"It's Very Frustrating For Lukashenko."
- 23.07.2025, 8:01
The dictator has been psychologically traumatized again.
Poland has discovered the largest oil and gas field in the country's history and one of the largest in Europe. The volumes of hydrocarbons in the well near the island of Wolin in the Baltic Sea are 22 million tons and 5 billion cubic meters, respectively.
The very next day, Alexander Lukashenko called a meeting on hydrocarbon production and demanded to "drill and drill" in search of new deposits.
- The meeting he called right after the discovery of a field in Poland became known is certainly a coincidence," economic observer Andrei Makhovsky ironically noted on Euroradio. - In general, it's offensive.
There is no justice in the world: For 30 years Lukashenko has been saying "I feel we have oil", we just need to find it. And if there is oil - then there will be gas. And if there is gas, there may be diamonds somewhere. 30 years of searching and nothing. And Poland - pop! - they weren't looking for anything, but they found it. And this, I think, is very offensive for Lukashenko.
There is a very interesting point with these searches for minerals in Belarus. They are looking for them, Lukashenko demanded - so we should look for them. He said: to drill, so there is no time to think, we have to drill, that's it. And they are drilling.
But at the current meeting Lukashenko gave some curious figures - usually they hide them, but now he spoke out. He said that 285 thousand meters of wells were drilled last year, and it allowed to get 20 thousand tons of oil.
If you recalculate and imagine that they managed to sell them in accordance with the Russian oil price ceiling (the one that was before the recent decline) - you can get about 26 million Belarusian rubles.
How much the drilling itself cost, Lukashenko did not say. But he said that they spent Br35 million just to upgrade and strengthen the material and technical center for geology.
There's the ratio: we dug and dug, earned Br26 million, spent (and this is only a small part of spending) Br35 million. This, in fact, is the whole economic sense of searching for Belarusian minerals.
The justification for such persistent "drilling", according to Makhovsky, lies in the field of psychology rather than economics:
- All Lukashenko's economic ideas consist in inventing something like this, making a "scheme", a project, which we will implement now - and after that we will be completely happy. This was the case with the nuclear power plant, about which he said: if we build a nuclear power plant, then we will be happy. Something did not heal.
With the BNBK Corporation, which was launched together with the former Prime Minister of Kyrgyzstan, he said: this is a unique project, "there are no analogues", now we will build it and sell the developments (in particular, amino acids and fodder - S.) all over the world. But we built something, and now we had to take it on state maintenance.
I am not talking about woodworking at all. Because now one can say either good or nothing about woodworking. But Lukashenko also said that once we do it, we will live well.
All these ideas are hopes for a miracle. And it is the same with oil: we will produce it, we will get rich. But so far we don't get rich, we spend more.
It's not that oil can't be found in Belarus. Perhaps it is there - it's just that we don't have to try so hard. And in order to please Lukashenko, Belarus is now developing such fields, where oil production is unprofitable in principle.
Andrei Makhovsky recalled that even before 2020, until the state did not intensively close economic statistics, Belarusian oilmen complained: they were forced to develop fields, where they had to invest more than they could earn - and then they were scolded for the low profitability.
As we can see, nothing has changed years later: the same attitude to drill and search for minerals in the bowels of the Belarusian land, and the same scolding of geologists and all those involved, when it turns out that not all wells are equally rich in oil - and some of them have no oil at all.