MOSCOW, August 18 (RIA Novosti)
Russian forces will pull out slowly - analysts / Washington wants to punish Moscow for Georgia's defeat / Russia and the West's attitude to Georgian president irrational / South Ossetian conflict spurs Polish-U.S. missile defense deal / Another former prime minister to lobby for Nord Stream / Ukraine prepares to pump Caspian oil to Poland /
Vedomosti, Gazeta
Russian forces will pull out slowly - analysts
The West is insisting that Moscow pull out of Georgia right away. And so they will start withdrawing Monday, leaving analysts uncertain as to how long they'll take to leave or how far they'll go.
Russian troops are to move out of Georgian territories to a safety zone determined by a 1999 decision of the Joint Control Commission (JCC), and to South Ossetia, President Dmitry Medvedev said in a telephone conversation with his French counterpart Nicolas Sarkozy, adding that the pullout would start Monday, the Kremlin press office reported.
U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice does not think the settlement plan will allow Russian forces to move farther into Georgia. And, once international peacekeeping forces are stationed in the self-proclaimed republics, there will be no need for Russian peacekeepers there either.
A Kremlin source said Russia agreed to pull out from Georgia quickly, but no decision has yet been made about how far they will go.
The pace of the pullout will also depend on how soon additional security measures are taken, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told the media.
Around 10,000 Russian troops and several hundred armored vehicles entered the conflict region once hostilities began. Georgian Interior Ministry reports that Russian forces are currently in control of Gori, Senaki and Zugdidi, which are all Georgian towns.
They have also taken under their protection the Ingurskaya hydro power plant on the Georgian-Abkhazian border. Anatoly Nogovitsyn, deputy chief of staff, said important strategic facilities like power plants could become targets for "provocations" or even terrorist attacks.
According to the French settlement plan signed by the conflicting parties, Georgian forces should return to their permanent bases, while Russian units should retreat to their pre-conflict positions.
This point, along with the reference to the 1999 agreement, means that Russian peacekeepers will control the same area on the South-Ossetian-Georgian border as before the conflict. "No more and no less," confirmed Viktor Ozerov, chairman of the defense committee at the Federation Council, the Russian parliament's upper house.
Igor Bunin, director of the Center for Political Technologies, a Moscow-based think tank, said Russian troops will be retreating very slowly from Georgia. "The military have a feeling the operation isn't over yet. They feel psychologically insecure about going away and are therefore searching for reasons to linger," he said.
Nezavisimaya Gazeta
Washington wants to punish Moscow for Georgia's defeat
On the initiative of the U.S., NATO foreign ministers are scheduled to meet on Tuesday. The agenda of the meeting is the future of Russian-NATO dialogue following recent events in the Caucasus. As a result, many plans for cooperation between Russia and the North Atlantic alliance will come under question, but analysts do not believe Russia-NATO cooperation will cease altogether.
Kurt Volker, the U.S. ambassador to NATO, said no detailed response has been agreed to Moscow's moves yet. But the ministers will examine the wisdom of holding regular meetings between foreign and defense ministers, as well as between ambassadors of the alliance's member countries and their Russian opposite numbers. Such meetings are held under the auspices of the Russia-NATO Council, the main body promoting relations between Russia and the alliance. Council meetings at ambassador and representative levels under the chairmanship of the NATO secretary general are held not less than once a month.
Professor Alexander Nikitin, of the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO), and president of the Russian Political Science Association, said: "The urgency, which made the Russian side launch a military operation in South Ossetia without informing Brussels after Georgia attacked Tskhinvali, proved larger than the Russia-NATO Council format, although Moscow proposed an immediate calling of the Council after the hostilities entered their active phase."
The Russia-NATO Council is a multi-way mechanism, which arranges cooperation between Russia and the West in dozens of fields, and to cover them all at once following a concrete regional conflict would be a super-reaction, he said.
"Russia-NATO cooperation in nuclear and non-proliferation policy is in no way connected with developments in Georgia, and it is clear that such cooperation should continue," Nikitin said. "Even in the most difficult years of the Cold War, the U.S.S.R. and the West carried on disarmament talks and reached serious agreements."
