For the sake of Belarusian oil products, Russia is ready to yield in tariffs of both railways and ports

The Russian Ministry of Energy is preparing proposals providing for more favorable conditions for oil products from Belarus, and we are talking about tariffs for both Russian Railways and ports. Deputy Energy Minister Kirill Molodtsov told reporters about this on the sidelines of a press conference dedicated to the St. Petersburg Gas Forum, TASS reports.

“We will create conditions for them not to send [oil products to the Baltics]. We create them. The relevant materials have been reported, the work is proceeding very actively, the instruction has been received,” Molodtsov said.

Earlier, Russian President Vladimir Putin instructed to oblige Belarusian refineries to use Russian seaports when exporting oil products.

According to Russian experts, the Russian transport system can receive 7-8 million tons of oil products from Belarus by the end of the year in case of reorientation of cargo traffic from the ports of Lithuania.

As previously reported, at the end of August, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that it would be nice to deploy the transit of Belarusian oil products to Western Europe to Russian ports, using the simplest method - to prescribe such logistics to Minsk "as a load" to the oil supply agreement .

The head of Russian Railways , Oleg Belozerov , then complained to the President of Russia that the Belarusians were refusing the services of Russian railways in favor of the Baltic infrastructure. “We have given a 50% discount on oil loading for transportation from Belarusian plants, but Belarusian plants do not use Ust-Luga or St. Petersburg yet, but go to the Baltic republics. We are discussing, they say that they have signed long-term contracts on this subject, but we are trying to build a dialogue with them,” Belozerov said.

In addition to long-term contracts with Lithuania and Latvia, Minsk has other arguments, the most significant of which is economic inefficiency.

After Putin's current statement, a representative of the Belarusian Oil Company, Sergei Grib  , told a BelTA correspondent that the tariffs for transporting oil products to ports in other countries are lower than Russian ones, even with discounts.

The price of the issue for Belarus is serious - the benefit from the supply of duty-free oil with an annual volume of 24 million tons and current prices is about 1.4 billion dollars a year.

Deputy Prime Minister Vladimir Semashko , commenting on Putin's initiative, noted: Russia does not attempt to put pressure on Belarus to change the transit routes for Belarusian oil products.

“In April, we settled all relations on oil until 2025. There are no ultimatums and blackmail, and I hope there won't be. There is a proposal to look at the ways of transporting oil products (through Russian ports. - Note ed.). But the economy should be the basis of everything. So far, this is just a working proposal, ”Semashko explained.