National currencies account for 92% of Belarus-Russia payments in 2023

“Last year national currencies - Russian and Belarusian rubles - accounted for 92% of payments. This is a huge figure, the highest on record,” the ambassador emphasized.

Commenting on the record-high trade between Belarus and Russia last year, Dmitry Krutoi noted that Western sanctions were the driver of the increase in supplies to the Russian market. The task of diverting more than $10 billion of exports to friendly nations, in particular, the Russian Federation, has become a matter of survival of the Belarusian economy and a litmus test for its sustainability. “It’s great that this worked out. And within two years we increased our exports to the Russian market by $8.5 billion. This is quite an achievement, and it is attributed to a number of factors,” the Belarusian ambassador said.

The factors that contributed to it were successful resolution of logistics issues, including the use of Russian ports; good performance of the financial and banking sectors; implementation of a number of important investment and import-substitution projects together with Russia. “Over the course of two years, the prime minister and I travelled across Russian regions and visited all the largest enterprises that were ready to cooperate with us. We signed medium-term supply programs for components with each of them. This is probably one of the few segments of our economy that grew not by a couple of percentages, but by an order of magnitude,” said Dmitry Krutoi.

A reminder, at the opening ceremony of the Belarus-Bashkortostan Business Forum on 9 February Prime Minister Roman Golovchenko said that trade between Belarus and Russia approximated $53 billion in 2023. “We have become closer to each other. We beat last year’s figures, that were also rather high, by 6%. This is a great success,” he said.