Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko has called for bolstering military-technical cooperation with Russia and expressed his hope for settling related questions.

"Plenty of questions - not problems - have come up lately in the defense sector and military-technical cooperation between Belarus and Russia and they need to be resolved," Lukashenko told Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin in Minsk on Tuesday.

"Certainly, these are solvable questions," the Belarusian president added.

Lukashenko said Russian President Vladimir Putin and he spent much time discussing those questions at their recent meeting in Sochi.

"I would like us to scrutinize these questions in the context of our cooperation strategy and mutual supplies," he told Rogozin.

"I would like to find solutions to particular questions so that we know what to do next," he said.

"I would not deny that I expect your defense industry to contribute to our common defense," Lukashenko said. "We practically share the army, the group of forces."

"We have covered a great distance over the past year; we have done a good job in searching for new ways and new points of strategic partnership between Russia and Belarus," Rogozin replied.

He thinks Russia and Belarus should stop concentrating on "trade in finished products". "There is great demand for merging our intellectual potential and developing industrial cooperation," Rogozin said. "That would be consistent with the good general level of our relations."

Rogozin said that Russia had started fulfillment of a state armament program on orders from President Vladimir Putin. "This is not only a question of strengthening the defense capabilities of Russia and its ally, but also a major attempt to re-industrialize the nation," he said.

"One cannot be weak in the modern world. Weakness is not just the absence of armaments or military hardware, it is also dependence on the market," the vice-premier stressed.

"Our sole defense is large industrial potential: operational plants and new jobs. Russia-Belarus cooperation is a vast resource," Rogozin said.