Western sanctions against Belarus are finally beginning to target dictator Alyaksandr Lukashenka’s enablers in Russia.
When the United States, the European Union, Canada, and the United Kingdom announced a new round of sanctions against the Minsk regime this week, one name in particular stood out: Russian businessman Mikhail Gutseriyev, the largest single foreign investor in Belarus. Gutseriyev was included on the EU’s list of sanctioned individuals.
A longtime friend of Lukashenka, Gutseriyev is the founder and a major shareholder at the Russneft oil company that provides Belarus with most of its crude. He also owns the Slavkali company, which is building a potassium chloride mining and processing plant in the Belarusian town of Lyuban.
In a recent report arguing for sanctions against the Kremlin-connected Russian oligarchs that back Lukashenka, Ilya Zaslavskiy of the Free Russia Foundation specifically named Gutseriyev, noting that his potash exporting business “provides invaluable hard currency to Lukashenka’s depressed economy.”