OREANDA-NEWS. President of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko said that with insufficient supplies of oil by the Russian side, Minsk will begin to take fuel from a transit pipeline.

“I didn’t blackmail anyone, but I said: if the necessary volumes of oil are not delivered from Russia (in January they supplied only 500 thousand tons, 1.5 million tons were not delivered), we will begin to take it from the transit pipe,” the politician said.

According to Lukashenko, now 70 million tons of oil is passing west through the territory of Belarus. He recalled that Moscow still have not paid Minsk for the situation with oil pollution in the Druzhba pipeline. “Therefore, if they not deliver it in February, we will get it up to 2 million tons,” the President concluded.