The red-carpet treatment given to the Kremlin strongman inevitably impressed global public opinion. It also overshadowed another development: Trump’s phone call to a different Eastern European autocrat, Belarus’ self-proclaimed president, Alexander Lukashenko.
From a Belarusian perspective, however, the Anchorage spectacle was less important than that phone call.
Just hours before meeting Putin, the US president phoned Lukashenko unprompted, later calling him a "respected president" in a social media post and announcing the imminent release of 1,300 people from Belarusian prisons.
The news landed like a thunderclap—sparking heated debate within the opposition and jubilation among regime propagandists.
Lukashenko’s media mouthpieces declared that the United States had finally recognised his government’s legitimacy—and that Europe would now have no choice but to follow suit.
More militant voices in the opposition cried betrayal, accusing Trump of joining the dictators' club, siding with Putin, and abandoning both Belarusians and Ukrainians.
The more pragmatic critics urged caution. Trump constantly boasts that he is a "master dealmaker," they noted.
One possible explanation, they suggested, could be the unfreezing of Belarus’ potash exports—a key commodity for US agriculture, blocked by Western sanctions but vital amid America’s trade war with Canada.
Belarus, Russia and Canada are all major global suppliers of potash fertilizers. And much of Trump's political base consists of farmers.
Some Belarusian observers went further, suggesting Trump simply used Lukashenko to send a signal to Putin just hours before the Alaska summit—treating the Belarusian strongman less as a partner and more as a convenient messenger.
The figure of "1,300 additional prisoners," as Trump put it, was no accident either: it nearly matches the total number of individuals recognized as political prisoners in Belarus.
After Washington resumed high-level contacts with Minsk, Lukashenko released 16 political detainees, including the husband of opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya—though he immediately deported all of them, even those without citizenship elsewhere.
Since Trump’s phone call last Friday, however, no new reports of prisoner releases have emerged from Minsk.
The war in Ukraine has once again reclaimed the spotlight.
After Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s relatively successful visit to Washington alongside European leaders on Monday, Belarusian state media returned to its usual propaganda playbook.
On Monday, Belarusian and Russian propaganda channels on Telegram circulated a series of AI-generated fake photos purporting to show European leaders sitting meekly in a White House hallway, waiting for the Trump-Zelensky talks to end.
The images were clumsy—some leaders appeared with more than two legs—but that did not stop a dozen propaganda outlets from sharing them.
Clearly, Lukashenko’s propagandists are struggling to stomach Zelensky’s warm reception in Washington.
The symbolic keys to the White House presented to the Ukrainian president provoked outright fits of rage, with commentators branding him a "puppet" and insisting Ukraine is on the verge of becoming US property.
Yet the more clear-headed segment of the Belarusian opposition drew a different lesson. One figure wrote on social media: "If we don’t want to be judged solely by who calls us and when, then we must build our own agency every day through concrete actions—and pursue a long-term strategy for years ahead."
Hard to disagree with that.
Jan Krzysztof Michalak in Belarus