Russia’s failure to implement Union State agreements puts Belarusian-Russian integration into question, Lukashenka says

Russia’s failure to implement Union State agreements puts Belarusian-Russian integration into question, Alyaksandr Lukashenka told reporters on Friday while visiting his native village of Aleksandryya near Shklow, Mahilyow region.

"You can see how our Russian brothers are behaving," the government’s news agency BelTA quoted Mr. Lukashenka as saying. "All that we’ve agreed upon, discussed at meeting of the Supreme State Council [of the Union State] and signed is being blocked."

According to Mr. Lukashenka, he intends to raise this problem at the next session of the Union State's Council of Ministers and discuss it "in the most serious way" with Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.

"If we start blocking each other in these areas and Russia starts barring us from its market, who needs these so-called integration processes?" Mr. Lukashenka said. "But I shouldn't be blamed for this. It isn’t my fault that integration isn’t moving forward, and that we're said to have turned toward the West, joined the Eastern Partnership and so on. Where else can we go?"

"I'll put this question to the [Russian] prime minister," Mr. Lukashenka said.