'Fight
Smart' Update - 10 December 2004 'Peak' Oil And
Gas
"The energy crisis
we are in today is entirely different from the temporary problems we experienced in
1973-74, 1979-86, 1990-91 and 2000..... There was always sufficient worldwide geological
capacity to produce additional barrels of crude oil to meet the world's needs. No longer.
In the next major energy crisis, that capacity will likely be eroded. So the crisis should
have a severe impact, be global in scope, and be difficult to solve. Plainly, it will be
unprecedented.... Over the next 25 years, a new world energy economy will arrive in three
waves. We are near the top of the first and smallest one, a warning wave. A second more
powerful wave likely will hit in the 2009-2010 period when the non-OPEC world may reach
its all-time highest output of crude oil, subsequently declining to become ever more
dependent on OPEC for incremental barrels of production. The final wave should break
around 2020, or earlier, as even OPEC's vast reserves are tapped at a maximum rate of
production. After that, oil volume should head down and keep falling, never to revive..... An international economic disturbance of
this magnitude will create potential conflicts between
nations and civil competition within societies. These could
be a trial for us and for our children, made worse in the early years by our lack of
preparation and our failure to understand what is already
happening to us." "A cold
war-style confrontation over Ukraine’s presidential
election escalated yesterday as Moscow and Washington traded heated words and an
EU-brokered deal to end the deadlock in Kiev fell through. Colin Powell, the US Secretary
of State, sharply rejected an accusation by President Putin of Russia that the West was
playing 'sphere-of-influence' politics by backing Viktor
Yushchenko, the Ukrainian opposition leader.... Russia
openly backed Viktor Yanukovych,
the Prime Minister, who advocates closer ties with Moscow, fearing that Mr Yushchenko
would pull Ukraine out of its strategic orbit and into Nato and the EU." "So much is still obscure, corrupt and
inauthentic in Ukrainian politics, but at the very heart of this change is something very
authentic: human beings hoping to take control of their own destiny.... Great outside
interests are at stake here - Russia and the US struggling
for mastery in Eurasia, the shaping of a new European Union -
but that is not the story you hear on the streets and the square. Even the most
pro-European intellectuals admit that the attractions of turning from a post-Soviet union
towards the European Union played only a small part in the campaign." "Yet, even for many Ukrainians, Mr. Yushchenko himself remains something of an
unknown quantity. His supporters may call him 'the Messiah', but his background and nature
are more that of a moneychanger than a charismatic radical...... His wife Kateryna
Chumachenko, with whom he has three children, has also been dragged into the fray. A US
citizen of Ukrainian descent, she worked in the White House during the Reagan presidency,
a fact that deeply irks Mr. Yushchenko's political rivals. Although he is portrayed as the
people's president, Mr. Yushchenko has powerful wealthy friends. One close associate is
Petro Poroshenko, the owner of car and confectionery factories and a shipbuilding yard.
Other supporters include David Zhvania, a Georgian businessman, and Wolodymyr Martynenko,
an oil and gas magnate who is one of Ukraine's 10 richest people. " "Interpol has reportedly asked Russian
prosecutors for additional information on the fraud case against senior Ukrainian opposition politician Yuliya Tymoshenko even as that international
police organization has removed a warrant for her arrest from its official website,
Russian and international media reported today.... ITAR-TASS and dpa reported that Interpol temporarily removed the warrant for Yuliya Tymoshenko's arrest
from its official website (http://www.interpol.org) pending further information. A warrant
for her husband, Oleksandr Tymoshenko, remains in force, according to the Interpol
website." "Two weeks
before, on May 12, the European Commission passed an official document, the Message on the
Development of the Energy Policy of the Enlarged European Union, Its Neighbors and
Partners. One of the priorities was stated as cooperation with neighbor-countries in
ensuring safe transportation of oil by sea, including the extension of the Odessa-Brody pipeline to Poland’s Plotsk
to be later connected either to the Druzhba or the existing pipeline, which runs to the
Polish Baltic port of Gdansk..... Ukraine is becoming 'a key nation for the transit
and diversification of energy supplies to Europe,' stated Hages Mingarelli, Chief of the
EC Directorate for Eastern Europe, Caucasus and Central Asia.... Malcolm Rifkind, the former British defense and foreign minister, now a senior consultant with PriceWaterhouseCoopers, who presented his
business plan concept first in Kyiv and now in Brussels, stressed several times that this
project is advantageous to all..... On the one hand, the consumption of carbohydrate fuels
is growing steadily, and on the other, there are objective obstacles to increasing oil
supplies to the EU market, primarily the limited transit
capacity of the Bosporus straits. Also, there is not a
sufficient infrastructure in existence for delivering light Caspian oil to potential
markets. Authoritative experts maintain that Ukraine has the strategic possibility to make
the Eurasian Oil Transportation Corridor a bypass alternative to the Bosporus....... The Europeans are also worried by shrinking extraction in the North Sea. According to the forecasts made at the Brussels conference, by 2015 it will have decreased by 87% (!)......... The project is wholeheartedly supported by the United States..... The most
promising and feasible route that can help the Bosporus problem is Odessa-Brody-Plotsk. 'A project very seldom
appears so positive and profitable for so many participants. And this underscores our
opinion about the importance of this project, because it
attains a strategic goal, it is commercially realistic and it
meets the interests of different nations,' US Ambassador to Ukraine Carlos Pascual stated
when the business plan concept for the Odessa-Brody project was presented in Kyiv..... So
what is going on? In our opinion, Moscow’s stubborn insistence on operating the
Odessa-Brody pipeline in the reverse mode is of the same kind as its attempts to drag
Ukraine into a customs or even an economic union in the framework of the so-called
Integral Economic Zone..... The Kremlin certainly
doesn’t want Ukraine to become a key supplier of Caspian oil to the European market
and, consequently, to become more independent economically.". "As of today, preliminary agreements
have been reached with several Caspian oil producers about their supplying crude oil for
the Odessa-Brody pipeline. At
the initial stage, the oil is most likely to be coming from Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan. Sporadic supplies of Azerbaijani oil are not unlikely,
either. The volumes of the latter are going to grow as oil production in the Azerbaijani
sector of the Caspian Sea expands. Europe says it needs Caspian oil… Leonid Kuchma and Vitaliy Haiduk were
expected to meet later this week. However, according to some of the ZN sources, the
President’s schedule has changed: instead of meeting with the Ukrainian Vice Prime
Minister he is scheduled to have negotiations with the Transnafta President Semen
Weinstock, who has come to Kyiv to discuss, yet another time,
the reverse use of the Odessa-Brody pipeline." "If the
ruling party holds on to power in Ukraine, a
new cross-Ukraine pipeline designed to feed U.S.-financed, Kazakhstani
oil from the Black Sea north to European markets will likely see a peculiar reversal
of roles. It's likely the
Odessa-Brody pipeline would literally reverse its flow and instead be used to ship Russian
oil south through the Mediterranean, strengthening Russia's export position, undermining
U.S. energy and investment interests in Kazakhstan, and preventing any European
diversification away from Russian energy." "The current hot spots for major oil companies are the oil reserves in the
Caspian Sea region. Former Soviet states Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan all are seeking to quickly develop their oil
reserves, which languished during the years of Russian domination, says Halliburton Co. Chief
Executive Officer Dick Cheney. Cheney was in Amarillo during May for the Panhandle Producers and Royalty Owners
Association annual meeting.....The potential for this
region turning as volatile as the Persian Gulf does not concern Cheney. 'You've got to go where the oil is,'
he said. 'I don't worry about it a lot.' Cheney's ties to the region grow out of his international connections when he
was part of first the President Ford administration, then the Reagan administration and
his term as secretary of defense under President Bush. Now he
is on the 12-member Kazakhstan Oil Advisory Board.... Various
forecasts indicate that the growth in petroleum demand will average about 2 percent a
year, while the depletion of oil reserves is averaging about 3 percent a year, he said. That means within the next 12 years the oil industry will need to produce
48 million barrels of oil per day more than the current amount of about 73 million to 74
million barrels per day, Cheney said." "James Giffen, an independent banker
described by former
CIA agent Robert Baer in his book 'See No Evil' as 'Mr
Kazakhstan,' features prominently in investigations that
Mobil violated the US trade embargo. Baer says Giffen was the de facto US ambassador to Kazakhstan, and that he arranged high-ranking
meetings, fixed deals, and got chunky commissions. In April 2003, a grand jury in New York
issued indictments against Giffen and Bryan Williams, senior executive in charge of
Mobil's overseas crude transactions. All the accused deny any wrongdoing. The ties between
big oil and political power also get too close for comfort. Nowhere are they closer than
