MOSCOW, January 20. /TASS/. It will take Moscow and Minsk from 18 to 24 months to reach solutions on closer economic integration, Belarusian Ambassador to Russian Vladimir Semashko told TASS on Sunday.
According to the Belarusian diplomat, Russia and Belarus will have to work in several areas simultaneously. One of such areas, in his words, is cooperation within the Union State.
"We have already done much: in the areas of education, medicine, free movement of citizens, etc. At the same time, both sides admit that there are certain problems in the economic and social spheres. A special group co-chaired by Belarusian Economics Minister Dmitry Krutoi and Russian Minister of Economic Development Maxim Oreshkin has been set up to analyze the implementation of the treaty and work out proposals on further development of the Belarusian-Russian integration," he said.
"We need to have a clear picture of what has been implemented from the Union State Treaty of 1999, what has not been fully implemented, which ideas are no longer topical and which ideas important for the integration inside the union, on the contrary, are not reflected in this document or need specification. We need to think about the pros and cons of a common currency, a common issuing center and a common tax code. These are very complicated issues," Semashnko noted.
"Thus, as concerns unification of taxation, it should be taken into account that we have different structures of budget revenues. Oil and gas prevail in yours (Russia’s - TASS), we rely on production, BelAZ, MAZ, MTZ," he added.