On March 15, Minsk / Vladimir Matveev - BELTA /. President of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko expects an expansion of cooperation within the framework of the Union State of Belarus and Russia. He stated this today at a meeting with the State Secretary of the Union State, Grigory Rapota, as reported by a BELTA correspondent. "I am very glad that we will have to work together on improving the Union State. This will be handled by a person who is not only competent but also loves Russia and Belarus," the President said, addressing Grigory Rapota. According to the head of state, it is necessary to define approaches that will help raise the level of cooperation in this union project. "We will find, and most likely are obliged to find, those areas that will allow us to speak of good dynamics in the development of the Union State," Alexander Lukashenko noted. He also remarked that Grigory Rapota knows the elected President of Russia, Vladimir Putin, very well. "The fact is that I spoke with him recently, and the first phrase he said was: 'We need to develop our integration, to be closer to each other'," the President of Belarus noted. "Indeed, time, the situation, and the circumstances speak precisely of this and show that we should not look around to see what they will think of us there. We must think about our people and about what these people in Russia and Belarus will think of us, and act in this direction," Alexander Lukashenko emphasized. "I am ready to discuss today the main directions of our activities, up to the convening of the Supreme State Council, and a complex of issues that are currently acute in the Union of Belarus and Russia," the President said. In turn, Grigory Rapota noted that the opinion of the President of Belarus is extremely important for him in order to correctly build the work of the executive bodies, as he also heads the Supreme State Council. "I completely agree with you that we must find, and we already have a number of ideas on this matter regarding the development of cooperation (in the Union State. - BELTA note)," the State Secretary said. According to him, an analysis of the situation related to the intensification of work in the three-party Eurasian Economic Space is currently underway. "We must understand the place of our Union State in this integration structure and in the CIS as a whole," Grigory Rapota said.