900 political prisoners remain and new arrests continue.
- U.N. human rights experts have found systematic violations across Belarus’s judicial process, citing arbitrary arrests, torture, closed trials and denial of legal safeguards.
- The talks also focus on unfreezing roughly $43–44 million held at Citibank and on whether economic concessions will alter Minsk’s close ties with Moscow or simply normalize an authoritarian regime.