Belarusian opposition leader asks for US sanctions

Belarusian opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya is renewing calls for the US to expand its sanctions targeting Belarus' oil and fertilizer industries.

Tikhanovskaya, who met yesterday with US secretary of state Tony Blinken and other State Department officials in Washington, today said she asked for additional sanctions and was given assurances that the US administration will unveil "strong actions" against Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko's government and state owned enterprises.

"We talked about sectoral sanctions because they are most powerful — they would hit the enterprises, they would hit Lukashenko's cronies," Tikhanovskaya said at a discussion hosted by Washington think tank the Atlantic Council. "They monopolized the potash, oil, steel and wood processing enterprises, and sectoral sanctions would hit the regime."

The US administration on 3 June resumed enforcing sanctions against nine Belarusian refining, petrochemical and fertilizer companies. That list affects the operator of the 240,000 b/d Novopolotsk refinery and Belarusian state-owned refining business Belneftekhim. Tikhanovskaya last month called on US lawmakers to also target the 323,000 b/d Mozyr refinery and state-owned potash producer Belaruskali, neither of which is affected by existing US sanctions.

US president Joe Biden on 25 May ordered new sanctions to be prepared against Belarus in coordination with the EU to protest the forced redirection of a Ryanair passenger flight to Minsk and the arrest of a Belarusian journalist aboard that aircraft. But the US has yet to act to match sanctions the EU unveiled last month against Belarusian entities and Russian businessman Mikhail Gutseriyev.

US officials normally do not comment on future sanctions targets, and the State Department did not address the prospect of additional sanctions in an official readout of meetings with Tikhanovskaya. "With partners like the EU, the UK and Canada, we continue to coordinate tools and economic pressure in support of the Belorussian people and to hold regime actors accountable for their abuses," US ambassador to Belarus Julie Fisher said today.

The Belarusian opposition leader is holding meetings with White House officials and members of Congress later today. "We want maximum pressure," Tikhanovskaya said, a term used frequently by former president Donald Trump's administration to describe its sanctions approach to Iran and Venezuela.

But the term — and the approach — has fallen out of favor in Washington since Biden took office.

The US administration is reviewing its existing sanctions programs to judge their efficacy after concluding that the maximum pressure campaigns against Iran and Venezuela have achieved little to no political results. Current and former US sanctions officials have criticized the recent practice of imposing sanctions as a purely punitive measure instead of using them to try to alter foreign governments' behavior.

Deputy treasury secretary Wally Adeyemo hosted former Democratic and Republican government officials to discuss possible sanctions tweaks. The group told Adeyemo that "US economic and financial sanctions are not an end to themselves but are most effective when employed in the context of a broader US government strategy to address a foreign policy or national security threat," the Treasury Department said. The meeting also "discussed the need to effectively calibrate sanctions to limit the unintended consequences on US businesses, foreign partners, and other third parties — including entities engaged in legitimate humanitarian activities."

By Haik Gugarats