Lukashenka Stuns Lithuanians :: Charter'97 :: News

On Friday, visiting the regions suffered from the Charnobyl dsaster, Alyaksandr Lukashenka has made a sensational statement that he is quite willing to buy Ignalina atomic station from the Lithuanians.

Lithuania is really set to close its only atomic electric power station, as it is one of the preconditions of entering the European Union for Lithuania. Ignalina atomic power station is considered a source of ecological danger, probably because its reactors belong to the same type as Charnobyl’s ones (RBMK), though modernized. And Belarus really has problems with electric power, and its president does not fear anything. So he informed about the possible purchase on the day when the world remembered the largest technological catastrophe in the history. And he made it in the region that was affected by its disaster mainly. Lukashenka underlined that he is considering a few variants of buying the atomic power station, presented by the Belarusian experts.

And what about the prospective sellers? They were extremely surprised, to put it mildly, by the initiative of the neighbors. “It’s an original idea, but it has nothing to do with the real state of affairs”, - said the Lithuanian economy minister Piatras Chesna. And added that the Lithuanian officials have not discussed this bargain with the Belarusian at all. And the director general of the Ignalina atomic power station Viktor Shevaldin named the piece of news from Belarus “a joke on the Fools’ Day”. Not a single state in the world has ever sold an atomic power station to another state.

But to begin with, on Friday it was not the 1st of April, but the 26th of April, so Lukashenka must have said it seriously. Secondly, the reason that “not a single state has ever done it” is not convincing for Lukashenka. The first unit of the Ignalina atomic power station will be stopped by 2005, and the second by the 2009. There is still time for taking daring economical and technical steps.