Belarus has revised its commitment to build a biathlon complex in Russia's Winter Olympic 2014 host city of Sochi, a Russian business daily said.
Last March's commitment by Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko to build one of the Olympic sites in Sochi has been widely seen as a gesture by Minsk to heal growing rifts between the two ex-Soviet states as they seek to build a common "union state".
Their relations have been soured by a series economic and political disputes, including Russian energy supplies, last year's milk export row and Belarus' reluctance to sign a deal to set up a post-Soviet rapid reaction force.
The Vedomosti business daily said that Belorussian Triple diversified consumer services group has agreed to invest in a project to construct a 20,000-capacity biathlon complex in the Black Sea resort city of Sochi. The project was initially estimated at 257 million rubles (some $8.7 million).
The company could not be immediately reached for comment.
Dmitry Kozak, Russia's deputy premier in charge of the Sochi Olympics preparations, neither confirmed nor rejected the news of Belarus' withdrawal from the biathlon complex construction.
A source in the Russian energy giant Gazprom told Vedomosti that responsibility for the construction of the biathlon complex now rests with Gazprom.
The Russian government announced last September that more than 1 trillion rubles ($34.1 billion) would be spent between 2009 and 2012 on preparations for the 2014 Winter Olympics.
MOSCOW, January 13 (RIA Novosti)
