Sergei Martynov: The European Commissioner for External Relations and European Neighbourhood Policy, Benita Ferrero Waldner, is on a visit to Minsk. Today, there have been fruitful and constructive negotiations with the President of the Republic of Belarus. I and Ms.Ferrero Waldner also discussed everything during our meeting and in details at the meetings of the two delegations.

We act on the premise that Belarus and the European Union continue working on improving their relationship. Improvement of the relationship between Belarus and the European Union is mutually critical and beneficial. Steps on improving this relationship should be taken from both sides.

We also discussed our new co-operation within the Eastern Partnership that became a reality largely due to personal involvement of Ms. Ferrero Waldner. We also discussed co-operation and concrete steps between Belarus and the European Union in all areas, in all platforms of the Eastern Partnership and on perspectives of our relationship from political area to economy and other fields.

We agreed that our contacts would continue with Ms. Ferrero Waldner and the European Commission as a whole, European Troika, European Union, and the forthcoming Swedish Presidency.

BelTA: At what stage is the preparation of the basic partnership agreement between Belarus and the European Union? And the second question: what are the prospects of facilitating a visa regime for Belarusians?

Sergei Martynov: In this area, we talk about the fact that so far there is virtually no legal framework between Belarus and the European Union, apart from the agreement between the European Union and the Soviet Union that we are a legal successor of. Therefore there is a strong need for the legal framework. The way we obviously need to follow is what Ms.Ferrero Waldner has mentioned – ratification of the existing agreement that was ratified only by a number of countries. However, to speed up co-operation on a number of critical and mutually beneficial issues, it would be right to set in motion a so called “temporary trade agreement”. This is a task we are facing now.

We also stress that the situation when Belarusian nationals are practically discriminated in terms of the visa regime in comparison with our neighbours, I mean Russian and Ukrainian nationals, including as for the visa fee, has been repeatedly raised by our side. During today’s negotiations, I told that Ms.Ferrero Waldner. We hope that steps in this direction should be taken as quickly as possible, with the understanding of all internal difficulties in the European Union and competence differences between the European Commission and the European Union as a whole. Nevertheless, I would like to highlight once again that further delay in this issue does meet neither the interests of our nationals, nor the Helsinki principles, nor mutual interests of Belarus and the European Union. And we would not be against if the visa fee was reduced lower than 35 Euros.