in the US. During the period in which the bribery and the illegal oils swaps took
place in Kazakhstan, Vice President Dick Cheney was president of Halliburton. Halliburton, the world's biggest provider
of oil services, is involved with ExxonMobil and BP in Kazakhstan." "Federal prosecutors have said that
President Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan accepted large bribes in connection with dispensing his country's oil
concessions during the 1990's, and later tried to obstruct the federal inquiry into the
payments, which came from American oil companies, according to legal documents. The
allegations were made by the Justice Department in a sealed motion and described
recently in a letter of complaint from Kazakhstan's lawyers to the deputy attorney general. The letter was part of a quiet
effort to exempt Mr. Nazarbayev from prosecution.... Kazakhstan is a crucial part of the administration's strategy to reduce dependence
on Persian Gulf oil and to stem Islamic militancy in Central Asia. But the corruption
inquiry and its fallout illustrate the diplomatic and economic difficulties that can arise
in a quest for energy security." "Here we are
in an election year and Mr. Dick [Cheney] is our Republican nominee for vice president. He
used to sit on the Oil Advisory Board of Kazakhstan
and out of that nation has surfaced quite a scandal and our Major Media just cannot seem
to get around to telling us 'mushroom Americans' about it. Mobil Oil (now ExxonMobil),
Texaco, (now Chevron / Condoleezza [Rice] / Texaco), Amoco, (now BP Amoco) and
Phillips Petroleum (from the same place former neocon CIA
Director James Woolsey is from), have all been implicated in a sweeping bribery
scandal in Kazakhstan, regarding oil and gas rights in that
nation. Apparently those bribes started during the period of time that Mr. Dick was
sitting on that Kazakhstan
Oil Advisory Board, and that
advisory board was deciding who was 'favored' to get those oil and gas deals. I can smell
this one all the way from Kazakhstan. A Mr. James H. Giffen has been
indicted in the U.S. District Court, Southern District (Manhattan) and is now facing a
64-count criminal indictment. He is a U.S. citizen and merchant banker and that our major
media has hushed up this story is something to behold. Darn, they went to Mr. Dick to keep
things quiet. Quote: 'Nazarbayev himself has gone personally to Vice President Dick
Cheney and other top U.S. officials to try to quash the investigation.'" "Ukraine's Prime Minister Viktor Yushchenko met in Astana on 10-11 March with his
Kazakh counterpart, "Mr. Yushchenko began his meetings
with senior [Bush] administration officials on February 5 with Vice-President Richard Cheney and concluded
them on February 7 with Deputy Secretary of State Richard
Armitage..... The visiting Our Ukraine deputies were the guests of honor at two evening receptions. One was
hosted by three organizations involved in democracy-building efforts in Ukraine - the National Endowment for
Democracy, the National Democratic Institute and the International
Republican Institute [IRI], which assisted in setting up the group's Washington visit
schedule." "Next week,
the world will have the answer to a fascinating geopolitical question: whether the pivotal
post-Soviet state of Ukraine will choose to return eastward, toward
Russia, or to move westward, toward Europe......
Yanukovych, the current prime minister, has shown
his colors, and they are all shades of red. Russian intervention in the campaign has been
intense, public and utterly clear. For his part, Yanukovych vowed ... to give Moscow special rights to the oil
pipeline in the south near Odessa." Crisis In Ukraine - Bulletin
Overview 1. Instability And The Battle Of The Oligarchs - Putin's Boys V Dick Cheney's "Next
week, the world will have the answer to a fascinating geopolitical question: whether the
pivotal post-Soviet state of Ukraine will choose to return eastward, toward Russia, or to
move westward, toward Europe...... Yanukovych, the current prime minister, has shown his colors,
and they are all shades of red. Russian intervention in the campaign has been intense,
public and utterly clear. For his part, Yanukovych vowed ... to give Moscow special rights to the oil pipeline in the south
near Odessa." "Viktor Yushchenko isn't just a
presidential candidate these days in the Ukraine. He's a legend..... 'He is all things
to all people,' said Zoryana Ilenko, a western Ukrainian journalist who has covered the
election. 'As to what he would actually do once he becomes president, I do not think many
people have considered this yet. They are happy, for now, with a myth.'... Some Ukrainians
question whether Yushchenko's image is greater than reality. 'The truth is that the best
thing about him, to millions of people, is that he isn't the other guy,' said Evgen Rybka,
editor of Tviy Vybir, a national political newspaper. 'We have to take him for what he is,
not what we want him to be.'" "Yet, even for many Ukrainians, Mr.
Yushchenko himself remains something of an unknown quantity. His supporters may call him
'the Messiah', but his background and nature are more that of a moneychanger than a
charismatic radical...... His wife Kateryna Chumachenko, with whom he has three children,
has also been dragged into the fray. A US citizen of Ukrainian descent, she worked in the
White House during the Reagan presidency, a fact that deeply irks Mr. Yushchenko's
political rivals. Although he is portrayed as the people's president, Mr. Yushchenko has
powerful wealthy friends. One close associate is Petro Poroshenko, the owner of car and
confectionery factories and a shipbuilding yard. Other supporters include David Zhvania, a
Georgian businessman, and Wolodymyr Martynenko, an oil and gas magnate who is one of
Ukraine's 10 richest people. " "Mr Yushchenko's flamboyant aide [Julia Timoshenko] is adored by the crowds that seem to have
forgotten that she used to be an oligarch herself." "There is,
however, one thing which separates the two main candidates, and which explains the
West’s determination to shoo in Yushchenko: Nato. Yanukovych has said he is against Ukraine joining; Yushchenko is in favour. The West wants Ukraine in Nato to weaken Russia geopolitically..... " "We are obsessed with ordering the
world to our will — and complaining bitterly when it declines to be so odder. Mr
Yushchenko may be 'our sort' of oligarch, as opposed to
Russia’s....... [but] by its vociferous partisanship the
West plays a dangerous game. It may drive eastern Ukraine into separation, dismembering a potential
buffer state on the borders of Russia. And all this assumes that Mr Putin will eat humble
pie with good humour." "Ukraine's embattled government is ready to stage faked terrorist attacks to
destabilise the country and discredit the opposition ahead of a rerun of the presidential
vote, a senior government source has told The Independent. The official, who works for the
government of the Moscow-backed candidate and current Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych,
said: 'One of the plans is to blow up a pipeline and blame it on opposition supporters. Ukraine is the key transit country for
Russian gas supplies to the West.'" "Russian special forces have
reportedly been deployed in the Ukrainian capital Kiev as thousands of demonstrators
besieged government buildings to protest the results of the presidential election. A
1,000-strong contingent of Russian special forces have put on Ukraine uniforms upon their
arrival in Ukraine, said Boris
Tarasyuk, chairman of Ukraine's parliamentary European integration commission and an envoy
of the Ukrainian opposition's presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko. In an interview
for Bulgarian private bTV channel Tarasyuk said the soldiers arrived in Kiev by plane and were
armed with machine guns, which spoke of their 'serious intentions'". "When President Bill Clinton -- in a
desperate search for votes from the East European diaspora in the Midwest -- set in motion
the extension of NATO right up to the borders of Russia, it provided all the ammunition
that was needed to those in the Russian establishment who had never been happy about a too
close relationship with the West. George Kennan, the grand old man of Russian diplomacy,
described it as 'the most fateful error of the entire post-Cold War era.' The Europeans
compounded the error by refusing to engage in what Gorbachev termed the construction of 'a
European house' and President Vladimir Putin's musings on the same theme. It was never in
the cards that the eastern part of Ukraine would
slip its moorings and go West. This could happen only if Russia itself decided
unequivocally to become part of Europe, but the European Union countries, both by going
along happily with NATO expansion and by their coolness to Russia, have made that
impossible. The West's post-Cold War Russia policy now reaches a denouement of sorts, one
that astute observers have seen coming for a decade. While few in the West will excuse the
rigging of Ukraine's election, using it as a reason to go to eye-to-eye with Moscow would be
counterproductive. Ukrainians must work it out for themselves, which means finding a way
of resolving this crisis in a way that Russia can accept. The West for its part needs to
rethink its whole post-Cold War policy toward Russia. The United States should put a stop
to its aggressive geopolitical strategy of challenging Russian interests in the 'near
abroad,' and Europe must use the lure of European membership for both countries to keep
Russian and Ukrainian democracy and behavior on the straight and narrow. Otherwise a
return to the hostilities of the Cold War cannot be ruled out, and it will be as much the
West's fault as Russia's." "On Dec. 3, Russian President Vladimir
L. Putin replied to Bush's Hallifax speech by declaring Bush's policy 'dictatorial and
hypocritical.' Russia's leader warned that policies 'based on the barrack-room principles
of a unipolar world appear to be extremely dangerous.' Russian Air Force commander Gen.
