Events

MINSK, 17 November (BelTA) – Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko has warned against disintegration in the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU) and called for every effort to prevent it as he spoke at the press conference for the Russian regional mass media on 17 November, BelTA has learned.

“The 30-40% decline in the trade in the Eurasian Economic Union speaks for itself, and this means that there are many problems. All the heads of state speak about this. And if we fail to work out a sound plan to resolve this situation, I am afraid we will face a certain disintegration, and we cannot let it happen,” Alexander Lukashenko noted.

He said that to prevent moving backward, it is necessary to improve what has already been created. “The Prime Ministers have recently met in Moscow to finalize the work on the new Customs Code and have almost submitted the document for approval to the Presidents. But we had had a Customs Code before that. The Code is the main document in the Customs Union and the Economic Union. So why did we suddenly decide to develop a new document several years later? Because we saw that the current Code is discordant with the realities of today,” the Belarusian leader explained.

“It seems that we have achieved progress in a number of fields, but the EEU is not fully developed and has not yet adapted to the modern world. And if we see drawbacks, we need to eliminate them in a natural way, without launching any trade wars which we frequently observe. There are many blank spaces to fill. We have not managed to do this so far because of the differences in the interests of our countries. But we will overcome them if we want to,” Alexander Lukashenko noted.