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34 I Cover story bne June 2021
Potash accounts for 20% of Belarus' budget revenue and the EU is one of the biggest buyers.
EU to target Belarusian potash exports
of the Ryanair plane, which was forced to land by a MiG fighter on May 23, with retaliatory aviation bans.
The EU moved to limit flights through Belarusian airspace on a voluntary basis, a recommendation that most European carriers have been following.
Some EU countries, and also the UK, have gone further and banned the state-owned national carrier Belavia from landing at their airports. On May 24 a Belavia plane bound for Barcelona, where there is still no ban on landing, was held at the Belarusian border while seeking permission to fly over France. France has not only banned Belavia from landing, but clarified that it was also withdrawing permission to fly through French airspace, forcing the plane to turn back and return to Minsk.
The EU has already sanctioned seven Belarusian entities and 88 individuals, including Lukashenko, and was already working on adding more people to that list over their support for the regime and the repressions
of protests. Following the Ryanair incident EU leaders agreed on May 24 to extend the list to include people involved in the Ryanair incident, which will be approved by the bloc’s foreign ministers on June 21.
Potash
The aviation bans, while very inconvenient, are not particularly damaging. Belarus earns approximately
Ben Aris in Berlin
The EU might ban (or limit) imports of Belarusian potash and other fertilisers as a part
of its economic sanctions following the Ryanair forced landing and
arrest of Roman Protasevich, said
EU foreign ministers gathering in Lisbon on May 23, as it ratchets up its sanctions regime on Belarus' President Alexander Lukashenko’ regime.
Russia remains by far Belarus’
biggest trade and investment partner, accounting for 42% of exports in 2019 and just under half of all the foreign investment. Ukraine is the next most important trade partner with 13% in the same year, whereas the EU collectively accounts for some 20% of trade.
EU trade sanctions on Belarus would be very painful but they would not
be debilitating, as Russia would take up some of the slack, and although Ukraine will follow the EU’s lead, it simply cannot afford to cut itself off from supplies of power and fuel that
it current receives from Belarus. For example, Ukraine has just announced it will halt Belarusian power imports until October, but it imports little in the
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summer, and in the first two months of this year, during an unseasonal cold snap, imported more power than it imported in all of 2020.
Nevertheless, the proposed EU sanctions are more aggressive and economically damaging than any sanctions that
have been suggested to date.
Aviation bans
The EU immediately retaliated against what many have dubbed a “hijacking”