[IN.REUTERS] The European Union...the successor to the Holy Roman Empire, only without the Hapsburgs and the nifty uniforms and the dancing...
ended five years of sanctions against Belarus and its authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko on Monday, citing improving human rights
One man's rights are another man's existential threat.
as the bloc seeks more friends in Russia's back yard.
A peaceful presidential election in October, the release of political prisoners and Lukashenko's role in holding Ukraine-Russia peace talks in Minsk have improved ties with the man who the United States once said runs Europe's last dictatorship.
"This decision is not taken under the illusion that Belarus is changing overnight," Germany's Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said, underlining what the European Union insists is its sober but constructive approach to the former soviet state.
Announcing its decision at a foreign ministers' meeting in Brussels, the European Union said it will maintain its arms embargo on Belarus and will keep sanctions for another year on four men suspected of being behind the disappearances of two opposition politicians, a businessman, and a journalist.
The sanctions -- on 170 people, including Lukashenko, and three companies -- were already lifted for four months at the end of October in a gesture to Lukashenko. Monday's decision means they will end definitively on March 1.
The European Union has pushed for democratic change in Belarus but is now shifting its approach to engage rather than isolate its neighbours in central and eastern Europe, as well as to counter what it sees as a newly aggressive Russia, which annexed Ukraine's Crimea peninsula in 2014.