Vladimir Mikhailov announced that Russia, too, can engage in pre-emptive attacks. Russia
has informed neighboring Georgia
that Russia might use cruise missiles and strategic bombers in preventive strikes against
Chechen terrorists sheltering on Georgian territory. Bush's insane doctrine of
pre-emptive war promises a 21st century more bloody than the 20th." "The latest recipient of Washington's
'regime change' was not some miscreant Muslim state but the the mainly Christian mountain
nation of Georgia. Eduard Shevardnadze, the 75-year-old strongman who has ruled
post-Soviet Georgia's 5.1
million citizens since 1991, was overthrown by a bloodless coup that appears to have been
organized and financed by the Bush administration. Shevardnadze's sin, in Washington's
eyes, was being too chummy with Moscow and obstructing a major U.S. oil pipeline, due to
open in 2005, from Central Asia, via Georgia, to Turkey. Georgia occupies the heart of the wild, unruly, and strategic
Caucasus region, which I call the Mideast North. In recent months, Shevardnadze had
given new drilling and pipeline concessions to Russian firms.....Washington sent
high-level emissaries to warn Shevardnadze not to do anything that threatened the proposed
oil corridor. When he went ahead with Russian oil deals, Washington denounced the Nov. 2
Georgian elections as rigged, which they were, although it also turns a blind eye to
rigged elections in useful allies like oil-rich Azerbaijan, Armenia, Russia, Egypt,
Pakistan, etc. Cash and anti-Shevardnadze political operatives from the U.S. poured into
Tbilisi to back up the president's American-educated principal rival, Mikhail
Saakashvili.... Washington will shore up its man in Tbilisi, Saakashvili, and may send
Special Forces troops under the pretext of the faux war on
terrorism. The entire Caucasus is near a boil. The sharply increasing rivalry between the U.S. and Russia for political
and economic influence over this vital land bridge between Europe and the oil-rich Caspian
Basin promises a lot more intrigue, skullduggery and drama." "The energy crisis we are in today is
entirely different from the temporary problems we experienced in 1973-74, 1979-86, 1990-91
and 2000..... There was always sufficient worldwide geological capacity to produce
additional barrels of crude oil to meet the world's needs. No longer. In the next major
energy crisis, that capacity will likely be eroded. So the crisis should have a severe
impact, be global in scope, and be difficult to solve. Plainly, it will be
unprecedented.... Over the next 25 years, a new world energy economy will arrive in three
waves. We are near the top of the first and smallest one, a warning wave. A second more
powerful wave likely will hit in the 2009-2010 period when the non-OPEC world may reach
its all-time highest output of crude oil, subsequently declining to become ever more
dependent on OPEC for incremental barrels of production. The final wave should break
around 2020, or earlier, as even OPEC's vast reserves are tapped at a maximum rate of
production. After that, oil volume should head down and keep falling, never to revive..... An international economic disturbance of
this magnitude will create potential conflicts between
nations and civil competition within societies. These could
be a trial for us and for our children, made worse in the early years by our lack of
preparation and our failure to understand what is already
happening to us."
"The United States has
said that the Caspian region, and the development of its energy resources, is a key
national security interest. It has also made clear its commitment to the independence of Ukraine. But current options for Caspian oil
transport are beset with political and logistical problems and, therefore, fall far short
of guaranteeing the safe, secure export of Caspian oil in the short or long term. At the
same time, Russia's increasing stranglehold on Ukraine's energy imports does not bode well for the smaller country's ability to
maintain its hard-won sovereignty, and it increases the risk that Ukraine will call on the United States and
its NATO allies to stand behind it against Russia. The development of an export route for
Caspian oil through Ukraine is a
cheap and effective means of ameliorating both problems, and thus an approach that
Washington should support.... The potential for energy wealth has already led Clinton
administration officials to class Central Asia and the Caucasus as a region 'vital' to the
United States. Washington hopes that the development of
natural gas and oil there will lead to reduced reliance on Middle Eastern suppliers for
both the United States and its European allies..... For years, Ukraine has advocated a route through Azerbaijan and Georgia,
over the Black Sea, and through Ukraine to Poland..... The
Caspian states, particularly Azerbaijan, are ideal partners. These states need non-Russian
routes for their oil for the same reasons that Ukraine needs non-Russian sources of energy: to break the cycles of dependence
with Russia. Furthermore, Ukraine's
involvement with Azerbaijan and Georgia (with Moldova and Uzbekistan) in the GUUAM
grouping has paved the way for excellent relations.... In the short term, however, Ukraine is in desperate need of a way to
diminish Russia's increasing leverage. If no cure is forthcoming for the disease, Ukraine will almost certainly seek to treat
the symptoms, asking the United States and its other Western friends for increased and
more concrete security commitments. In order to avoid the
painful and potentially dangerous decisions that would force, the United States should
move now to help Ukraine diversify away from Russian energy. Because it could also enable
Washington to help to provide a more secure and reliable route for Caspian oil, this
policy is particularly advantageous." "In one of the generally less
remarked-upon recent political earthquakes, the reform-oriented government of Prime
Minister Viktor Yushchenko of Ukraine has lost a no-confidence vote in the Ukrainian Rada (parliament) but will
stay on at the head of a caretaker government for up to 60 days. The column analyses the
significance of the political crisis in Ukraine for energy questions in Europe and Eurasia..... Yushchenko's efforts to promote the establishment of an oil transit
corridor between Azerbaijan and Poland, to be developed under the European Union's TRACECA
project, probably did not help improve his stature in Moscow's eyes. Such a corridor would
circumvent the route to Novorossiisk on Russia's Black Sea coast..... Even Yushchenko's announcement that the Ukrainian section of this Odessa-Brody oil pipeline and the Yuzhny oil
terminal near Odessa were 90 % complete was insufficient to cause EU leaders to take
notice of Ukraine's plight at their latest summit." "... on December 19, the Odessa-Brody pipeline in Ukraine is scheduled
to become operational. A strategic bonus is the easy hook-up of the Odessa-Brody route to
the refinery in Plotsk, Poland, and a further link to the Baltic port of Gdansk, from where oil be transported to Western markets. The primary advantage of the 673-kilometer long Odessa-Brody route is
that allows exporters to avoid major transit bottlenecks. As Michael Bleyzer, President of
the Houston-based SigmaBleyzer Fund and an advisor to the Ukrainian state pipeline
company said, 'getting the Caspian oil through Ukraine to
Europe is strategically important for the United States
… With the increased supply of oil, and all other bypasses being several years from
completion, this is too good of an opportunity to pass up.' The new pipelines
demonstrate that the Caspian Basin is emerging as a viable source of energy, creating an
attractive alternate to the Middle East and other traditional oil provinces.... Government
officials and oil executives have long wrestled with the dilemma of finding ways to bring
Caspian Basin resources to market. The flow of oil from the Caspian is constrained by the
bottleneck of the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles (the Turkish Straits), a narrow water
artery which connects the Black Sea with the Sea of Marmara and the Mediterranean." "Two weeks
before, on May 12, the European Commission passed an official document, the Message on the
Development of the Energy Policy of the Enlarged European Union, Its Neighbors and
Partners. One of the priorities was stated as cooperation with neighbor-countries in
ensuring safe transportation of oil by sea, including the extension of the Odessa-Brody
pipeline to Poland’s Plotsk to be later connected either to the Druzhba or the
existing pipeline, which runs to the Polish Baltic port of Gdansk..... Ukraine is becoming
'a key nation for the transit and diversification of energy supplies to Europe,' stated
Hages Mingarelli, Chief of the EC Directorate for Eastern Europe, Caucasus and Central
Asia.... Malcolm Rifkind, the former British defense and
foreign minister, now a senior consultant with
PriceWaterhouseCoopers, who presented his business plan concept first in Kyiv and now in
Brussels, stressed several times that this project is advantageous to all. So why all this
praise? Why was the European presentation of the project so successful? As was noted at the conference, the situation in the European market of
oil supplies and services has changed. On the one hand, the
consumption of carbohydrate fuels is growing steadily, and on the other, there are
objective obstacles to increasing oil supplies to the EU market, primarily the limited transit capacity of the Bosporus straits. Also, there is not a sufficient infrastructure in existence for
delivering light Caspian oil to potential markets. Authoritative experts maintain that
Ukraine has the strategic possibility to make the Eurasian Oil Transportation Corridor a
bypass alternative to the Bosporus. ....... The Europeans are
also worried by shrinking extraction in the North Sea.
