Lukashenko headed to Moscow for talks with Putin
The President of Belarus, Aleksandr Lukashenko, left for Moscow to hold talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin, BelTA reports
The heads of state agreed on a new meeting during a telephone conversation on the evening of February 5th, when they discussed three sets of issues of Belarusian-Russian co-operation.
The first concerned the general agenda of interaction in the economy, politics, and security issues. In particular, they talked about further actions within the framework of the Union State to ensure the security of Belarus and Russia. The main thing that the two presidents agreed on was to fix the date of the meeting in the near future. Its main goal will be to control the execution by the two governments of the instructions given by the presidents earlier, primarily, in the field of import substitution and across all areas of anti-sanction collaboration. This was the subject of the second set of questions in the conversation between Aleksandr Lukashenko and Vladimir Putin. The third tackled preparation for the Supreme State Council session.
Due to the fact that a meeting of the Union State Council of Ministers is scheduled for February, the Supreme State Council is tentatively scheduled to be held in April-May. It is expected that during the meeting, the existing agreements will be formalised, and the relevant documents will be signed. But before that, the heads of state will discuss and clarify the entire range of current issues during the meeting.
The day before, on February 16th, in an interview with foreign and Belarusian journalists, Aleksandr Lukashenko revealed some details of the upcoming meeting with his Russian colleague.
“We will discuss security and defence issues. But the main thing (I have already said that we are preparing a meeting of the Supreme State Council in April-May) is to discuss economic, military and political issues that will be tackled at the Supreme State Council meeting. One of the most important questions is that we still want to see how the governments of Belarus and Russia are fulfilling the tasks we have set, primarily economic tasks. These concern energy resources, the single market, import substitution – how they are financed and how they are implemented. This is a whole range of questions. Therefore, we will discuss all issues. If we come to the issue of our joint group in Belarus, of course, we will discuss this as well,” the President of Belarus added.
In turn, the Kremlin press service informed that the meeting is planned to consider key issues of further development of Russian-Belarusian relations of strategic partnership and alliance, as well as integration collaboration within the framework of the Union State.
