Tatsiana Manionak: Russia pays Belarus for ratification of Eurasian Union agreement

Russia's concession on Belarus's demand to keep all export duties on oil products in the Belarusian budget is a price for integration processes.

Tatsiana Manionak, an expert in the oil and energy sector, said it in an interview with BelaPAN.

“It was a price of the rectification of the Eurasian Economic Union treaty. Perhaps, it was worth the price proposed by Belarus. The political decor helped to solve the economic problem,” the analyst thinks.

According to Manionak, “Belarus's budget for the next year was prepared on the assumption that Belarus won't lose anything from the Russian tax maneuver. No principled changes for Belarus are expected.”

She doubts whether the Belarusian budget could lose more than 1 billion dollars due to the tax maneuver.

“As we may suppose, Belarus's payments to the Russian budget this year will be slightly higher than last year (3.385 billion dollars). Taking into account a promised $1.5bn concession, Belarus will lose nothing on the tax maneuver. So, the budget can be approved. There's no need to edit it, because the Ministry of Finance already counted $1.5bn as payments for external debts,” the expert thinks.

“We need to think how higher prices of Russian oil will impact Belarusian oil refineries,” she notes.

“Belarus will receive money from oil duties, but the country will need to support its petrochemical and refining industries, because they will probably have some problems due to higher oil prices. We need to think what will happen in the domestic fuel market, because Russia has taken a decision to cut excise duties by half in 2016,” Manionak says.