Alexander Lukashenko at a signing ceremony in Minsk, Belarus, 6 December 2024. Photo: EPA / Grigory Sysoyev / Sputnik / Kremlin
Ukraine has imposed sanctions on Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko over Minsk’s increasing support for Russia’s war effort, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announced on Wednesday.
Writing on X, Zelensky said the new measures aimed to combat “all forms” of Lukashenko’s “assistance in the killing of Ukrainians” and that Kyiv would work with its partners to ensure they had a “global effect”.
“Alexander Lukashenko has long been trading Belarus’s sovereignty for the continuation of his personal power, helping Russians circumvent global sanctions for this aggression, actively justifying Russia’s war, and now further increasing his own participation in scaling and prolonging the war,” Zelensky wrote. “There will be special consequences for this.”
According to Zelensky, Lukashenko allowed Russia to deploy a number of relay stations in Belarus in late 2025, which it used to launch drone strikes on northern regions of Ukraine.
Without Belarus’s support, Moscow would not have been able to carry out a number of those strikes, many of which targeted energy and railway infrastructure, Zelensky said.
He added that over 3,000 Belarusian companies were supplying the Russian military with machinery, equipment and “critically important” components for weapons, including missiles that “terrorise our cities and villages”.
Minsk had also supplied parts for Russia’s new Oreshnik missile system, Zelensky said, with Lukashenko permitting Moscow to develop infrastructure to deploy the hypersonic ballistic missiles in Belarus.
While Lukashenko has long been under US and European sanctions for his rampant human rights abuses and routine electoral fraud in Belarus, the White House lifted some of those measures late last year as part of a deal that saw Lukashenko release dozens of political prisoners in an apparent thaw in relations with US President Donald Trump.
In January, Lukashenko accepted Trump’s offer for Belarus to join his Board of Peace, a unilateral US initiative to oversee the reconstruction of Gaza. Earlier this week, the Belarusian leader said Minsk was “utterly serious” about working with the body and that it would use its membership to assert its “sovereign position” on global affairs.
