Translated material
Russian-Kazakh coolness
Nazarbayev will transform GUAM into GUAC
The beginning of yesterday's meeting in the Kremlin between Vladimir Putin and the President of Kazakhstan Nursultan Nazarbayev looked crumpled. Appearing from different sides of the Executive Office, intended for the protocol, in the presence of the press, beginning of meetings between the owner of the Kremlin and his guests, Putin and Nazarbayev sat down next to each other and quietly joked about something. And, without saying anything out loud to the journalists, they went out together into the next office.The press secretary of the Russian president, Alexei Gromov, explained this situation by saying that before the meeting Putin was “occupied with Kemerovo.” Indeed, the accident at the Ulyanovskaya mine in Kuzbass became known just a couple of hours before Nazarbayev appeared in the Kremlin. The press was asked to wait for the presidents, who were supposed to make statements, to appear before them.
There were no questions for the leaders. Putin read a prepared text, Nazarbayev spoke impromptu. At some point, the Russian president apparently felt that his speech was going on too long. You could see how he silently swallowed a whole piece of text with his eyes in order to quickly deal with it. A little later it turned out that Vladimir Putin considered the reminder about the approaching 15-year anniversary of the CIS Collective Security System and the five-year anniversary of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) not so important. Putin missed the words with which he was going to express the importance of the prospects for cooperation between NATO and the CSTO, which are opening up in the near future in Afghanistan.
As a result, only one paragraph was devoted to the CSTO in Putin’s speech, but it looked unusually alarming: “Russia, Kazakhstan, like other members of the CSTO, must always be ready to give an adequate response to emerging threats. We see that there continues to be considerable potential for conflict in the world.” Vladimir Putin also shared his thoughts regarding economic cooperation with Kazakhstan. He spoke about bilateral trade turnover, which increased by one third last year. Somehow, without much enthusiasm, Putin noted that he considered the EurAsEC a good basis for the formation of a single economic space, but only “later”...
Nursultan Nazarbayev spoke on this topic just as routinely, recalling that “his proposal to create a Eurasian Economic Union of States still remains in force.” “A certain group of states is ripe for this,” Nazarbayev added vaguely, “we certainly have such capabilities.” It remains unclear who else, besides Russia, sees such opportunities from the President of Kazakhstan.
It seems that the only positive result of the meeting was the statement of a mutual agreement to participate in joint production of uranium enrichment and Nazarbayev’s message about his invitation to Putin to visit Kazakhstan this summer to discuss the joint development of Kazakh uranium deposits.
After almost two hours of negotiations, both presidents showed no signs of obvious satisfaction from mutual communication. Nazarbayev’s remark that “Kazakhstan and Russia in the oil and gas sector are not competitors, but partners” seemed interesting. It seems that the Kazakh guest was still continuing to argue with the owner of the Kremlin - otherwise such a refutation spoken out loud seems incomprehensible. Indeed, oil and gas issues occupied a significant place in the negotiations between the two presidents, as evidenced by Nazarbayev’s urgent summons to Moscow yesterday morning for Kazakhstan’s Energy Minister Baktygozhi Izmukhambetov.
As Vremya Novostei learned, the Russian and Kazakh sides have not yet been able to reach a final agreement on the terms of supply of Kazakh associated gas produced at the Karachaganak gas condensate field in Kazakhstan to the Orenburg gas processing plant. The problem of expanding the capacity of the Caspian Oil Pipeline Consortium (CPC) oil pipeline to 67 million tons of oil per year is still not resolved .
Through the CPC, oil from the Kazakh Tengiz field is delivered to the Russian port of Novorossiysk, and then by tankers through the Turkish straits to world markets. In 2005, Moscow promised Astana to resolve the issue of construction of the second stage of the CPC, but after Russian managers came to the management of the CPC, this issue was stalled again .
Nursultan Nazarbayev’s reaction to the agreement recently concluded in Athens between Russia, Bulgaria and Greece on the construction of the Burgas-Alexandroupolis (BA) oil pipeline was typical. The President of Kazakhstan, in an interview with Russian television, said yesterday that without Kazakhstan’s involvement in this project, it will not be economically effective. However, for now, Russian oil companies, which are the main shareholders of BA, are in no hurry to let their colleagues from Kazmunaigas into the consortium for the construction of the Balkan pipeline.
However, even in Moscow there are complaints about the partner who builds energy muscles. We are talking about announcing the participation of President Nazarbayev in the energy summit, which will take place in May this year in Poland. It is expected that the President of Poland and the leaders of four CIS countries - Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan - will meet there. This four differs from the other famous GUAM quartet in that the place of Moldova in it is occupied by Kazakhstan. So it’s fitting to call this structure GUAC. Polish President Lech Kaczynski announced the upcoming summit in early March during a meeting with his Ukrainian counterpart Viktor Yushchenko. In particular, we will talk about extending the Odessa-Brody oil pipeline to the Polish city of Plock. Poland hopes to receive Kazakh oil through this pipeline. In February of this year, Astana reported that preparations were being made to form a Kazakh-Polish working group to discuss this project. President Kaczynski intends to discuss this issue during his visit to Astana on March 28.
Kazakhstan has already connected to the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline, through which Caspian oil goes to Western markets, bypassing Russian territory. He also intends to continue studying the project of another trans-Caspian project, already a gas project, lobbied by the United States and the European Union, also being built bypassing Russia. Taking this into account, the essence of the Russian-Kazakh dialogue becomes clear, after which Nazarbayev is forced to assure Moscow that Astana “is not its competitor.”
In this regard, it should not be surprising that relations between Putin and Nazarbayev have become noticeably cooler than they were even before September last year. This is due to the circumstances surrounding the September visit of the President of Kazakhstan to Washington. It was the promises that Nazarbayev was then forced to give to the American President regarding Kazakhstan’s participation in the above-mentioned projects that, according to our newspaper, became the reason for the cooling in relations between Moscow and Astana. By the way, at the end of February, Nazarbayev was reminded in Astana of the agreements reached in September last year during a visit to Washington by US Assistant Secretary of State Richard Boucher.
The clouds that rolled into the horizon of Russian-Kazakh relations prevented the first rendezvous of Putin and Nazarbayev this year in February. The pace of their meetings this year clearly lags behind last year's achievements, when they met at least ten times. It is no coincidence that yesterday in the Kremlin, addressing Putin, Nazarbayev casually said that the increase in trade turnover last year was due to their frequent presidential meetings.