He said cooperation in counter-terrorist efforts could not be disrupted either. Relations will not be ruptured, he said. The alliance, despite making biting comments on the conflict, kept a low profile and made no hostile moves during the five days of the operation. NATO took a wait-and-see attitude, and "a certain psychological and ideological overreaction upon the completion of the active phase of the Russian operation has been to compensate for the accomplished fact, which now cannot be altered," Nikitin said.
Vedomosti
Russia and the West's attitude to Georgian president irrational
Russia, which is striving for the resignation of the Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, and the West, which is taking him under its wing, are both acting against their own interests. The irony of the situation is that Saakashvili staying in his post as long as possible is in the interests of Moscow, while the West's interests lie in urgently finding his substitute.
Why Saakashvili has become inconvenient for Europe and the U.S. can be easily explained. This is something the European mass media have already started doing - particularly, BBC News, which has shown a video of Saakashvili chewing his own tie while sitting in his office and talking on the phone, forgetting he is on camera. Commentators immediately considered this a sign of mental issues.
The Foreign Minister of France, Bernard Kouchner, admitted that the Georgian side has made some major mistakes. Politicians in Europe and the United States are facing certain questions: is Saakashvili able to think reasonably? Is he sane? Does he possess any political skills? Can he be trusted, after all?
The answers to these questions are hardly reassuring for the president himself. And even if the West is insisting on Saakashvili preserving power, this is rather to spite Moscow's interests and avoid accepting its own mistakes.
However, Saakashvili's credit of trust in the West has never been so low. In politics, once you've lost, you are unlikely to be betted on again. It does not matter why Saakashvili has lost the war and why now he has Georgia's ruined army and the country's cracked economy. The major thing here is he has achieved the goals directly opposite of those he had aimed for. This is hugely advantageous for Moscow, which has now all the initiative in its hands. But does Moscow want a new, bright, self-confident and charismatic leader like the one Saakashvili was five years ago?
The answer would be definitely yes - if it was the ideal choice of an ideal Georgian electorate. Yet, despite all his seeming inadequacies, Saakashvili rather fittingly reflects one of the Georgians' hopes - that is, the hope of getting back the territories which were lost, and there are no signs of that attitude changing so far. Neither are there signs of Moscow establishing in Georgia a "pro-Kremlin" regime. Moscow would hardly be in favor if Irakly Okruashvili, who proposed attacking the city of Tskhinvali back in 2006, wins the Georgian presidential elections.
RBC Daily
South Ossetian conflict spurs Polish-U.S. missile defense deal
The United States continues moving forces toward the Russian border. Poland announced it has initialed an agreement with the U.S. on hosting an antimissile base, which is part of the U.S. missile defense system in Europe.
Analysts believe that Washington is quickly opening up a new "front" against Moscow to make up for not providing open military support to Georgia in its confrontation with Russia over South Ossetia.
According to the agreement, a U.S. interceptor base will be built in Redzikowo, near Slupsk in northern Poland; construction will begin this year and will be completed in 2014-2016. Along with an interceptor base, Poland will get 96 Patriot missiles (probably modified Patriot-2). The first American missiles will be delivered to Poland later this year. The Pentagon will also send its military experts there.
Russian officials have been outraged over the news. Russia's General Staff said openly that Poland had turned into a priority target for a possible strike. President Dmitry Medvedev agreed with his military officials, adding that Russia was not convinced by fairy tales about restraining "rogue states." "The deployment of new missile-defense elements in Europe has the Russian Federation as its aim," Medvedev said at a press conference.
"The purpose of deployment of missile interceptors in Poland and a radar base in the Czech Republic is forming a belt around Russia and stepping up military and political pressure on us," said Radzhab Safarov, director of the Moscow-based Center of Modern Iranian Studies. "The U.S. reasoning about protecting Europe from Iran and North Korea upon its allies' request is absurd."
Vagif Guseinov, director of the Institute for Strategic Studies and Analysis think tank, said: "The [U.S.-Polish] agreement is part of a well-designed scheme carefully built by the US and its Western allies. It is aimed at shaping a "single front" to punish Russia for its peace enforcement operation in Georgia."