According to the forecasts made at the Brussels conference, by
2015 it will have decreased by 87% (!), while the extraction
from Caspian deposits will have increased by 44%...... The project is wholeheartedly
supported by the United States..... The most promising and feasible route that can help
the Bosporus problem is Odessa-Brody-Plotsk. 'A project very seldom appears so positive
and profitable for so many participants. And this underscores our opinion about the
importance of this project, because it attains a strategic
goal, it is commercially realistic and it meets the interests
of different nations,' US Ambassador to Ukraine Carlos Pascual stated when the business
plan concept for the Odessa-Brody project was presented in Kyiv. .So what is going on? In
our opinion, Moscow’s stubborn insistence on operating the Odessa-Brody pipeline in
the reverse mode is of the same kind as its attempts to drag Ukraine into a customs or
even an economic union in the framework of the so-called Integral Economic Zone..... In
other words, these are all attempts to deprive Ukraine of European prospects, which have
become more visible lately, and to put Kyiv back into Moscow’s orbit. The Kremlin
certainly doesn’t want Ukraine to become a key supplier of Caspian oil to the
European market and, consequently, to become more independent economically.". "Kazakhstan is ready to cofinance
Brody-Plotsk [Ukraine to Poland]
oil pipeline construction and transport up to 8mn tons of oil via the Ukrainian transport
system to Black Sea, Ukrtransnafta company’s press service informed. The share and
terms of Kazakhstan’s participation in the project will be finalized after the
feasibility report is ready. The governments of Ukraine and Poland have also given the
political support to the project. As informed, earlier, Ukraine and Kazakhstan will draft
an intergovernmental agreement for Kazakh oil transit via Ukraine in Q3. Oil extraction in
Kazakhstan is forecast at 52mn tons this year, out of which 8.5mn tons will be used
domestically and 44mn tons of oil will be exported. It is planned that the national oil and gas monopoly KazMunaiGas will be
an operator for Kazakh gas transportations to Ukraine and Neftegas Ukraine will represent
the Ukrainian side." "Ukraine's geographic location makes it an ideal corridor for oil and natural gas
to transit from Russia and the Caspian Sea region to European markets. Most of the oil
transited via Ukraine is Russian oil, and is sent through the 1.2-million-bbl/d Druzhba
pipeline, the southern fork of which runs through Ukraine (see map). In July
2003, the Ukrainian government approved a new agreement with Russia calling for the
transit of Russian oil through Ukraine to increase by 60%, to 1.6 million bbl/d, for 15
years. However, the Russian side, in a surprise negotiating tactic, has refused to sign the agreement, owing to a
dispute over Ukraine's newest oil pipeline, Odessa-Brody (see below)..... Ukraine also hopes to become a transit center for oil from the Caspian Sea
region, which is expected to increase significantly over the decade. The leading potential
conduit for this oil in Ukraine
is the Odessa-Brody pipeline, which was completed in 2001 and extends from Ukraine's Black Sea port of Odessa northward
to the city of Brody (see
map) ..... However, for roughly two years the pipeline has been mostly dormant. Russia
has suggested that the pipeline be used in reverse, to move oil from Russia southwards to
tankers in the Black Sea and shipped onwards to world markets. Since January 2003, the
last 32-mile leg of the pipeline has been used (in reverse) by Russian oil companies for
these purposes. Faced with the possibility of losing direct
access to Caspian Sea region oil, European governments have voiced their opposition to the
reversal project in newspaper articles and public statements..... " "Kazakhstan national oil and gas
company KazMunaiGaz reconfirms its interest in using the oil pipeline Odessa-Brody to
supply Kazakh oil to European markets....Earlier, KazMunaiGaz has showed interest in
taking part in the construction of the Brody-Plotsk pipeline (Poland).... Russian and
Caspian suppliers had been pressuring Ukraine's cash-strapped government to decide the
pipeline's direction for months, in a bid to boost exports to Europe while oil prices are
high. Analysts said whoever gets their oil into the pipeline first will enjoy greater
influence over the decision on permanent use." "The
Ukrainians built the Odessa-Brody oil pipeline without international investors or
commitments by petroleum producers to use the pipeline. After the line opened for
business, a struggle emerged over the pipeline's direction flow, whether it would run
east-west for Caspian exports or if Russia would use it to flow west-east to ship Siberian
oil via Odessa. As of this date, it still has yet to be decided..... The [east-west] policy seemed to dovetail well with
Washington's increasing interest in the region's energy resources. In the aftermath of the September 11th
attacks, the US attempted to shift its energy policy by lessening US dependence on OPEC
through deepening ties with Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, and Turkmenistan. .........
ChevronTexaco -- operator of the giant onshore Tengiz field and one of the largest
investors in Kazakhstan -- wanted to sign on in October 2003 with Ukrtransnafta on the
Odessa-Brody oil pipeline by using it to ship 9 mm tons of Kazakh oil annually. It also
wanted to store petroleum in the Pivdennyy oil terminal for six months. Because of Ukraine's uncertainty about the project and Russian lobbyists seeking to hinder project
efforts, the plan never materialized....... Russian pressure also influenced Azerbaijan's decisions not
to invest in Odessa-Brody. Threat to Russian monopoly Baku-Novorossiisk (Azerbaijan), CPC
(Kazakhstan) -- exorbitant transit fees Russia, in the meantime, does not want to see extension plans fulfilled
but instead have Siberian oil shipped to world markets out of the Odessa port via the
Black Sea. With the Azeri
option now gone, the Ukraine was again considering Russia's plan for
the short-term because Ukraine could profit from Russian oil transit while the extension
to the Polish border was being built but the plan never materialized. Supporters of the
extension argued that even a short-term reversal of the pipeline could jeopardize
potential future investment because international investors might see the pipeline as too
controlled by Russia. Washington
has supported Kiev's plans for a westward-flowing line, but not to the extent of providing financial support. The US fears that an eastward flow could
increase Ukraine's dependence on Moscow and could increase the possibility of a major oil spill in the
Turkish straits because of the intensified oil traffic. The lack of progress clearly
frustrated Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma; last month he admonished his Cabinet, the
European Union, and the Polish government for not financially supporting the Odessa-Brody
project. Kuchma was also
angered that his own government did not support reversing the pipeline to an eastward flow
to export Russian petroleum. .....
