Lavrov: No Border With Belarus Means Opportunities For Wrongdoing

The Russian Federation is concerned about the agreement between Belarus and the European Union on the camps for illegal migrants.

Belarus and Russia are starting a “dialogue” on the common policy in the sphere of extradition.

This has been informed by Russia’s Minister for Foreign Affairs Sergey Lavrov on January 17 in Moscow during the press-conference for the foreign and Russian journalists, BELTA reports.

“Belarus and us have a “union state” together, in the framework of which we took a principle decision to equalize the rights of the citizens of both countries in all the spheres with no exceptions,” — Russia’s Foreign Minister has reminded.

According to Lavrov, coordination of the parameters of a single visa and migration space remains one of the spheres which require many efforts.

“This requires, among the other things, defining of a common list of persons who are undesirable, and those who are desirable, but it also requires introduction of a single policy in the sphere of extradition. This appears most timely today as there is one more theme relating to the agreement between Belarus and the European Union on creating camps for illegal migrants at the territory of the Republic of Belarus. Given that we have no terrestrial borders with Belarus, this of course raises certain issues and creates opportunities for wrongdoing, so we are starting a dialogue on this theme with our Belarusian colleagues,” — Sergey Lavrov has told.

The diplomat has noted that the Belarusian-Russian negotiations on the common migration policy have been going on since long ago, and added he thinks it is time to speed them up to achieve concrete results.

As reported yesterday, the officials started checking the passports of the passengers of Minsk-Moscow flights in the Russian airports. The Borderline Service of the Federal Security Service has clarified that the documents check was also connected with the decree on abolishment of the Belarusian visas. However, the main reason was to prevent the citizens of the third countries from crossing the border this way.

Previously, they started admitting foreign citizens, even if they had the Russian visas, to the Russian Federation from Belarus only through the international admission points. Russia justified its decision by “the situation in the world has drastically changed” and “the risks connected with terrorist migration issues sharply grew”.

The Belarusian MFA considered this measure excessive. According to Spokesman for the MFA Dzmitry Mironchyk, the Russian side unexpectedly saw a problem “where it had failed to see any problems for two dozen years”, namely, in the absence of the international admission points at the border between Belarus and Russia. Sergey Lavrov has noted that this problem will be solved only upon creation of the single visa space of Belarus and Russia.