MOSCOW, October 25 (RIA Novosti) – Russia will cancel oil export duties to Belarus if Minsk removes all tariffs to conform to the requirements of the Moscow-led Customs Union, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov said Friday.
“The position of the Belarusians is ‘we are ready to sign without the special tariffs.’ That means our export duties with them will not be used,” Shuvalov said in Minsk.
The Kremlin is pushing for closer economic integration with its ex-Soviet neighbors and has been the driving force behind the creation of the Customs Union bloc. Russia, Kazakhstan and Belarus are the only current members, but Armenia has also committed to joining the group.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said Thursday at a Belarus summit bringing together heads of state of former Soviet nations that Moscow was prepared to scrap oil export duties for all members of the Customs Union, despite the loss of revenue this would entail for the country's budget. He said that could be done if other bloc members removed customs tariffs on Russian goods.
Russia's oil export duties could be gone by 2015, according to Shuvalov. The autocratic leader of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, has said that Belarus could remove all remaining tariffs on Russian goods by 2014.
The Kremlin traditionally uses economically vulnerable, and politically isolated, Belarus' dependence on Russian oil exports as a tool of diplomatic pressure. In August, Russia cut oil exports to Belarus by about 25 percent after Minsk arrested the head of Uralkali, a large Russian fertilizer company.
