Belarus has proceeded to the verification of business plans, intending to provide Russia with more than a dozen large-scale import substitution projects. The money, according to head of the Belarusian government Roman Golovchenko, may come from a new loan of $1.5 billion provided by Moscow
“We are looking specifically at this project – will it be financed or not. That is, it may turn out that the business plan will simply not work and we will reject it. Then we will look for new ones. Only two projects have already been accepted. They are BelAZ (ring rolling production) and one more. Approximately $1.2 billion is for civil projects. And another around $200 million is for military ones. These will be microelectronics, mostly.
It is worth pointing out that the timber industry programmes are no less valuable – in particular, the Amkodor equipment production project.
“If before the market was rather saturated, today Amkodor is the only producer in the Union State … Here we should not even talk about the sum itself but about the importance of support in the current conditions when the sanction restrictions make it rather difficult to attract credit resources. That is, I would not talk so much about the size of the loan, but rather about the importance and timeliness, the cost of these credit resources. Still, the Russian Federation offers them on fairly favourable terms. Very good interest rates are set and we can see that the product we will eventually sell will be competitive,” he stressed.
The joint development of import substitution is due to unprecedented pressure from Western “ill-wishers” who have launched an enormous war of sanctions against the Union State of Russia and Belarus. The loans issued to Minsk are expected to be of “good service” in the implementation of the outlined roadmap of the strategic partnership.