In February 2020, Mike Pompeo became the first American secretary of state to visit Belarus in 26 years. After a meeting with President Alexander Lukashenko, he told the country’s foreign minister and assembled reporters the visit was “a bit overdue” and that the United States was committed to “Belarusian sovereignty.” Several months earlier, national security adviser John Bolton also made the trip to Minsk in service of normalizing U.S.-Belarusian relations and had what he called “a fascinating conversation.”
Protests in Belarus
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Nina Jankowicz: The West can’t coddle Belarus’s authoritarian leader anymore
A man holds a picture of the Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko reading "Go away!" during a protest rally against police violence during recent rallies of opposition supporters, who accuse strongman Alexander Lukashenko of falsifying the polls in the presidential election, in central Minsk on August 14, 2020.