Both Washington and Warsaw had to make mutual concessions. The Polish government had to turn a blind eye to the negative sentiments about the U.S. base harbored by a large part of the country's population. The White House has to make a commitment to help modernize Poland's army, especially its air-defense equipment.
Overall, however, Poland is the one who will benefit more from the arrangements. "Poland wanted the U.S. to help improve its air-defense facilities, and it got what it wanted," concluded Alexei Makarkin, vice president of the Center of Political Technologies, a Moscow think tank.
Kommersant
Another former prime minister to lobby for Nord Stream
Following on from Germany's ex-Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, the former Finnish Prime Minister Paavo Lipponen will hold a top post in Nord Stream AG, the operator of the Nord Stream gas project. He must push through the decision to build the North-European (Nord Stream) gas pipeline across the Baltic seabed in the economic zones of Finland and other Scandinavian countries.
Employing a high-ranking consultant, Russia's natural gas monopoly Gazprom hopes to build the pipeline within the declared timeframe by 2011.
Paavo Lipponen is reluctant to talk about the terms of the contract he signed. He was invited to the company by Gerhard Schroeder (in 2006, Russia's then-President Vladimir Putin proposed that Schroeder should become chairman of Nord Stream AG) and Mattias Warnig, the company's director general.
According to Lipponen, his remuneration will be "moderate." "I will be paid at a normal international level. There are bigger wages than that," he said.
Experts explain the need to invite the former prime minister to Nord Stream AG by the fact that the project is frequently stalled due to the need to obtain ecological permits, therefore the Russian company needs political support.
Valery Nesterov of Troika Dialog believes that "the attraction of a political heavy-weight should step up the implementation of the project. The company is pulling through the legislative filters. The only thing we need now is to commission the pipeline in time."
However, the timeframe situation is far from simple. Nord Stream AG promised to commission the first line of the pipeline, with an annual capacity of 27.5 billion cu m of gas, in the third quarter of 2010, but then the commissioning date was first postponed for a year and then deferred until 2012.
Within the next few weeks Nord Stream AG is planning to complete additional ecological studies as requested by Sweden, Denmark and Finland. The company's problems with Finland are of a special nature: offshore pipelines have never been laid in the country's exclusive economic zone, therefore there is no mechanism for coordinating such issues with government bodies.
However, Mikhail Korchemkin, director of East European Gas Analysis, is convinced that even if Paavo Lipponen helps Gazprom resolve problems in Finland, the company will face other serious problems in Sweden and Denmark and the former Finnish prime minister may fail to cope with them.
Vremya Novostei
Ukraine prepares to pump Caspian oil to Poland
Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko has instructed his government to prepare the Odessa-Brody pipeline to start shipping Caspian oil to Poland in 2009. In this way, Kiev believes Europe will gain access to Caspian oil, allowing it to depend less on Russian raw materials and, most important, permit Ukraine to become the main transit center. But the jury is still out on who will be filling this pipe.
The first section of the pipeline (capacity 9 million tons per year and distance 674 km) was put into operation in 2001. The idea was to transport Caspian oil from Kazakhstan via the Black Sea coast to Europe (from the Yuzhny sea terminal in the Odessa Region to the Druzhba system in the Brody area in the Lvov Region). But for three years the pipeline was in a kind of limbo, because oil refineries both in Ukraine and Europe could not reach agreement with Caspian oil suppliers. In 2004, following talks between Ukrtransneft and TNK BP, Ukraine reversed pipeline oil flow. At the end of 2006, the Ukrainian company concluded a contract with Transneft on pumping nine million tons of Russian oil to Odessa.
Currently, 80% of the Odessa-Brody pipeline, which handled 9.6 million tons in 2007, is filled by TNK BP and LUKoil. Now that the Ukrainian leadership has taken its decision, the companies' contract obligations are threatened. Neither TNK BP nor LUKoil commented officially yesterday. A source in one of the companies, however, said that "they do not fear these plans." "The Ukrainian authorities make such statements fairly often. Yet if the pipeline reverses to direct flow again, there will be nothing to fill it with, because Ukraine needs first to agree with Kazakhstan," he said.
As early as this spring, Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev said that before the Odessa-Brody pipeline could be used, "it is necessary to reach agreement with Russian oil transporting companies."
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