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It is necessary to legally formalize the relationship between Belarus and the European Union, Dzyanis Sidarenka, head of the OSCE and Council of Europe division of the Belarusian foreign ministry’s Main Europe Directorate, said while speaking at the 11th Minsk Forum on Saturday. Mr. Sidarenka suggested making a decision on the status of the Partnership and Cooperation Agreement (PCA), which was signed in 1995 but has never come into force.
A new page has been turned in the relations between Belarus and the EU, Mr. Sidarenka said, suggesting continuing a dialogue and an effort to work out differences. He stressed that Brussels should talk about its expectations, not conditions for the development of relations with Belarus. The interests of common people in the EU and Belarus should be prioritized, he said.
Ernst Reichel, head of the division for Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Moldova at Germany’s Federal Foreign Office, noted that there is no legal basis for the development of relations between Minsk and Brussels without the PCA. The closer Belarus is to the EU, the higher expectations will be, he said. No matter how the EU’s conditions may be called, expectations or otherwise, the time will come in five months for Brussels to determine what the Belarusian authorities have done, Mr. Reichel said. The EU’s conditions are not what the EU needs; they are in the interests of the Belarusian people, he added.
According to him, Brussels does not make Belarus choose between the EU and Russia. There is nothing wrong with Belarus’ intention of cooperating with all of its neighbors, he said.
Michael Georg Link, a member of the Free Democratic Party (FDP) group in Germany’s Bundestag and a member of the Bundestag’s Committee on the Affairs of the European Union, suggested that the Belarusian authorities would have to move from promises to action in the next five months. Belarus is an important independent state that should become a subject, not an object of international politics, Mr. Link said. “We can’t afford wasting time,” he added.
In mid-October, the European Union suspended for six months its travel ban against Alyaksandr Lukashenka and 35 other Belarusian officials in an attempt to encourage democracy in the country.