Pavel Borodin on Putin's address to Lukashenko

Pavel Borodin, the State Secretary of the Union State of Russia and Belarus, has praised Russian President Vladimir Putin's address to his Belarussian counterpart Alexander Lukashenko concerning conceptual matters dealing with the building of the Union State.

In a Thursday interview with RIA Novosti, Borodin said the positions laid down in the document were "absolutely right." He also classified Putin's proposal to set up a joint working group to determine the most promising integration model as "brilliant." The Belarussian president is ready to consult with his Russian counterpart anytime, added the state secretary, who had had a meeting with Lukashenko yesterday.

The Russian president's address confirmed that there were "the following main variants of further Russian-Belarussian integration: full integration into a single state, a suprastate formation of the European Union type, and work for unification on the basis of the terms set by the Treaty of Creation of the Union State." Putin had proposed to set up a joint working group to "classify, comprehensively and in detail, each of the integration models to find out which one is the most promising of the three." Borodin also said the next session of the Union Council of Ministers was due on September 17th. A session of the Higher State Council of the Union State, too, will take place in late September or early October.