Translated material
Deprivation of benefits
Belarusians accuse Russians of violating the agreement
Russia's introduction of duties on oil supplies to Belarus is “illegal,” said the head of the Belarusian State Customs Committee, Alexander Shpilevsky, at a press conference convened last Saturday. This is the first such harsh statement by an official representative of Minsk since the beginning of this year, when problems arose with oil supplies to Belarus. President Alexander Lukashenko has not yet made public statements on this issue. “An agreement was signed on the procedure for oil supplies to Belarus. According to this document, from January 1 of this year there should be no customs duties on oil. At the same time, Russia introduced tariffs. We are talking about illegal actions of the Russian Federation and a unilateral withdrawal from the agreement,” Shpilevsky said. He did not predict how this would affect the work of the customs union, although he suggested that problems would arise.At the end of 2006, Moscow and Minsk signed a document according to which a preferential duty was charged on oil supplies to Belarus for two years, amounting to about a third of the standard duty. The parties differ on how the agreement should operate from the beginning of 2010. And the lack of agreement on the terms of oil supplies threatens the further operation of Belarusian oil refineries. According to an anonymous Interfax source, they are provided with oil supplies only until the end of January; contracts for further supplies have not yet been concluded.
Minsk insists on duty-free supplies of Russian oil. To achieve this, at the end of 2009, Belarusians decided to join the trilateral customs union with the participation of Kazakhstan and Russia. Moscow agrees to exempt from duty only oil supplied for domestic consumption of Belarus, that is, about a quarter of the total supply (in total, just over 21 million tons per year). This could significantly reduce income from Belarusian oil refining, since most of the oil products are exported. In recent years, this has been one of the main sources of foreign exchange earnings for the country.