Belarus agrees to pay off gas bill
Belarus President Alexander G. Lukashenko said his country would pay a $460-million gas bill to Russia in the next few days.
Russia’s natural gas monopoly, Gazprom, said Wednesday that it would nearly halve the volume of gas Belarus receives if it did not pay the debt. That sparked fear that Belarus could siphon gas, taking 20% of Russia’s exports to Europe.
The gas standoff grew out of a hard-fought deal signed in the last minutes of 2006 that obliged Belarus to pay $100 per 1,000 cubic meters of gas, instead of $46.
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