European Commission president gave a press conference with the Nato secretary general, Mark Rutte, ahead of an EU security college meeting
US envoy Kellogg also offered a bit of tasty colour on the US relationship with Belarus, after a deal earlier this month to release some political prisoners in exchange for loosening some of sanctions on Minsk.
He stressed that the US focus on Lukashenko was because “we know he talks to president Putin a lot.” “We’re not sure what he says, but we know that he talks to him,” he says.
“But what we did, we established a relationship to ensure the lines of communication were open so we could make sure all of our messaging was being passed to president Putin. That was the reason we did it; we weren’t going in there initially to get political prisoners out,” he said.
Kellogg stressed that the success in releasing some political prisoners was a positive side to that, but “the overall objective of that was not to free political prisoners – the overall objective was [to] find a resolution to the best way we can to the war between Ukraine and Russia.”
