Putin and Lukashenko intend to gather eye-to-eye and discuss a tentative agenda of the bilateral union's Council of Ministers session, due in Minsk, Belarussian capital, June 8, a Kremlin functionary said to Novosti. The two countries' economic issues will also be prominent at the Russian-Belarussian summit. "We have come close to an essential integration level. It is thoroughly new, and concerns many economic aspects-in particular, common currency prospects. The desired integration scope has no rival throughout the post-Soviet area," said our interviewee.
Whatever problems the emergent union is encountering are mere growing-pains, he reassured. The bilateral union is not only to be viable-it must rest on patterns both countries' public will find easy to understand. Next, "we must delineate union and national duties-or one of the countries, or both, for that matter, will occasionally refuse to comply with union decisions," he remarked.
Belarus received a streamlined draft union Constitutional Act from Russia, last December. Moscow is looking forward to its opinion, added our informant.
Three intergovernmental documents are ready for signing, said a Russian government spokesman. The papers concern oil and gas corporate property, and the amount of related Russian exports to Belarussian industry. "The papers are ready, and the matter will be settled with them signed," stressed the informant.
He came down on the legal basis of Russian-Belarussian energy cooperation to compare it to the Russian-Ukrainian. "The Moscow-Minsk gas industrial legal basis leaves very much to be desired. We gave its Russo-Ukrainian analogue a standard judicial wording. Whatever we would do to make the same for Belarus is coming against Minsk protesting for political reasons or, again, bargaining like a gypsy," said the source. "As for the prospects of Russia's Gazprom Co. to buy up the Beltransgaz, chief Belarussian-based carrier of gas imported from Russia, the deal is at a standstill." Independent Russian-based exporters can cope with a mere 700 million cubic meters of gas between the year's start and this month's end. Even that is a heroic deed, 700 million being normally their annual ceiling. Belarus is demanding five billion US dollars for its company, while Russia thinks it costs $500 million, at most.
As for the two countries' prospects to shift to common currency, negotiators have stored tremendous experience, and it will come in handy even if the Parties fail to sign a related package, remarked the source.
Russia is determined to press the matter on-and has every reason to do so, though there is no chance to introduce the Russian ruble in Belarus starting January 1, 2005, as was expected, Anton Siluanov, Russia's Finance Ministry department head, said on a recent occasion.
