Mikhail Mishustin’s meeting with Prime Minister of Belarus Roman Golovchenko

The meeting took place on the sidelines of the Eurasian Intergovernmental Council meeting.

Excerpts from the transcript:

Mikhail Mishustin: Mr Golovchenko, friends, we are delighted to see you all in Sochi. First, I would like to ask you to convey greetings and best wishes to President of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko on behalf of President of Russia Vladimir Putin, and of course on my personal behalf.

You and I remain in touch at all times. In March, we held a meeting of the Council of Ministers of the Union State, followed in April by the meeting of the Supreme State Council of the Union chaired by Vladimir Putin and Alexander Lukashenko.

Russia and Belarus have taken very important decisions to step up their integration ties, and the governments launched system-wide efforts to carry out 28 Union State programmes. Of this total, 10 have been completed, and five IT systems were launched. Of the 989 initiatives stipulated by these programmes, we have fulfilled almost 80 percent, which is quite a solid performance. I would like to thank all your colleagues and you personally, Mr Golovchenko, as well as our colleagues from the Government of Russia for this professional work.

Despite the sanctions pressure exerted by the collective West, we have been proactive in expanding our trade and economic cooperation. Last year, mutual trade increased 12 percent to exceed 3 trillion Russian roubles, or 111 billion Belarusian roubles. There was a further 11 percent increase in trade in January-April to over 1 trillion Russian roubles, or almost 40 billion Belarusian roubles.

We have made industrial cooperation our priority. Mr Golovchenko, I know that you attach great importance to these matters, while Mr Lukashenko has been overseeing efforts to promote manufacturing in Belarus and the Union State. We approved 16 joint projects worth 80 billion Russian roubles or almost 3 billion Belarusian roubles as part of our intergovernmental agreement on industrial cooperation dealing with machine building, machine tool engineering and microelectronics.

More to be posted soon.

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