On Dec. 13, Belarusian authorities released 123 political prisoners, including Nobel Peace Prize laureate Ales Bialiatski and key figures from the 2020 protest movement in Belarus. The announcement came after two days of talks with U.S. Special Envoy John Coale. The decision to release these political prisoners was tied to a U.S. government agreement to lift sanctions on Belarusian potash exports.
In short, the U.S. government appeared to deploy a pressure point built from sanctions policy, fertilizer geopolitics, and wartime diplomacy in an effort to connect to a wider Ukraine peace track.
This “potash bargain” worked because it linked three realities into one transaction. First, the U.S. sought to trade existing potash sanctions for specific human outcomes. Second, the Russian potash/fertilizer trade has largely been treated as exempt for food security reasons, making diplomacy over this commodity unusually flexible. And third, the U.S. deal sidelined the European Union, as the E.U. confronts new challenges from Belarus.
The U.S. capitalized on a “ready-made” bargaining chip: potash sanctions
The government of Belarus has enabled Russia’s war against Ukraine by providing a staging ground for Russian troops, along with logistical infrastructure. Belarus remains a staunch Russian ally, but the U.S. sanctions on Belarus potash exports existed before Russia’s February 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The U.S. began targeting the Belarus potash sector in 2021, stepping up pressure on the regime of Alyaksandr Lukashenka and the state-owned Belarusian potash giant Belaruskali, the Belarusian Potash Company (BPC), and a subsidiary company, Agrorozkvit, LLC.
That timing was important: U.S. negotiators could frame the swap as human-rights leverage, a reversible concession (i.e., potash relief) in exchange for a measurable humanitarian outcome – freeing specific detainees – rather than as a concession on Belarus’s alignment with Russia in the Ukraine war.
Potash geopolitics are complicated – and the U.S. wants to avoid food shocks
A core asymmetry was pivotal to the prisoner deal logic. The U.S. has generally treated the Russian fertilizer trade, including potash, as exempt from U.S. sanctions. That’s because the U.S. seeks to avoid global food security shocks. The U.S. Treasury publicly clarified in 2022 that agricultural commodities, including fertilizer, were not the target of Russia sanctions. That created space for selective Belarus relief: If Russian potash can keep moving under exemptions and authorizations, then Belarusian potash relief could become a feasible payment to secure humanitarian prisoner releases.
At the same time, sanctions and logistics pushed Belarus to redirect potash exports toward China. The Centre for Eastern Studies (OSW), a Warsaw-based Polish think tank/research institute, estimates China’s share of Belarusian potash sales rose from around 17% in 2021 to over 70% in 2023. That shift was colliding with U.S. strategy: The 2025 U.S. National Security Strategy (NSS) emphasizes China as a central challenge and leans on transactional economic statecraft. In that context, by opening a controlled channel for Belarus potash, the U.S. government effectively created a non-China outlet for a key Belarus export.
The deal also leveraged a U.S. supply-diversification constraint. The U.S. remains highly import-reliant for potash, an important agricultural input. U.S. data show that Canada dominates U.S. import sources (with smaller shares from Russia and Belarus, historically). Any tariff friction or political shock with a primary supplier makes other options more valuable – and that calculus is likely part of this sanctions policy reversal on Belarusian potash. Recent tariff threats on Canada – and criticism of tariff costs for U.S. farmers – sharpen that logic, in fact. Donald Trump recently warned he could impose “very severe tariffs” on Canadian fertilizer, with media coverage explicitly flagging potash as a focal point of concern for supply chains and farm costs.
Sidelining Europe leaves the E.U. facing new pressures from Belarus
A striking feature of this recent prisoner deal is that Europe isn’t driving it, even though the E.U. remains central to Belarus sanctions and regional security. For years Belarus exported potash via Lithuanian railways to the port of Klaipėda, but the Lithuanian government terminated the arrangement on Feb. 1, 2022. This move cut Belarus off from its most important pre-war outlet and pushed exports toward Russian ports. Bypassing Europe in this recent prisoner deal aligns with the tone of the 2025 NSS, as well as broader Trump statements this year that treats Europe as secondary to U.S. national interests.
Meanwhile, Europe continues to face day-to-day security challenges from Belarus. Low-flying “weather balloons” drifting in from Belarus cigarette smugglers are hard to detect, but dangerous for aircraft. These balloon incidents have repeatedly violated Lithuania’s airspace, triggering more than a dozen shutdowns of the Vilnius airport since early October. Lithuanian officials called this a “hybrid attack” and even declared a state of emergency on Dec. 9. In response to the balloon incidents, Lithuania also temporarily closed and restricted traffic at the border checkpoints with Belarus. And Belarusian authorities then detained hundreds of Lithuanian cargo trucks in retaliation for Lithuania’s border closures.
In Poland, border guards reported more than 180 migrants crossed from Belarus through a hidden 1.5 meter-high tunnel in a forest near the border, running from the Belarus side into Poland. Polish authorities said it was the fourth such tunnel they had discovered in 2025. This tunnel episode represents a vivid example of what political scientist Kelly Greenhill might call coercive engineered migration: the deliberate creation or manipulation of cross-border movement to generate political pressure and extract concessions from a targeted government. This was not an isolated incident. Polish authorities have experienced pressure at the Belarus border as part of a campaign that has been building for several years. In 2021, for example, the Belarus government helped facilitate a surge in border crossings.
Will we see more commodity politics – and transactional moves?
With this latest deal with Belarus, the U.S. government used potash sanctions relief to pursue several priorities: prisoner releases, greater supply-chain leverage, and a potential channel relevant to Ukraine diplomacy.
The release of these political prisoners suggests the Trump administration is eager to use leverage that might pull Belarus (even slightly) away from total reliance on Russia, and secure additional humanitarian outcomes. These moves could potentially help shape the diplomatic environment around any discussions of a long-term resolution of Russia’s conflict in Ukraine.
Tatsiana Kulakevich is a U.S. Fulbright scholar and associate professor of instruction in the School of Interdisciplinary Global Studies at the University of South Florida (USF). She serves as a Research Fellow and Affiliate Faculty member at USF’s Institute for Russian, European, and Eurasian Studies. Her research examines how authoritarian regimes maintain stability and how opposition, identity, and institutions evolve under repression, with extensions into international security, comparative politics, and political economy.
