In meetings with the US State Department and members of Congress this week, Sviatlana Tsihanuskaya said she discussed both strengthening future sanctions and closing gaps in existing ones. He also said he had provided information to the US government about the involvement of Belarussian leader Alexander Lukashenko in the Russian-led war in Ukraine. Speaking to reporters on Friday, Tsikhanouskaya said the sanctions “should be the same in force” as those imposed in Russia “but different in structure” and should target state-owned banks and state-owned enterprises. The opposition leader said she had spoken to officials in Washington about ways to “make sanctions more effective, close the windows, freeze Lukashenko’s assets and freeze the money given to him by the International Monetary Fund.” Tsikhanouskaya said she suggested using secondary sanctions to close such gaps. “We are seeing Russia use Belarus to circumvent its own sanctions,” he said, citing the example of steel. He said the sanctions affected Lukashenko’s regime, however, citing letters from the foreign minister calling for a rapprochement in recent weeks. “I hope that Lukashenko will not be able to deceive democracies again, as he has done many times in the past,” he said. Tsikhanouskaya met with US Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman – a meeting attended in part by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken – as well as Jim O’Brien, head of the State Department’s Office of Sanctions Coordination. Tsikhanouskaya told reporters that she had given O’Brien “documents with evidence of Lukashenka’s involvement in the war against Ukraine, as well as a list of companies and countries that helped circumvent the sanctions.” He said this included “huge evidence of rocket fire from our territory, movement of Russian equipment on Belarusian territory”. “This is confidential information about some internal orders for the development of different Russian military equipment in our territory,” he continued. “It simply came to our notice then. “They are well documented and we passed this information on to the government.” Tsikhanouskaya said she did not believe the Belarusian army was involved in launching the missiles, and instead Lukashenko gave the land to Russian President Vladimir Putin to use as he wished. “It’s already World War II. “We are so scared of World War III, but it is already going on.” “It is a war between democracy and empire.”
