Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko has ordered that the government demand that Russia pay for goods imported from Belarus in a hard currency.

"The task has been set that we trade not for rubles but for dollars, because we pay for energy resources [imported from Russia] not in rubles but in dollars. By the way, this is a shortcoming in the government's work. We should have worked with Russia and demanded that they also pay us in a hard currency like dollars or euros a long time ago," Lukashenko said at a conference dealing with economic problems in Minsk on Thursday.