On May 28 Polish Deputy Treasury Minister Tadeusz Soroko [said]...'It was visible in talks
that part of the Ukrainian government supports the project, while the other part is less
excited about it. Now it seems that the Ukrainian side is walking away from the project,
and the information we
already have -- that the Ukrainians intend to shift power over the currently existing
pipeline to the Russians --
makes this project difficult to accomplish." "To be sure, Ukraine's return to Russia's embrace won't be alarming to those
in the Bush administration -- and there do seem to be a few around -- who see President
Putin as a force for good. But for those with a few doubts about the purity of the KGB
careerist's soul, here is a short list of how Ukraine's
lockstep with Russia, precipitated by a stolen election this Sunday, might harm U.S.
interests on the Eurasian land mass ....... Russia will have trumped an energy strategy in which U.S.-financed Caspian
oil was to have flowed through Ukraine to Poland and Western Europe. If the ruling party holds on to power in Ukraine, a new cross-Ukraine
pipeline designed to feed U.S.-financed, Kazakhstani
oil from the Black Sea north to European markets will likely see a peculiar reversal
of roles. It's likely the
Odessa-Brody pipeline would literally reverse its flow and instead be used to ship Russian
oil south through the Mediterranean, strengthening Russia's export position, undermining
U.S. energy and investment interests in Kazakhstan, and preventing any European
diversification away from Russian energy." "The current hot spots for major oil companies are the oil reserves in the
Caspian Sea region. Former Soviet states Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan all are
seeking to quickly develop their oil reserves, which languished during the years of
Russian domination, says Halliburton Co. Chief Executive Officer Dick Cheney. Cheney was in Amarillo
during May for the Panhandle Producers and Royalty Owners Association annual meeting..... The potential for this region turning as volatile as the Persian Gulf
does not concern Cheney. 'You've
got to go where the oil is,' he said. 'I don't worry about it a lot.' Cheney's ties to the region grow out of his
international connections when he was part of first the President Ford administration,
then the Reagan administration and his term as secretary of defense under President Bush. Now he is on the 12-member Kazakhstan Oil Advisory Board.... Various forecasts indicate that the growth in petroleum demand will
average about 2 percent a year, while the depletion of oil reserves is averaging about 3
percent a year, he said. That means within the next 12 years the oil industry will need to
produce 48 million barrels of oil per day more than the current amount of about 73 million
to 74 million barrels per day, Cheney said."
"This is about America's energy security. It's also about preventing strategic
inroads by those who don't share our values. We're trying to move these newly independent
countries toward the west. We would like to see them reliant on western commercial and
political interests rather than going another way. We've made a substantial political
investment in the Caspian, and it's very important to us that both the pipeline map and the politics come out right." 3. The White House And The 'Spontaneous' Ukrainian Revolution "...the gains of the orange-bedecked
'chestnut revolution' are Ukraine's,
the campaign is an American creation, a sophisticated and brilliantly conceived exercise
in western branding and mass marketing that, in four countries in four years, has been
used to try to salvage rigged elections and topple unsavoury regimes. Funded and organised
by the US government, deploying US consultancies, pollsters, diplomats, the two big
American parties and US non-government organisations, the campaign was first used in
Europe in Belgrade in 2000 to beat Slobodan Milosevic at the ballot box. Richard Miles,
the US ambassador in Belgrade, played a key role. And by last year, as US ambassador in
Tbilisi, he repeated the trick in Georgia, coaching Mikhail Saakashvili in how to bring
down Eduard Shevardnadze. Ten months after the success in Belgrade, the US ambassador in
Minsk, Michael Kozak, a veteran of similar operations in central America, notably in
Nicaragua, organised a near identical campaign to try to defeat the Belarus hardman,
Alexander Lukashenko. That one failed. 'There will be no Kostunica in Belarus,' the
Belarus president declared, referring to the victory in Belgrade. But experience gained in
Serbia, Georgia and Belarus has been invaluable in plotting to beat the regime of Leonid
Kuchma in Kiev. The operation - engineering democracy through the ballot box and civil
disobedience - is now so slick that the methods have matured into a template for winning
other people's elections.... Officially, the US government spent $41m (£21.7m) organising
and funding the year-long operation to get rid of Milosevic from October 1999. In Ukraine, the figure is said to be around
$14m."
"... 300 out of the 450 Ukrainian MPs are dollar millionaires, and we'll hear more about Yushchenko's other wealthy backers later on...
both the present election candidates have much in common. At the beginning of the campaign
one businessman in Kiev compared the Yushchenko and Yanukovich teams to the difference
between Coca Cola and Pepsi. After all both men have served as Kuchma's prime
minister. During his time Yushchenko, a former central bank chairman, pushed for
market reforms and greater financial transparency. That doesn't mean to say he was a great
champion of democracy..... His right hand woman, once his deputy prime minister, has also
been busy reinventing herself as a new Joan of Arc. The most radical voice of the last
fortnight belongs to Julia Timoshenko a former brunette, who now wears blond plaits around her head like a
young Carpathian folk dancer. This demure peasant look hides a woman once know as
Ukraine's iron lady, a ruthless operator in the gas supply market who succeeded in turning
her government connections into enormous personal
wealth...." "Tymoshenko, who heads the opposition parliamentary faction, has regularly won media
beauty polls, while her charisma took her into office as a deputy prime minister in the
government under Yushchenko in 2000. But she faced criticism and was fired by outgoing
President Leonid Kuchma after being charged with forgery and smuggling gas while heading a
private gas trading firm in the mid-1990s." "In December of 1998, Lazarenko was
arrested in Switzerland on charges of money laundering. He fled to the United States,
where he was again arrested and charged with the laundering of $ 114 mm received as bribe
money during his time in office. This June, while still being held in the United States,
Lazarenko was sentenced for money laundering in Switzerland. Yuliya
Tymoshenko, who was president of UESU when Lazarenko was
prime minister, has so far avoided criminal prosecution. In 1997, she left the company and
went into politics. In December of 1999, she became a deputy prime minister with special
responsibility for energy matters. Her husband, who still is a member of the board of
UESU, was arrested last month on charges of embezzlement of state property." "These were heady times for the hungry
young tycoon. According to Matthew Brzezinski's 2001 book Casino
Moscow, which devotes a chapter to Tymoshenko entitled The Eleven Billion Dollar
Woman, she was guarded by an entire platoon of ex-Soviet special forces bodyguards....
According to Brzezinski, as a result of Lazarenko's [Ukraine's prime minister in 1996-97]
patronage, 'Tymoshenko gained
control over nearly 20% of Ukraine's gross national product, an enviable position that
probably no other private company in the world could boast.' Her rapid rise, and her
friendship with Lazarenko, would later return to haunt her. Lazarenko fell from favour,
was sacked amid accusations of corruption in 1997, and fled Ukraine. In June this year, he
was convicted of money-laundering and extortion in California. At first, Tymoshenko was able to distance herself from
the scandal - in the short-lived premiership of Yushchenko, she became deputy prime
minister - but as her relationship with Kuchma cooled, she became drawn into the scandal.
