Belarus has ratified Customs Union’s Code

Belarus has ratified the Code of the Customs Union with Kazakhstan and Russia, the government’s news agency BelTA reported on July 3, citing Alyaksandr Lukashenka.

The Belarusian leader made the announcement following Russian President Dmitry Medvedev’s attack on Minsk over the union.

When speaking in Blagoveshchensk in Russia’s Far East earlier in the day, the Russian leader said that Mr. Lukashenka should better show “political support” for the union instead of “spamming” to people.

Mr. Medvedev referred to letters that Mr. Lukashenka earlier sent to 80 prominent Russian businesspeople to outline his vision of last month`s gas dispute between Minsk and Moscow. Russia`s lenta.ru website said on Friday that the text of the messages was nearly the same as that of Mr. Lukashenka`s letter sent to the newspaper Pravda of Russia`s Communist Party. In the letter, which the paper published on June 28, the Belarusian leader accused Moscow of “assessing the sacredness of the brotherly ties [between Belarus and Russia] in cubic meters of gas and barrels of oil.”

Mr. Medvedev said at Saturday’s government conference in Blagoveshchensk that the customs union was an “absolute priority” for Russia.

“As for the customs union, it is a great pity that the president of the allied state is not aware of what is going on in the union,” BelTA quoted Mr. Lukashenka as commenting. “I should say that we haven`t made the slightest step backward. We are not lagging even by a millimeter behind Russia or Kazakhstan in the Customs Union. We have ratified all Customs Union agreements and treaties. But they don’t know this. I guarantee that they don’t know. Otherwise there wouldn’t have been this idle talk on TV. We have ratified the Customs Code. We are now in the same system of coordinates as they [Kazakhstan and Russia] are.”

Mr. Lukashenka suggested that the Russian president should “calm down and look at the world that surrounds him.”

“We are not forbidding Medvedev to say what he may find appropriate. And he says things, but he should do this professionally, in an expert manner,” Mr. Lukashenka said.

Citing sources in the Belarusian National Assembly, Russian media outlets reported on Wednesday evening that Belarusian lawmakers passed the ratification bill for the Code of the Customs Union earlier in the day.

The bill was approved at a closed session at the end of the House’s plenary meeting that officially concluded its spring session, the report said. But no official confirmation followed.

On May 28, Kazakhstan and Russia agreed to launch the union on July 1 on a bilateral basis without Belarus. Belarusian Prime Minister Syarhey Sidorski boycotted the talks in St. Petersburg in protest against Russia’s export duty on crude oil supplied to the country.

Source: naviny.by