On Tuesday morning, Alyaksandr Lukashenka has flown off from Bolbasava airfield to St. Petersburg; he is to meet with Russian leader Vladimir Putin today, the Telegram channel linked to Lukashenka’s press service reports.
According to the channel, they are expected to discuss ‘the development of cooperation in various fields, international issues’.
The channel also states that Lukashenka and Putin agreed upon a meeting during their phone conversation that was held on July 1. However, the meeting has not been publicly announced by either Belarusian or Russian side before. Notably, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that the Russian authorities were waiting for Lukashenka’s visit to Crimea; Sergey Aksyonov, the head of the Russian administration of the occupied peninsula, stressed they would be glad to receive him in Crimea. The Belarusian authorities have not yet commented on that.
Dmitry Smirnov, a journalist at the pro-Kremlin newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda, claims that this week’s meeting of Putin and Lukashenka has not been prescheduled, and Putin’s spokesman has not made mention of the would-be talks.
Since the beginning of the year, the two politicians have had three meetings. In the wake of their May’s meeting in Sochi, Lukashenka said that the Russian president pledged uninterrupted oil supplies to Belarusian refineries.
