Official says price of Russian oil for Belarus controlled by market

YALTA, Crimea, Jan 10 (PRIME) -- Moscow does not control the oil price for Belarus, Russia’s Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Kozak said on Friday when asked whether Minsk and Moscow had managed to agree on oil shipments.

“The special feature of our oil industry is that it works fully on market terms and oil prices are unregulated. The markup to the price which existed and which our Belarusian colleagues offer to abolish in a centralized way will demand radical reassessment of the principles of the functioning of the Russian industry,” Kozak said.

Kozak said that the mechanism is used by Russia to control engine fuel prices on the domestic market.

The oil negotiations of the two countries were fruitless in 2019, and Russia stopped oil exports on January 1, 2020 as the export contracts between Russian companies and Belarusian customers expired.

On January 4, Deputy CEO of the state’s energy holding Belneftekhim Vladimir Sizov said that Belarus plans to resume exports of oil products until the end of January and hopes to receive 650,000 tonnes of oil from Russia in the month. He also said that a Russian company had agreed to send a batch of oil without a U.S. $10 per tonne premium.

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