American and Russian officials are expected to meet in Moscow on Thursday as President Vladimir V. Putin weighs a 30-day cease-fire proposal from the United States and Ukraine. Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesman, told reporters at about midday Moscow time on Thursday that American officials were en route. “Negotiators are indeed flying in, and…
The senior American diplomat slipped quietly into Belarus, a police state run by a strongman reviled for decades in the West, traveling by car across the border for meetings with President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko and the head of his KGB security apparatus. It was Mr. Lukashenko’s first meeting with a senior State Department official in…
Belarus, Russia’s closest ally, has released an American prisoner and two others from jail, an exiled opposition group said on Wednesday, in the latest sign that the autocratic Belarusian president, Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, was looking for ways to improve frozen relations with the West. The releases, announced by an opposition group led by Svetlana Tikhanovskaya…
Europe’s longest-serving leader, President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko of Belarus, cruised to his seventh election victory in a row on Sunday in a contest that his exiled opponents dismissed as a sham, whose only purpose was to cement his autocratic grip on the former Soviet republic, Russia’s closest ally. “Don’t use the word election to describe…