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Belarus asks Russia for $2 billion in loans

Belarus has asked Russia for $2 billion in "cheap loans" and the request has not been turned down, Alyaksandr Lukashenka said on Friday while meeting with students at Belarusian State University of Informatics and Electronic Engineering in Minsk, BelaPAN said.

"If we are blood brothers, we should be helped," Russia's news agency RIA Novosti quoted Mr. Lukashenka as saying. "We need a couple of billions of dollars in cheap loans to modernize our companies. I held tough talks in the Russian government and with the president on December 18 and 19, there were many issues."

Moscow has not rejected the request and has asked Minsk to present a list of the companies that it wants to modernize with the loans, according to Mr. Lukashenka. He added that if the companies received the loans, Russia might obtain a stake in them in exchange.

Mr. Lukashenka noted that Belarus also needed money to modernize companies that are of no interest to Russia. "They did not answer in the negative, on the contrary, they said, 'We will consider the matter and provide help in this area'," he was quoted as saying.

Speaking in late November, Mr. Lukashenka said that Belarus would be able to survive without a new loan from the International Monetary Fund.

Mr. Lukashenka claimed that Belarus would not have difficulty servicing its external debt in 2013. It is no problem to find $2.5 billion for a nation that has a GDP of nearly $60 billion and public revenues of almost $20 billion, he said, noting that Belarus had already negotiated a repayment delay and could borrow to repay existing debts.

Belarus will enter a period of peak payments on the external public debt in 2013, with the total volume of payments to double next year to $3.1 billion.