When US President Donald Trump announced the creation of his “Board of Peace”, he included several leaders in this private body. For two of them, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for war crimes, as in the cases of the Russian President Vladimir Putin and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Still, Trump doesn’t recognise ICC’s decisions. Others are authoritarian leaders with far-right ideas. Belarus dictator Aleksandr Lukashenko is one of them.
Trump sent invitations to the leaders who accepted to join his “Board”, and to others he hopes to convince to participate. The invitation from the President of the United States was addressed personally to Lukashenko as the Head of State. However, Lukashenko decided not to attend the meeting in person and informed the organisers that, by his decision, the Foreign Minister, Maxim Ryzhenkov, would attend instead.
The decision was not a surprise, as Lukashenko doesn’t participate in international fora in Western countries, such as the UN General Assembly in New York, where the foreign minister usually represents his country.
Nevertheless, visas for the Belarusian delegation to the Peace Council meeting were not issued, “despite all documents being submitted on time and procedures followed,“ the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Belarus announced on 19 February.
“If even basic formalities aren’t respected, what ‘peace‘ are we talking about?”, the MFA’s announcement asked.
It is not yet clear why the US officials failed to prepare the visas in time for the delegation. Was it because of the US bureaucracy’s slow response? Or a way – pretty rude – to exclude a delegation with which many others would feel uncomfortable staying at the same table? In any case, the exclusion of the Belarusian delegation from the first meeting of Trump’s “Board of Peace” is a fiasco of the US foreign policy and another demonstration of the amateurish way the MAGA-inspired administration makes foreign policy.