She was accused of having given Lazarenko kickbacks in exchange for her company's
stranglehold on the country's gas supplies. It is an accusation she has always denied,
although Brzezinski maintains it is true. 'The US government has evidence of wire
transfers from her to Lazarenko personally while he was PM,' he told me yesterday." "Yushchenko, for his part, was Central Bank chief throughout
the destructive years of the 1990s. When he became Prime Minister, in 2000-01,
privatization accelerated, as did the amassing of criminal fortunes. Speaking at a
Carnegie Endowment forum on Ukraine in 2001 (where he shared the dais with
Freedom House President Adrian Karatnycky), radical free-trader Anders Aslund hailed the
acceleration of privatization in Ukraine in
1998-2001, asserting that 'dirty privatization is better than no privatization.'
Yushchenko brought energy executive Yulia Tymoshenko, who today is his ally and the most aggressive opposition leader,
into the government as Deputy Prime Minister. Responsible for Ukraine's energy sector, Tymoshenko oversaw the sale of several power
plants to the U.S.-based AES company, an energy shark and asset-stripper par excellence.
She protests that her subsequent imprisonment on bribery charges was a political frame-up
by the Kuchma regime, but even Matthew Brzezinski (son of Zbigniew) reports in his 2001
book, Casino
Moscow, that Tymoshenko made billions of dollars from the
patronage of Pavlo Lazarenko, the mid-1990s Ukrainian Prime Minister, who has been
convicted of money-laundering in Swiss and U.S. courts, and is currently serving time in
the United States." “The file on her was maddeningly thin,
consisting of a few rumpled Ukrainian press clippings of dubious veracity and a number,
underlined twice and adorned with large question marks. The number was $11,000,000,000,
the gross revenue of Timoshenko’s
virtually unknown Ukrainian company. Not even Coca-Cola earned that much from its
combined international sales....... Timoshenko’s big break, however, came on the day of my mugging, when Lazarenko
was appointed prime minister of Ukraine. One of his first moves in office was to wrest
half a dozen lucrative energy concessions from several big private groups and give Timoshenko a nationwide monopoly on the
import and distribution of Russian natural gas.“ "Starting in 2001,
Ukrainian prosecutors opened several investigations into her business activities. She was
jailed for 42 days that year on charges of bribery, money laundering, corruption and abuse
of power while working for UES. The charges were subsequently dropped, but her husband,
Oleksander, still lives abroad, fearing prosecution in Ukraine. Last summer, Tymoshenko's father-in-law, Hennadiy Tymoshenko, a former UES president, and
former UES accountant Antonya Boliura were charged with illegally acquiring $2.25 billion
through sales of Russian natural gas in Ukraine. They have been released pending trial. Tymoshenko claims all the charges are
politically motivated. As the presidential campaign got under way in September, Russian
prosecutors dusted off an old case and demanded her extradition on charges of bribing
Russian Defense Ministry officials in 1996. Again, Tymoshenko said the charges were politically motivated, part of a Kremlin effort to
discredit the opposition." "Interpol has reportedly asked Russian
prosecutors for additional information on the fraud case against senior Ukrainian
opposition politician Yuliya Tymoshenko even as that international police organization has removed a warrant for
her arrest from its official website, Russian and international media reported today....
ITAR-TASS and dpa reported that Interpol temporarily removed the warrant for Yuliya
Tymoshenko's arrest from its official website (http://www.interpol.org) pending further
information. A warrant for her husband, Oleksandr Tymoshenko, remains in force, according
to the Interpol website." "Yulia
Timoshenko, one of the leaders of Ukrainian opposition, has
been put on the Interpol international wanted list. This police organisation has placed
all information about Timoshenko on its Internet site. The electronic file also says that
Timoshenko is searched for on charges of fraud and that a warrant for her arrest was
issued in Moscow. But the parliamentary deputy Yulia Timoshenko on the Interpol wanted
list cannot be detained on the territory of Ukraine, according to Sergey Rudenko,
press-secretary of the Ukrainian Prosecutor-General's Office. He says the search for
Timoshenko was not launched by Ukraine's law-enforcement agencies. It is Russia that is
eager to put questions to Timoshenko and that has submitted documents at the Interpol with
the request to put her on the international wanted list. Yulia Timoshenko, Ukraine's
former boss of the United Energy Systems, ex-Vice Premier and parliamentary deputy, is
charged with bribing five senior officers of the Russian defence ministry's central
materiel board. The indictment says that in 1999 when Mrs.Timoshenko headed the United
Energy Systems of Ukraine (UESU) she gave the officers bribes worth $500 to $5,000 for
them to over-rate prices on UESU sales to the Russian defence ministry. As a result, the
value of the contract made $300 million, which, claims the prosecution, is $90 million
more than the real cost." "Yulia
Timoshenko, prominent on the Ukrainian political opposition,
has vanished from the Interpol 'wanted' website. The goings-on round her search stay very
vague. Our correspondent called the Interpol HQ in Lyons for explanations. The officer on
duty said the international police organisation was never offering information by
telephone, and asked a written inquiry. An e-mail message was urgently sent. No reply has
come by now. The Interpol was offering Yulia Timoshenko's file on its website 'Wanted' rubric-two photographs accompanied by
several standard verbal lines: surname, Christian name, sex, age, birth date and place,
nationality, and details of her appearance, in particular, dark hair. The file said
Timoshenko was suspected of swindles, and Moscow had warranted her arrest." "But not all the interference in
Ukraine has come from the Russian side. It's no coincidence that the country is the fourth
largest recipient of US aid. And nobody disputes that hundreds of Ukrainian
organisations behind the orange revolution are funded by western governments ...." "Mr. Yushchenko began his meetings
with senior [Bush] administration officials on February 5 with Vice-President Richard Cheney and concluded
them on February 7 with Deputy Secretary of State Richard
Armitage..... Their tight schedule also included meetings with members of the U.S.
Congress - Sens. John McCain, Charles Hagel and Carl Levin, and members of the
Congressional Ukrainian Caucus - with former Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright; two
former U.S. ambassadors to Ukraine, Steven Pifer, who now serves as deputy assistant secretary of state for
European and Eurasian affairs, and his predecessor, William Green Miller; as well as with
Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was national security advisor to President Jimmy Carter..... The
visiting Our Ukraine deputies
were the guests of honor at two evening receptions. One was hosted by three organizations
involved in democracy-building efforts in Ukraine - the National Endowment for Democracy, the National Democratic Institute
and the International Republican Institute [IRI], which
assisted in setting up the group's Washington visit schedule." "In April 2002, a group of military
officers launched a coup against [Venezuelan President] Chavez, and leaders of several
parties trained by IRI [International Republican Institute] joined the junta. When news of the coup emerged, democracy-promotion
groups in Venezuela were holding a meeting to discuss ways of working together to avoid
political violence; IRI representatives
didn’t attend, saying that they were drafting a statement on Chavez’s overthrow.....
Yet IRI’s singular
focus on groups seeking to overthrow leaders seen as hostile to the United States can
sometimes harm American diplomatic efforts. In Cambodia, notes one official with
considerable experience in the country, 'it hurt the U.S. government’s credibility as
an honest broker in the election processes.' In Haiti, IRI has had a similar impact, experts say, by unbalancing an already volatile
situation and causing people to wonder what the United States’ true agenda was. In
2003, after being threatened by IRI’s Stanley Lucas, the departing U.S. ambassador, Brian Dean Curran,
gave a farewell speech to the Haitian chamber of commerce. 'There are many in Haiti who
prefer not to listen to me,' he said, 'but to their own friends in Washington—the
sirens of extremism.' Then he added, using the Haitian word for 'thugs': 'I call them the
chimères of Washington.'” "If the scenes of young people blowing
whistles, banging drums and handing out cough drops amid the throng of protesters in Kiev
last week looked familiar, they should: student-led mass protests also followed disputed
elections in Tbilisi last year and in Belgrade in 2000, and each time the opposition
prevailed. At least one group has played a role in all three movements. Serbia's Otpor, or
Resistance, the student organization that spearheaded the revolution that ousted Slobodan
Milosevic in 2000, sent 'trainers' to aid activists who helped unseat Georgian President
Eduard Shevardnadze in 2003. And earlier this year, the group provided training to Ukraine's Pora, the biggest opposition youth
group in Kiev. In each case, Otpor coordinator Sinisa Sikman told TIME, Otpor taught
local students organization and negotiation skills, street-protest tactics, and how to
'monitor the elections so that they could fight fraud.' News of Otpor's interest in the Ukraine vote — and the fact that the
group received funding from the U.S. government as well as dozens of other private and
non-American donors — drew alarmed speculation on Russian state TV that the group is
an American tool agitating for regime change 'on the doorstep of Russia.' Pora and Otpor
deny the charge." "In the Ukraine, citizens are in the streets protesting what they charge is a fixed
election. Secretary of State Colin Powell expresses this nation's concern about apparent
voting irregularities. The media give the dispute around-the-clock coverage. But in the
United States, massive and systemic voter irregularities go unreported and unnoticed. Ohio
is this election year's Florida. The vote in Ohio decided the presidential race, but it
was marred by intolerable, and often partisan, irregularities and discrepancies. U.S.
citizens have as much reason as those in Kiev to be concerned that the fix was in....
