Belarus’ Minister of Foreign Affairs Vladimir Makei has met with State Secretary of the Belarus-Russia Union State Dmitry Mezentsev, BelTA learned from the press service of the Belarusian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The parties discussed topical issues of Belarus-Russia interaction within the framework of the Union State, the schedule of meetings of the Union State bodies, as well as the work of the Union State Standing Committee.

As we reported earlier, the integration with Russia in the format of the Union State was discussed at a meeting of the Belarusian president with senior members of the Council of Ministers on 17 August. Aleksandr Lukashenko and the participants of the meeting heard out a report of First Deputy Prime Minister Nikolai Snopkov, who heads the Belarusian delegation at the negotiations with Russia on the integration programs.

According to Nikolai Snopkov, Belarus and Russia have almost completely aligned the integration documents:

(soundbite)

In the process of negotiations, we identified what the primary interests of each side were. For Russians, this is the tax and customs regulation, i.e. transparency, traceability of goods on their territory. For us, these are the terms of cooperation in the energy sector and access to the Russian market. The main difficulty in our negotiations was the aligning of these interests.

As a result, the parties almost completely aligned the package, including the guidelines and 28 Union State sectoral programs and also the draft resolutions on their approval by the Council of Ministers and the Supreme State Council of the Union State. Out of the 28 Union State programs, 27 have been approved and initialed. We were able to fond common ground on all of the 27 programs.