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Lukashenko: Belarus to repay Russia $1 billion per year on old loans
Belarus will pay Russia $1 billion per year for previous loans and will not ask for “any money at all”, and proposes “honest, transparent and sincere” bilateral cooperation, said Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, as cited by BelTA.
The US pays Russia “1.5% for keeping their foreign currency there” but Belarus pays 4-6%, Lukashenko explained: “This just couldn’t make us happier – paying Russia $1 billion per year. They’ve invested their money successfully.”
The president remarked that …
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Russia sends out military patrols without Turkey again in Syria
For the second time this week, Turkish soldiers have not joined their Russian colleagues in the joint patrolling of Syria, said Major General Yury Borenkov, director of the Russian Reconciliation Center for Syria, as cited by Russia’s Defense Ministry website.
According to Borenkov, because Turkey did not show up, Russian troops patrolled Syria’s Al-Hasakah region independently. The Russian military police has also continued to patrol the Aleppo province. Borenkov noted that the patrols took …
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Russia accuses Israel of nearly shooting down passenger plane during air attack on Syria
The Russian Defense Ministry accused its Israeli counterparts of creating a dangerous situation in which a passenger plane came under fire when it was about to land at Damascus airport.
“This was an airplane on the route from Tehran to Damascus. There were 172 passengers on board at the time of the attack, “ Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov said.
According to the general, on the night of Thursday, February 6, four Israeli F-16 fighter jets unexpectedly struck the suburbs of …
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Number of Belarusian supporters of union with Russia down by a third
The number of Belarusian citizens who support the idea of a union state with Russia has declined by 20 percentage points in the last year, Kommersant reports, citing the results of a sociological study by Andrey Vardomatsky’s Belarusian Analytical Workshop.
While at the start of 2019, more than 60% of Belarusians advocated a union with Russia, by December this figure had dropped to nearly 40%.
At the same time, sociologists have been observing a growth in the number of supporters of Belarus …
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Turkey losing interest in Russian gas
While Gazprom was completing the $7 billion Turkish Stream gas pipeline, Turkey was cutting back on its purchases of Russian gas.
By the end of 2019, 14.4-14.8 billion cubic meters (bcm) of Russian gas had been transported to the Turkish market, Interfax calculates, based on statistics from the Turkish Energy Market Regulatory Authority (EPDK).
In comparison with 2018, this equates to a decline of approximately 40%. As a result, for the first time in 13 years Turkey is no longer one of the …