Democracy should not be for export only. " US v Ukrainian Exit Polls - Whose Election Results Do You Believe And Why? - 28 Nov 2004 "Russia
is not now a superpower and is unlikely to regain such status in the foreseeable future.
Nevertheless, Russia remains a potential challenge to American national interests in the
twenty-first century though the nature of its challenge is changing....Russia’s
location, military power, natural and human resources, and technology could make it a key
player in a variety of potential ad hoc regional coalitions aimed at countering
America’s international leadership. It is an extremely important US interest to head
off such a result by discouraging Russia from seeking such a role.... A threat to their
[former Soviet states] independence could destabilize the situation in Europe, damage
US-Russian relations,and create the potential for subsequent serious conflict. Moreover, as essential choices such as
those surrounding pipeline routes from the Caspian Basin are made, it is important for the
US that they be taken without undue Russian pressure." The Stakes Are High - What's The Big Deal About The Ukraine? "The United States has said that the
Caspian region, and the development of its energy resources, is a key national security
interest. It has also made clear its commitment to the independence of Ukraine. But current options for Caspian oil
transport are beset with political and logistical problems and, therefore, fall far short
of guaranteeing the safe, secure export of Caspian oil in the short or long term. At the
same time, Russia's increasing stranglehold on Ukraine's energy imports does not bode well for the smaller country's ability to
maintain its hard-won sovereignty, and it increases the risk that Ukraine will call on the United States and
its NATO allies to stand behind it against Russia. The development of an export route for
Caspian oil through Ukraine is a
cheap and effective means of ameliorating both problems, and thus an approach that
Washington should support.... The potential for energy wealth has already led Clinton
administration officials to class Central Asia and the Caucasus as a region 'vital' to the
United States. Washington hopes that the development of
natural gas and oil there will lead to reduced reliance on Middle Eastern suppliers for
both the United States and its European allies..... if the
United States truly wants to ensure a safe and secure route for Caspian oil, it cannot
look solely to Baku-Ceyhan [Azerbaijan-Georgia-Turkey] pipeline route. At the same time
the very public nature of Washington's commitment to Turkey on this matter makes a
reversal of policy impossible. What Washington really needs, then, is to put teeth into
its claim that it supports alternative routes. It can do this most effectively by backing
one or more 'complements' to Baku-Ceyhan, short-term options for getting the oil to market
while the Turkish pipeline is under construction, which would also provide a hedge against
its failure.... Happily, there is another alternative. For
years, Ukraine has advocated a route through Azerbaijan and Georgia, over the Black Sea,
and through Ukraine to Poland. Although this proposal has
been all but ignored in Washington, it has real potential. Most of the necessary pipeline
already exists. Ukraine's
ongoing improvements to its refinery and pipeline infrastructure, given some foreign
assistance to speed the process, will make it sufficient both to handle the 'early' oil,
extracted in the next few years while Baku-Ceyhan is still building, and to process even
larger quantities later. Perhaps most important, the price tag would be relatively small:
the cost of a few miles of pipeline (estimated at $400 million) and facility development
and improvements (about $600 million)..... Insofar as Kyiv can trade transit of energy
exports from those states through its territory for some fuel for itself, while still
having to purchase the balance, this could be a real opportunity to break the cycle of
dependence with Russia--and to create incentives for reform. The Caspian states,
particularly Azerbaijan, are ideal partners. These states need non-Russian routes for
their oil for the same reasons that Ukraine needs non-Russian sources of energy: to break the cycles of dependence
with Russia. Furthermore, Ukraine's
involvement with Azerbaijan and Georgia (with Moldova and Uzbekistan) in the GUUAM
grouping has paved the way for excellent relations. In fact, as already noted, both
Georgia and Azerbaijan have repeatedly spoken favorably of a Ukrainian export route
option..... To recap, the Ukrainian export route will provide
a secure and reliable complement to Baku-Ceyhan for Caspian oil export, one that does not require the United States to abrogate its commitment
to Turkey, but which nonetheless serves as an excellent hedge should Baku-Ceyhan fail. It
will also strengthen Ukraine
from a security standpoint, enabling it to better withstand Russian pressure and, thus,
significantly decrease the likelihood that it will ask the United States and NATO to
defend it from its large neighbor. Furthermore, in diversifying Ukrainian energy imports
away from Russia, this policy solution creates significant incentives for domestic energy
sector reform as well as reform of the overall investment climate, which, in turn, should
lead to development of Ukraine's
own oil and gas resources.... In the short term, however, Ukraine is in desperate need of a way to diminish Russia's increasing leverage.
If no cure is forthcoming for the disease, Ukraine will almost certainly seek to treat the symptoms, asking the United
States and its other Western friends for increased and more concrete security commitments.
