Belarus seeking assistance in Venezuela

Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko left Belarus for Venezuela to negotiate with Hugo Chavez just a day before a visit by Vladimir Putin to Brest to attend a meeting of the Council of Ministers of the Union State. Although both the Russian side and Minsk refute a deliberate character of this "coincidence", a diplomatic meaning of such gestures is clear. This is a polite but obvious attempt of Belarus to contrast "Russia's energy pressure" to allied relations with Caracas, another oil capital of the world. Following the talks, Alexander Lukashenko declared that in the near future Venezuela would start supplying up to 80,000 barrels of oil per day to Belarus. It is also planned to increase production at the Petrolera BeloVenesolana joint venture that operates in this Latin American country. Belarus confirmed its intention to finish construction of its tractor and truck manufacturing plants in Venezuela.

All these moves are ideological and propagandistic rather than applied (oil deliveries from South America to Belarus are much more expensive than from Russia). This is inter alia aimed at hurting Moscow that is pressurizing Minsk trying to force the latter either to speed up transfer to full free market relations in the strategically important sphere of hydrocarbon sales or to make political concessions. But Lukashenko is ready neither for making real integration steps (like establishing a single issuing center of the common currency of the two states in Moscow) nor for raising oil and gas prices to a free market level. Meanwhile, Russia still cannot decide what it wants from Belarus - either integration with inevitable economic concessions by Russia or purely pragmatic market cooperation. The Belarusian president perfectly realizes this dual nature of Russia's position, which gives him substantial space for maneuvers. The current fuss around Venezuela is just an attempt to demonstrate Minsk's ability to pursue independent policies allegedly capable of seriously decreasing Belarus' dependence on Moscow.

By Stanislav Mitrakhovich, NESF leading expert