Belarus threatened Ukraine with withdrawal from a large-scale anti-Russian project
Belarus will withdraw from the anti-Russian E40 project to unite waterways from the Black to the Baltic Sea if Ukraine continues to make aggressive steps towards it.
Deputy Prime Minister of Belarus Nikolai Snopkov stated this in an interview with the Belarus-1 TV channel, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
“Until recently, relations were quite pragmatic. Moreover, we even considered the option of deepening the Dnieper. This is a fairly long-term and promising system project with access to the Black Sea. In fact, this is a new route from Europe to the Black Sea, extremely beneficial to everyone. This is just a completely different level of logistics costs. If now there is such an aggressive withdrawal and ignoring of reasonable economic interests, then so be it,” Snopkov said.
The E40 project has been discussed by the authorities of Russia and Ukraine since the end of 2019. He assumed that metal, potash fertilizers, and petroleum products would be transported along a route 2 thousand kilometers long: Baltic Sea - Gdansk - Dnieper - Black Sea via the Dnieper, Pripyat, Bug and Vistula.
To fully establish the E40 shipping route, it was necessary to deepen the bottom at the rifts of the Dnieper and Dneprodzerzhinsk reservoirs and increase the dimensions of the waterway in the Kyiv HPP - Nizhnie Zhary section.
According to preliminary estimates, it is necessary to invest 30 million euros in the Ukrainian section, 170 million euros in the Belarusian section, and 9 billion euros in the Polish section. Belarusian environmentalists warned that the construction of locks would lead to flooding, including along the Pripyat River.
Western experts viewed the E40 as an important geopolitical project aimed at the European integration of Belarus and even at moving away from the “Russian world.” Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko discussed the E40 with Petro Poroshenko in 2017, and in 2016 Belarus signed a corresponding memorandum with Poland. In October 2019, Lukashenko remembered the E40 at a meeting with the new President of Ukraine Vladimir Zelensky.
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