The price for the Russian gas for Belarus will be $129 per 1,000 cubic meters in 2018 and $127 – in 2019, Prime Minister Uladzimir Syamashka said in an interview to Channel One.
“In 2018 the gas price will be $129 per 1,000 cubic meters, regardless the oil and gas price trends. Without these talks and agreements, we would have to pay some $150. The discount is significant,” state-run news agency BelTA cites the top official.
According to him, in 2019 Belarus will have a fixed price of $127 per 1,000 cubic meters.
The gas price formula for Belarus will be pegged to the price for gas in Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous District. “There have been two formulas before: the Yamalo-Nenets one and the one of equal rates. Today we have only one <…> with the use of decreasing coefficients the price for gas will be going down,” Syamashka stressed.
As reported earlier, Belarusian president Alyaksandr Lukashenka signed the new Customs Code of the Eurasian Economic Union; the country paid off $726.2 mln debt to Gazprom. After the recent meeting the leaders of Belarus and Russia claimed they had settled a long gas and oil conflict between the countries as well as ‘all the disputable issues in bilateral relations’. According to political scientist Andrey Suzdaltsau, Lukashenka ‘meekly agreed’ to all conditions set by Russia.
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The oil and gas conflict between Russia and Belarus lasted over a year. Two capitals failed to come to terms over payments for Russian gas delivered in 2016. Minsk was indignant at the fact that Russian consumers bought gas at subsidized prices. Belarus was seeking the same subsidies for domestic enterprises so that they could compete on the Russian market. The conflict erupted as Belarus started to pay $73 per thousand cubic meters while the contract price for the Russian gas was $132.
