Keith Kellogg, U.S. President Donald Trump’s special envoy for Ukraine and Russia, is planning to travel to Belarus in the next few days for talks with Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko, sources told Reuters.
According to two people familiar with the matter, Kellogg sees the trip as a potential opportunity to revive stalled peace negotiations between Russia and Ukraine.
The visit has not been officially confirmed, and its agenda remains unclear. As Reuters notes, such trips require extensive planning, and Kellogg’s visit could still be altered or canceled at the last minute.
If it goes ahead, Kellogg would be the highest-ranking U.S. official to visit Belarus in recent years. In February 2020, during Donald Trump’s first term, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo traveled to Belarus — the first visit by a U.S. secretary of state since 1993.
Following Belarus’s contested 2020 presidential vote, mass protests, and a wave of political repression, Trump’s successor, President Joe Biden, shifted U.S. policy on Belarus. In 2022, after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the United States suspended operations at its embassy in Minsk.
During Trump’s second term, the U.S. has made a renewed push to rebuild relations with Belarus, Reuters reports. One source told the agency that the Trump administration has been exploring ways to pull Minsk out of Moscow’s orbit and align it more closely with Washington.