In his turn the state secretary of Security Council of Belarus Jury Zhadobin explained that introduction since Wednesday strengthened of customs control "is a symmetric measure in reply to actions of the Russian side in relation to the Belarus goods" - Russia entered restrictions on deliveries of dairy production from Belarus that displeased Minsk. Роspotrebnadzor at first forbade import of almost 500 items and then - 800 more because the Belarus manufacturers didn't renew the documents in accordance to the requirements of the Russian technical regulations on milk.
Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan have been engaged for some years in unification of customs rules and tariffs within the limits of creation of Customs Union. Moreover, one week ago management of three countries made a decision to enter World Trade Organization (WTO) as uniform customs territory. It's difficult to judge how "customs wars" inside uniform customs space look like on this background. Unhealthy picture obviously.
- There were in due time rigid state standards, GOST, - editor-in-chief of FORUM.msk Anatoly Baranov reminded. - It was difficult to satisfy GOST standards but to change something in it - almost improbable. Actually knowing the norms of the standard was possible to be sure that you do everything correctly - mankind consumes milk for thousand years, what can vary in standards on it? Another case - technical regulations. It's not a rigid norm, it varies actually at will - it is possible to demand that all milk was of dark blue colour - come and let someone try to infringe the requirement. Technical regulations - a piece of departmental, badly supervised but it's difficult to bypass it. The same thing we have now - some changes were brought and production arriving on the market for years appeared suddenly to be "unusable". As Lenin said, it's correct under formally, but it's a mockery in essense... The answer of Minsk is symmetric and symmetrically idiotic - they punish not the Kremlin but Russians as if they can affect a policy of the authorities.