Europeans conditionally lift travel ban for Belarussian leader

MOSCOW - The European Union temporarily suspended a travel ban on President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko of Belarus yesterday, rewarding the authoritarian leader for recent democratic gains in an effort to encourage further reform.

The move will eliminate travel restrictions for Lukashenko and select Belarussian officials for a six-month period, conditional on additional improvements in the direction of greater media freedoms, respect for human rights and guarantees of political pluralism, said Christiane Hohmann, a spokeswoman for the European Commission, the union's executive branch.

The ban had been imposed in response to a violent police crackdown on antigovernment protesters following presidential elections in 2006. The decision to lift it was taken "to make a clear sign we do appreciate what they've done," she said of the Belarussian government. "But we think they should . . . go further."

The announcement came in advance of a meeting between foreign ministers from the European Union and Belarus's foreign minister, Sergei Martynov, in Luxembourg yesterday evening, the highest-level contacts between the sides in four years.

Belarus, a former Soviet republic of 10 million people, has had a prickly relationship with Europe since Lukashenko came to power in 1994, imposing a Soviet-style dictatorship that has tended to gravitate toward Russia.

Still, friction has occasionally erupted between Russia and Belarus, and as animosity between the West and Russia has intensified, the EU has sought to improve relations with Belarus.