Brussels’ Balancing Act: Sanctions, Potash, And Politics

When the European Union officially imposed another round of restrictive measures on Belarus on August 3, it put an end to one of the longest-running sanctions sagas in the bloc in recent years. The new measures were the first targeting the regime of Alyaksandr Lukashenka since the summer of 2022. While early sanctions on Russia following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 were to a large degree imposed on Belarus as well, further EU sanctions on Moscow were not applied to Minsk. That was largely due to the belief in Brussels that…