President Aleksander Lukashenko, Belarus' authoritarian leader, said his country will pay Russia a 460-million- dollar bill for natural gas deliveries "in the coming days," the Interfax news agency reported Thursday, according to dpa. Officials from the Russian monopolist natural gas firm Gazprom on Tuesday accused Lukashenko's government of paying only 45 per cent of contracted fees for natural gas deliveries during the first half of 2007, and threatened to cut future volumes delivered to Belarus in half if Minsk did not cough up the cash. "Today I gave the command to take the money from the (cash) reserves (of the Belarusian government) and to pay the 460 million dollars," Lukashenko said. The payment if made would likely head off a feared natural gas price war between Minsk and the Kremlin threatening Europe with price spikes, as Europe receives some 25 per cent of its natural gas from Russia via Belarusian pipelines. Gazprom would receive the money "within a month," Lukashenko promised. A delegation of Belarusian officials led by Vladimir Maiorov, director of the Belarusian national natural gas transportation company Beltransgaz, flew to Moscow Thursday afternoon. The departure of a high-level delegation from Minsk to the Kremlin has over the years become a reliable indicator that the Belarusian leader intends to negotiate with his giant northern neighbour, rather than push a disagreement with Moscow over energy to an outright confrontation. Lukashenko nonetheless was outspoken in his criticism of Russian President Vladimir Putin who, Lukashenko claimed, stood behind Gazprom's long-term object of gaining full control over Beltransgaz and other key elements of Belarus' energy infrastructure. "They (the Russians) have a simple plan: privatize Belarus in its entirety, take everything over," Lukashenko charged. "If we at one time were able to make agreements with (former Russian President Boris) Yeltsin, the present Russian government has no other priority but its own interests ... and to stuff its cheeks." The payment once made would practically empty Belarus government cash reserves, but other nations friendly to Belarus had already offered the former Soviet republic credit to cover the gap, Lukashenko claimed. "Our good friends, in part (Venezuelan President) Hugo Chavez are prepared to give us credit on good terms," he said. "And Western banks also are ready to offer us resources." Belarus at the same time rejected a Russian government offer to cover the debt with a credit at an 8.5 annual rate, Lukashenko said, "because those terms are unacceptable for Belarus." He did not specify by what rate Belarus would borrow money from Venezuela. Chavez has been intensifying diplomacy and trade with Belarus in an effort to bypass efforts by the United States to isolate the Venezuelan economy, in retaliation for his anti-US rhetoric. Lukashenko's success in finding foreign credit averted, at least temporarily, a long-term Kremlin policy of squeezing Belarus with gas price hikes and supply cut off ultimata, in order to gain control of natural gas pipelines owned by the Belarusian governments. A similar dispute between the Russian government and Minsk at the beginning of 2007 over oil pricing reduced Russian oil deliveries to Europe for more than a week, spiking the price of the fuel across East Europe and even as far away as Italy. European Union spokesmen earlier this week called on Belarus and the Kremlin to resolve the present dispute "peacefully ... and as soon as possible."
