What Is The Reason For Rapture?

35 euros is, of course, less than the current 60. But it's still bad! Shameful! Disgusting!

Everyone is writing somehow enthusiastically and glibly about the successful negotiations between Belarus and the EU on the visa regime, so I feel like recovering the status quo.

"If we force events, then by the end of the year the Schengen visa will cost 35 euro for the Belarusians," – head of the Department for Citizenship and Migration of the Ministry of Internal Affairs Aliaksei Biahun said.

"There are no disagreements on the matter of principle," – Foreign Minister Uladzimir Makei said following the results of the visa talks.

And Lukashenka also talked a lot about our desire to get to Europe at the meeting with the heads of the MFA of the Central European Initiative.

And somehow it all looks like the high officials, as if some top Stakhanovites, are striving to make Belarusians happy with cheaper visas. They are sweating, doing their best, opening, so to say, the window to Europe for Belarusians.

And how about the fact that Russians have been charged 35 euros for this very visa for several years already? And this despite the fact that the relationship between the Russian Federation and the European Union is extremely bad, that Russia is a troubled country, an unpredictable and problematic one, and the Russians are more well off than we are and can pay for visas.

And what about the fact that we have heard for years about a possible coming reduction in the cost of Schengen visas, but the process goes as fast as the wet burns.

And what about the fact that Belarus remains the last and the only European country, where people have to get visas to enter the European Union? The last and the only one! Everyone else does not have to be bothered with this matter.

35 euros is, of course, less than the current 60. But it's still bad! Shameful! Disgusting!

And Minister Makei should tell not about 35 euros for the visa, but about what is done by the country's leadership so that the Belarusians would need only their passports to go to Europe. Like all the other Europeans.

Sviatlana Kalinkina, belaruspartisan.org