By Kal Sharven

TL;DR: President Trump says the US is working on a “massive” potash deal with Belarus, priced well below what Washington currently pays Canada. Belarus does have the reserves and, increasingly, the production capacity to supply more. What it doesn’t have is an efficient way to get that potash to the US — its main export corridor into the Baltic was cut off by EU sanctions in 2022, and everything since has moved through Russian rail and ports that Belarus doesn’t control and must share with Russia’s own, much larger potash exporter. History backs up the skepticism: even when Belarus had full access to the efficient route, the US bought a fraction of what it buys from Canada.

Background

On December 17, 2025, the US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control lifted sanctions on Belaruskali (Belarus’s state potash producer) and its export arm, part of a deal in which Belarus released more than 120 political prisoners. On September 21, 2026, Trump said a purchase deal with Belarus is “in the works,” framing it as leverage in an escalating trade dispute with Canada, which supplies roughly 85% of the potash the US imports.

Belarus is not a marginal player: it holds an estimated 21% of global potash reserves, second only to Canada, and supplied around 20% of the global export market before Western sanctions hit in 2021. That’s the case for why this deal is being talked about at all. The question is whether Belarus can actually move meaningfully more potash to the US, and at what cost.

Is there enough production and export capacity?

Production doesn’t look like the constraint. FAOSTAT data show Belarusian potash (MOP) production holding around 10–12 million tonnes a year through 2020, and Belaruskali’s Nezhinsky project is set to add another 2 million tonnes/year of capacity when it comes online in Q2 2026.

Exports are a different story. FAOSTAT export figures show Belarusian MOP exports falling off a cliff after 2021 — from roughly 11.2 million tonnes in 2021 to 4.2 million (2022), 4.9 million (2023), and 3.6 million tonnes (2024). Production didn’t fall nearly that much; the export chain did. That gap is the whole story: Belarus can mine the potash, it just can’t move it out the way it used to.

The reason is Lithuania, and it’s worth being precise about the mechanism, since it’s the crux of why one route is closed and another isn’t. In June 2021, the EU imposed sectoral sanctions on Belarus — a response to the forced diversion of Ryanair Flight 4978 to arrest a dissident journalist — banning EU entities from importing or trading most grades of Belarusian potash. That alone is an import ban, not necessarily a transit ban: goods merely passing through EU territory to a non-EU buyer aren’t automatically caught by it. Lithuania went further on its own initiative: on February 1, 2022, Lithuanian Railways cancelled its 2018 transit contract with Belaruskali outright, after a government commission ruled the agreement conflicted with national security interests. That specific, additional step is what shut Klaipėda — the port that had handled 9–11 million tonnes of Belarusian MOP a year, over 90% of total exports — to Belarusian potash. EU tariffs on what Belarusian potash can still reach EU buyers by other means are also set to escalate further (roughly €40–45/tonne now, rising to €60 this summer, €80 in 2027, and €350 by 2028), pushing Belarus to look even harder for non-EU buyers.

What export path is actually available?

Since 2022, Belaruskali has rerouted through Russia: rail to Russian-controlled Baltic terminals — mainly Ust-Luga and St. Petersburg, with Belarus also eyeing its own terminal at nearby Bronka — and in some cases much further afield to Novorossiysk (Black Sea), Astrakhan (Caspian), Murmansk (Arctic), or even Vladivostok (Pacific), with rail hauls ranging from roughly 400 km up to several thousand km depending on the port used, versus the more direct Klaipėda route.

That route is “open” only in the narrow sense that neither the EU import ban nor Lithuania’s transit ban has any jurisdiction on Russian soil — Russia isn’t an EU member and isn’t enforcing EU sanctions against its ally Belarus. It isn’t friction-free: Russia itself has been under a broad, separate Western sanctions regime since its 2022 invasion of Ukraine, which can complicate the insurance, financing, and vessel chartering needed for the ocean leg out of a Russian port, on top of the infrastructure-sharing problems below.

Two problems with this path specifically for a US deal:

  1. Belarus doesn’t control it. These are Russian ports and Russian railways, already loaded with Russia’s own potash exporter, Uralkali — the world’s second-largest — which takes precedence. Belarusian industry watchers have flagged disputes over both terminal/rail access and pricing.
  2. It doesn’t get product to the US on its own. A Russian Baltic port is still an ocean crossing away from any US buyer. Getting Belarusian potash to the US farm belt would mean rail through Russia, transatlantic ocean freight to a US Gulf or East Coast terminal, then further inland transport to reach the Midwest — three additional handling legs that Canadian potash skips entirely.

For comparison, Canadian potash for the US market moves by direct unit train from Saskatchewan mines straight into the US Midwest — no ocean leg, no port transload, one rail jurisdiction. That single-mode route is a large part of why Canada supplies roughly 11–12 million tonnes a year to the US at a current benchmark price of $305–310/short ton FOB NOLA, “already the most affordable nutrient domestically” per fertilizer-market reporting.

Open the map fullscreen → Same destination market, three paths: Canada's direct rail route, Belarus's current (longer) route through Russia, and the Klaipėda route Belarus can no longer use.

We don’t have a precise, route-specific freight quote for the Belarus-to-US path — that’s not publicly published — but the closest available benchmark, US Gulf–Europe Panamax dry-bulk freight, ran around $23/tonne in April 2026, which gives a rough sense of the size of just the ocean-freight leg alone, before rail and port handling on both ends are even added in. The more telling evidence is that Belaruskali has reportedly had to discount 50–60% below market price to move volume through this route since 2022 — even at a steep discount, the logistics chain is eating heavily into what the seller nets back.

So how “massive” could this realistically be?

There’s a useful precedent: from 2017–2021, when Belarus still had full access to the efficient Klaipėda route, the US imported an average of just 635,000 tonnes of Belarusian MOP a year — about 5% of the roughly 11–12 million tonnes the US now buys annually from Canada. That’s the ceiling Belarus hit with the easy route open.

There’s also a demand-side complication: most of Belarus’s shrunken exportable supply is already spoken for. China’s share of Belarusian potash sales rose from 17% in 2021 to over 70% by 2023, as Belarus redirected volume away from markets it lost (its Africa export share collapsed from 42% to 3%; India “almost completely ceased” buying). Any meaningful new allocation to the US would have to come from genuinely new production (the 2 million tonnes/year from Nezhinsky is the closest thing on the horizon) or a reallocation away from China — neither happens instantly, and neither is guaranteed by an OFAC sanctions release alone, which doesn’t by itself restore the correspondent banking, insurance, and customs relationships needed to actually trade at scale.

None of this means zero Belarusian potash reaches the US. It means “massive” and “substantially cheaper than Canada” are doing a lot of work in the current rhetoric, and the underlying logistics don’t obviously support either claim yet.

What to watch

  • Whether the Nezhinsky project’s 2 million tonnes/year actually comes online in Q2 2026 as scheduled, and who it gets sold to
  • Any concrete tonnage, pricing, or shipping-route details once a deal is actually signed, versus the current statement of intent
  • Whether EU tariff escalation pushes more Belarusian volume toward non-EU buyers generally, and whether any of that specifically lands in the US
  • The parallel US-Canada trade fight: threatened tariffs on Canadian fertilizer would change the relative economics regardless of what Belarus can physically deliver

This analysis is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. See our disclaimer for details.