Minsk in January is a cold place. Scrupulously clean and dull, the Belarusian capital is a pre-perestroika mini-Moscow, where the secret police still proudly bears its Soviet-era title and boasts on its website that “the reception rooms of the KGB are open 24 hours a day”.

By the glacial pace of change in Belarus, however, things were stirring this January. The men with the briefcases from the International Monetary Fund were in town dispensing tranches of a $2.5 billion emergency loan to prop up an economy in distress. This is new.

Photograph: Reuters

The regime has just lopped 20 percent off the value of the Belarusian rouble, people are hoarding dollars and euros, and Alexandr Lukashenko, Europe’s pariah leader, is cosying up to Brussels.

“This is a shift,” Javier Solana, the EU’s foreign policy chief, told E!Sharp, underlining how unusual it is for Lukashenko to turn to the West rather than Moscow for a bail-out. “This is an excellent decision by the IMF. We welcome it.”

A slight relaxation of media repression and a gesture or two on political prisoners from Lukashenko have had EU policymakers salivating that more change is on the way in the contested space between Europe and Russia.

Prodded by the Union’s current Czech presidency, pushed by the Poles, Europe is groping towards a fresh start with Belarus, the most isolated country in Europe; towards bringing the man routinely called Europe’s last dictator in from the cold.

It is highly controversial, but the authoritarian leader may find himself seated alongside European leaders like Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy and José Manuel Barroso in a Prague palace in May. The EU put Lukashenko, in power for 15 years, and dozens of his cronies on a blacklist in 2006, banning him from travel to the EU. The ban was suspended last October and is to be reviewed in April. Given the small but promising signals, say diplomats and government officials in Brussels and EU capitals, it is unlikely that the ban will be re-imposed.

That means that Lukashenko may be invited to the special summit planned in Prague on May 7 to launch Brussels’ new policy towards six post-Soviet states, the so-called Eastern Partnership. The European Commission unveiled the policy in December and EU ambassadors have already agreed to endorse it. EU government chiefs in Brussels are expected to rubber-stamp the new policy in March. The Czechs will then convene the May summit, bringing leaders of Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Moldova – and probably Belarus – together with the EU-2......