MOSCOW, December 19 (RIA Novosti)
End-of-year non-summit of the CIS / Gazprom starts traditional Christmas gas war with Ukraine / Russia to sell state-of-the-art weapons to Iran / Israeli defense and foreign ministries fall out over contract for Russia /
Vedomosti, Kommersant
End-of-year non-summit of the CIS
Next weekend, the Kazakh resort of Borovoye will host an informal meeting of the CIS presidents, the last one this year. The president of Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev, has invited the leaders of Armenia, Belarus, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan to discuss anti-crisis measures.
The initial plan was to hold informal CIS and CSTO summits. However, Moldovan leader Vladimir Voronin, who holds the rotating CIS presidency, will not be attending, and the Ukrainian and Azerbaijani presidents won't be present either.
"The Kazakh president's initiative is to combine efforts of the Russian and Kazakh governments as well as those of the other CIS member states to mitigate the repercussions of the global financial crisis. One of the proposals is to use Russian rubles for settlements instead of U.S. dollars," said Yermukhamet Yertysbayev, aide to the Kazakh president.
Using Russian rubles isn't a solution for the GUAM nations or for Uzbekistan, which has recently left Eurasec, said Leonid Vardomsky, head of the Center for CIS and Baltic Studies at the Institute of Economics.
Most of the CIS economies aren't diversified but are heavily dependent on exports. Their national currencies therefore become unstable as demand for commodities goes down, said Adzhar Kurtov, expert at the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies, a Moscow think tank.
The global crisis is prodding the CIS countries to further integration, as many of them have seen their respective GDPs plunge even lower than Russia's, said Yaroslav Lissovolik from Deutsche Bank in Moscow. Moreover, the ruble is more stable than other CIS currencies and even than currencies of other emerging markets.
This crisis will benefit the CIS countries, according to Andrei Fyodorov, director for political programs at the Russian Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, because it will show them once again that none of them can survive alone. "Cooperation with Russia is not just the only way they can develop, but the only way to survive for most of them," he added.
Kommersant, Vremya Novostei
Gazprom starts traditional Christmas gas war with Ukraine
Gazprom said Thursday it would cut off supplies to Ukraine on January 1 unless Kiev repays $2 billion in gas arrears by the end of the year.
However, the gas export monopoly's stance is weak, because global gas prices are falling and Ukraine has a three-month stockpile of gas. Gazprom has admitted that the new tensions are rooted in politics rather than in economic considerations.
In Kiev, President Viktor Yushchenko said Ukraine's Naftogaz had already provided $800 million as part payment for the arrears and a further $200 million would be paid soon. "The problem has been settled, period," Yushchenko said.
But the Gazprom management does not think this is so. Spokesman Sergei Kupriyanov said Ukraine still owed $2 billion to Gazprom, because December's arrears have been added to the initial debt of $2.4 billion.
The monopoly has few instruments of pressure on Ukraine. In November, Gazprom threatened to push up the price to $400 per 1,000 cubic meters next year from $179.5, but this looks unrealistic now.
Gazprom deputy CEO Alexander Medvedev said prices for the EU would be $260-$300 in 2009, which means that the price for Ukraine should be lower because the distance is shorter.
Alexei Golubov, president of Ukraine's Union of Chemists, said: "Even if the gas price for Ukraine is raised to $200-$230 per 1,000 cubic meters, this will not come as a death blow to the country's chemical industry, which depends more heavily on gas prices than other sectors."
Alexander Medvedev explained why Gazprom decided to stand up and fight. He said the gas talks were "not a purely Russian-Ukrainian problem," and that "European colleagues are discussing NATO accession with Ukraine, but have no time to consider its economic problems."
Gazeta.Ru
Russia to sell state-of-the-art weapons to Iran
Moscow has delivered short-range Tor-M1 surface-to-air missile (SAM) systems to Iran and is currently shipping the more powerful S-300 SAMs there under another contract.
News services quoted anonymous sources as saying that both countries are negotiating medium-range SAM purchases. Analysts said Russian-U.S. relations would inevitably be aggravated.
Moscow probably believes that a well-armed Iran no longer presents a problem. Moreover, Alexander Fomin, deputy director of the Federal Military-Technical Cooperation Service, said bilateral military-technical cooperation would positively influence regional stability.
Media reports concerning S-300 deliveries did not dispel analysts' doubts. "This may be a diplomatic game or an expression of departmental interests," Vitaly Tsymbal, a military analyst with the Moscow-based Institute of the Economy in Transition, told the paper.
Vladimir Yevseyev, an analyst with the Russian Academy of Sciences' Institute of World Economy and International Relations (IMEMO), said reports on S-300 sales to Tehran should not be trusted because the delivery of such hard-hitting SAMs would have the same implications on Russian-American relations as granting a NATO Membership Action Plan to Georgia.
He said a thaw was currently expected in relations between Moscow and Washington.
Instead of reducing chances of an Israeli strike against Iranian nuclear facilities, this move would increase them. "Tel Aviv, which wants to preserve its advantage over Iran, and which acts in line with the preventive-strike doctrine, would be tempted to destroy S-300 missiles before they are deployed," Yevseyev told the paper.
He said Russia had stopped production of S-300 SAMs and lacked reserve missiles in this category. It is unlikely that combat-ready S-300 missiles will be replaced with S-400 SAMs and subsequently supplied to Iran because the Russian Armed Forces have recently procured few new-generation anti-aircraft weapons, Yevseyev told the paper.
Kommersant
Israeli defense and foreign ministries fall out over contract for Russia
Russia's intention to purchase a quantity of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in Israel has provoked a conflict between the Israeli defense and foreign ministries.
UAVs are produced in Israel by two defense companies - Israel Airspace Industries (IAI) and Elbit Systems. But the choice of a potential supplier to Russia was made practically from the outset. The point is that Hermes 450 UAVs made by Elbit were supplied to Georgia, and its army made active use of them before and during the war in South Ossetia. Therefore, Elbit's chances of securing a Russian contract are seen by specialists as "very faint." Still, IAI is not in a hurry to rejoice. At any rate, its director for international marketing in Russia and the CIS, Robert Fisher, refused to comment yesterday on the prospects for a UAV contract.
High-level politics seems to have intervened. The Israeli Foreign Ministry is actively promoting the UAV deal and reasonably believes that it will strengthen Russian-Israeli relations. But Israeli security-related bodies fear Russia might transfer secret technology to countries not friendly to Israel, above all to Iran. "Any element of our military technology can be passed by Russia to Iran, for example, through Syria," a spokesman for the Israeli Defense Ministry told Kommersant.
In 2006, Iran took delivery of 29 Tor-M1 and Tor-M1T surface-to-air (SAM) systems and 1,200 missiles for them. Now Russian sources confirm supplies of S-300 air defense systems to Iran.
"Arms trade with Iran runs on commercial lines, is limited and sporadic, and involves no politics," believes Ruslan Pukhov, the director of the Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies. "And should the U.S. and Israel undertake an operation against Iran, Tehran's air defense systems will be unable to withstand the strike - Israel is perfectly aware of that."
In Pukhov's opinion, the deciding role in the UAV contract is played by the U.S., which is pressuring Israeli allies into giving up the deal. The S-300 SAMs supplies to Iran have come in very handy for that.
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