At 21:30 Brussels time on Wednesday, 10 January 2006, crude oil from Russia began filling the Belarussian section of the 'Druzhba' (Russian for 'friendship') pipeline again. At the same time, Belarus began pumping 79,000 tonnes of oil which were in the country's depots, to refineries in the Ukraine, Poland, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Germany and Hungary.
Shipments recommenced after Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko bowed to pressure from his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin and agreed, in a phone conversation with Putin, to cancel plans for a transit duty on Russian oil. The planned duty of US$45 per tonne had spurred a dispute that stopped short of a trade war between the two former Soviet Republics on the conditions for Russian gas and oil exports to Belarus and to central European countries, via the Druzhba pipeline.
In his conversation with Lukashenko, Putin is reported to have threatened to impose import taxes on all goods hailing from Belarus. More than 50% of the exports from Belarus's Soviet-style economy go to Russia. A Belarussian delegation led by Prime Minister Sergei Sidorsky flies to Moscow on 11 January, where it will seek to negotiate, within two days time, a more far-reaching agreement on oil and other trade issues between the two countries.
Commission President José Manuel Barroso called the cut in oil supplies from Russia "unacceptable", adding that the Commission "will act to guarantee that this does not happen in the future".
In a hearing organised by the US Senate in Washington, Fatih Birol, chief economist of the International Energy Agency, said that the provisional end of the Russian-Belarussian trade dispute "shouldn't make us feel too relaxed," adding that "the market may need more oil in the months to come" and that the current market balance between supply and demand "is very tight right now".
