Lukashenka borrows 500 million dollars from Putin

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has signed a decree to give Belarus a loan of $500 mln, stressing that he is doing that “at request of Belarus”.

“At request of Belarus we shall grant another loan of half a million dollars. A corresponding decree has been signed. I ask the Finance Ministry to execute it on an operational basis,” the prime minister said at the session of the Russian government’s presidium.

As Interfax informs, Vladimir Putin reminded that in 2008 Russia gave Belarus a stabilization loan of 1 billion dollars, and Gazprom paid more than 1.2 billion dollars for Beltransgaz shares.

As the Chrater’97 press-centre informed, last week the official Minks stated that another tranche of half a billion dollars of a loan from Russia hadn’t been received. The money was to arrive to Minsk on February 27.

2 billion dollars Russia promised to grant, are divided into several parts. The first billion was received in autumn, the second was to arrive in February and March divided into equal parts.

However, the Belarusian experts are sure that loans won’t help the authorities to survive the economic crisis.

“Creditability of Belarus is dropping as every new loan is received,” stated a well-known Belarusian economist Leanid Zlotnikau in an interview to Chater’97 press-centre.

“There is nothing to hope for so far,” Leanid Zlotnikau said. “It would be possible to borrow money and to eat it away only till the end of this year. In the future it would be impossible to keep the Belarusian ruble back. A lower level is to be established for many years to come. Russian experts say that after Russia would go through the crisis, the life would never be like it was before 2008. And there is no escaping for Belarusians, as we are too dependent on the Russian economy”.

Leanid Zlotnikau notes that the crisis is a kind of a test for resiliency of national economies. As said by him, some countries go through the crisis reinforced, and others not. The expert notes that the Belarusian authorities haven’t done real actions to save their economy yet.

“So far no real actions on competitive growth of the Belarusian economy are seen,” the expert says. “The authorities are not going to solve economic problems because socialistic mechanisms of the economy remained unchanged in Belarus for all these years”.