Russian representatives of a joint intergovernmental working on deepening integration have begun an inventory screening of the union state treaty, Special Representative of the President of the Russian Federation on trade and economic cooperation with Belarus, Ambassador Mikhail Babich said.
“The Russian part of the group has begun work. We are currently taking inventory of all the union agreement provisions in certain areas: economic, social, governmental, security and military-technical. All aspects of the treaty, which were laid in 1999, are being reviewed by the relevant authorities [in Russia],” the Ambassador of the Russian Federation noted.
Babich said that “the peculiarity of this work is that five years ago the Eurasian Treaty was signed.”
“Part of the union treaty provisions has already been withdrawn and transferred to the Eurasian level. Therefore, it is important not to duplicate the powers transferred to the Eurasian bodies, but to preserve within the framework of the union treaty the legal relations that should be in a bilateral format,” he said.
The ambassador said that as soon as the proposals are made, the Russian side will offer their Belarusian partners to express their comments and suggestions. “We hope that the Belarusian side will do the same,” said Babich.
“Later we will hold a joint meeting of the working group, where we will substantively distribute the tasks in order to find all interchanges within the framework of the project [integration proposals] for the report presented to the presidents,” the special envoy of Vladimir Putin said.
In December 2018, the presidents of the Russian Federation and Belarus decided to establish an intergovernmental working group on the development of integration. The Russian part of the group was headed by the Minister of Economic Development Maxim Oreshkin, the Belarusian part — by the Minister of Economy Dzmitry Krutoy. The group included representatives of ministries and departments, parliamentarians of the two countries.