In order to avoid the painful and potentially dangerous
decisions that would force, the United States should move now to help Ukraine diversify
away from Russian energy. Because it could also enable Washington to help to provide a
more secure and reliable route for Caspian oil, this policy is particularly advantageous." "Ukraine's Prime Minister Viktor
Yushchenko met in Astana on 10-11 March with his Kazakh counterpart, "In one of the generally less
remarked-upon recent political earthquakes, the reform-oriented government of Prime
Minister Viktor Yushchenko of Ukraine has lost a no-confidence vote in the Ukrainian Rada (parliament) but will
stay on at the head of a caretaker government for up to 60 days. The column analyses the
significance of the political crisis in Ukraine for energy questions in Europe and Eurasia..... On the political side of
the balance sheet, Russian pressure also affects the question of the gas transit pipeline
through Ukraine to Europe... Ukraine is also tied to Russia in other ways;
for one, it imports Turkmenistani gas via the Russian pipeline system. At the recent
Turcophone summit in Ankara, Turkmenistan's President Saparmurad Niyazov claimed that he
would soon sign an agreement for Ukraine to import 50 bn cm of his country's gas annually..... Yushchenko's efforts to promote the establishment of an oil transit
corridor between Azerbaijan and Poland, to be developed under the European Union's TRACECA
project, probably did not help improve his stature in Moscow's eyes. Such a corridor would
circumvent the route to Novorossiisk on Russia's Black Sea coast..... Even Yushchenko's announcement that the Ukrainian section of this
Odessa-Brody oil pipeline and the Yuzhny oil terminal near Odessa were 90 % complete was
insufficient to cause EU leaders to take notice of Ukraine's plight at their latest summit. It could also well be that the EU is
simply more interested in natural gas. If so, then it is noteworthy that Gazprom continues
to study pipeline routes to Europe that circumnavigate Ukraine..... recently it has been reported that an international consortium has
signed a letter of intent with Poland's state energy company PGNiG to conduct a
feasibility study of three routes from Belarus through Poland and Slovakia to European
markets. The consortium includes Gazprom, Gaz de France, Snam of Italy and the German
companies Ruhrgas and Wintershall. Earlier this year, Poland balked at participating in
any pipeline that would bypass Ukraine. But two considerations probably persuaded PGNiG to participate in the
study -- first, the economic advantage to be obtained as European demand for natural gas
increases in coming decades and second, reports that Gazprom was considering a pipeline
through the Baltics and undersea to Germany, thus bypassing Poland as well as Ukraine.... Ukraine never shook off its dependence on Russia for energy supplies, and this
issue has now proven an Achilles' heel. Ukraine's best chance in Europe is to serve as a bridge between Russia and the
West, and knowledgeable observers suggest that Yushchenko's fall is part and parcel Ukraine's necessary efforts to balance
between the economic pull to the East and the political aspirations to the West. The
question is how far and how much Ukraine will be pulled back into Russia's orbit under current
circumstances.....It is not even clear that Ukraine as a whole will reap any energy-related benefit from its deepening
relations with Russia, as Russia gives every appearance of being set to bypass Ukraine in sending its own natural gas to
Europe." "... on December 19, the Odessa-Brody pipeline in Ukraine is scheduled
to become operational. A strategic bonus is the easy hook-up of the Odessa-Brody route to
the refinery in Plotsk, Poland, and a further link to the Baltic port of Gdansk, from where oil be transported to Western markets. The primary advantage of the 673-kilometer long Odessa-Brody route is
that allows exporters to avoid major transit bottlenecks. As Michael Bleyzer, President of
the Houston-based SigmaBleyzer Fund and an advisor to the Ukrainian state pipeline
company said, 'getting the Caspian oil through Ukraine to
Europe is strategically important for the United States
… With the increased supply of oil, and all other bypasses being several years from
completion, this is too good of an opportunity to pass up.' The new pipelines demonstrate
that the Caspian Basin is emerging as a viable source of energy, creating an attractive
alternate to the Middle East and other traditional oil provinces.... Government officials
and oil executives have long wrestled with the dilemma of finding ways to bring Caspian
Basin resources to market. The flow of oil from the Caspian is constrained by the
bottleneck of the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles (the Turkish Straits), a narrow water
artery which connects the Black Sea with the Sea of Marmara and the Mediterranean." "Never
before was Ukraine treated with so much careful optimism as it was last Tuesday during a
conference entitled 'Oil Transportation Project Odessa-Brody-Plotsk: Enhancing the EU
Energy Security and Integrity'. The subject of the Brussels conference was the development
of the Eurasian oil transportation corridor.....Loyola de Palacio, Vice President of the
European Commission, the Commissioner for Energy and Transport, stated officially that the
Odessa-Brody-Plotsk
pipeline project 'is of European interest'. 'We have assumed very serious obligations
for supporting this project and we want to start implementing it as soon as possible,'
said the Commissioner. According to her, a feasibility study had proven the commercial
value of the project, which could contribute much to the economic development of all the
participating countries. Two weeks before, on May 12, the European Commission passed an
official document, the Message on the Development of the Energy Policy of the Enlarged
European Union, Its Neighbors and Partners. One of the priorities was stated as
cooperation with neighbor-countries in ensuring safe transportation of oil by sea, including the extension of the Odessa-Brody pipeline to Poland’s
Plotsk to be later connected either to the Druzhba or the
existing pipeline, which runs to the Polish Baltic port of Gdansk. Parallel to the
conference, Brussels hosted talks between Ukraine’s Vice Prime Minister Vitaliy
Haiduk, Poland’s Vice Prime Minister Marek Pol and
European Commission Vice President Loyola de Palacio. The talks resulted in a joint
declaration in support of the Eurasian Oil Transportation Corridor. Besides, speaking
before almost two hundred representatives of European governments, diplomatic corps,
business and financial organizations, Mrs. de Palacio announced the formation of a joint
EU-Poland-Ukraine working group for supporting and developing the Odessa-Brody-Plotsk
project. She also announced that the European Commission granted €2M as technical
assistance to the project through the TACIS and INOGATE programs. The working group’s
maiden session got underway on Saturday in Kyiv, and is supposed to continue on Monday in
Warsaw. The EBRD and the European Investment Bank are also interested in the project and
are ready to support it. So it must be clear that the conference and talks in Brussels
were not just 'an umpteenth vain presentation action', as someone here in Kyiv has termed
it, but a real breakthrough of this country, which ranks first in Europe by virtue of its
direct link with European energy markets. Ukraine is becoming
'a key nation for the transit and diversification of energy supplies to Europe,' stated
Hages Mingarelli, Chief of the EC Directorate for Eastern Europe, Caucasus and Central
Asia. 'The European Commission should support the project,
and our cooperation will make relations between the European Union and Ukraine
qualitatively new.' And Alexander Chaliy, the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry State Secretary
for European Integration, said that 'Ukraine regards the Odessa-Brody-Plotsk pipeline
project as one of the main instruments of the European integration policy'. Besides,
according to the diplomat, the Odessa-Brody pipeline is an inseparable part of an enlarged
Europe’s energy system. Malcolm Rifkind, the former
British defense and foreign minister, now a senior consultant with PriceWaterhouseCoopers,
who presented his business plan concept first in Kyiv and now in Brussels, stressed
several times that this project is advantageous to all. So
why all this praise? Why was the European presentation of the project so successful? As was noted at the conference, the situation in the European market of
oil supplies and services has changed. On the one hand, the consumption of carbohydrate
fuels is growing steadily, and on the other, there are objective obstacles to increasing
oil supplies to the EU market, primarily the limited transit capacity of the Bosporus
straits. Also, there is not a sufficient infrastructure in existence for delivering light
Caspian oil to potential markets. Authoritative experts maintain that Ukraine has the
strategic possibility to make the Eurasian Oil Transportation Corridor a bypass
alternative to the Bosporus. Besides, since the cost of
tanker shipments has increased two- or threefold, pipelines are assuming more importance
to Europe, not only because of lower transportation prices, but because piping is safer
environmentally (the wreck of the Prestige tanker has made an indelible impression on
Europe). In 2005 the EU plans to introduce new, more rigid
standards of the sulfur content in oil products, so European consumers are already looking
for lighter sorts of oil with a lower sulfur content. The role of Caspian oil is thus
increasing. European businessmen know how to count cost, and
they realize that sooner or later they should opt for the more expensive but lighter
Caspian oil, because the purification of cheaper sorts would cost them much more. The Europeans are also worried by shrinking extraction in the North Sea.
According to the forecasts made at the Brussels conference, by 2015 it will have decreased
by 87% (!), while the extraction from Caspian deposits will have increased by 44%...... As
we were told by members of the Ukrainian delegation, the German and Polish representatives
displayed special interest in the possibility of extending the Odessa-Brody-Plotsk
pipeline to the German town of Wilhelmshafen, which would make the project trans-European.
This issue is most likely to be the joint working group’s
priority, and a portion of the €2M, earmarked by the European Commission, is likely
to be spent on studying the possibility of constructing a pipeline section between Schwedt
and Wilhelmshafen (Schwedt is connected to Plotsk by the northern branch of the Druzhba
pipeline)..... Summing up the conference, F.Bensarsa called the 1995 Odessa-Brody project
and the construction of the pipeline exclusively through Ukrainian funding 'a historic
decision' for the diversification of the European Union’s energy market. The project is wholeheartedly supported by the United States, especially
after the political and economic situation in the world changed six moths ago. Its former
motto was 'Not a drop of Caspian oil to Europe!', and the Baku-Tbilisi-Djeikhan route was
pivotal. Now, when the United States has full access to Iraqi oil, that route has lost its
former importance. Besides, new risks have emerged as the route is now in an unstable
zone. So the EBRD would be unlikely to allocate anything to
fund that project (the deficit of which is about $2 billion). On the other hand, US
companies have invested billions in the extraction of oil from the Caspian deposits, and
those billions have to be recouped. So they are interested in transporting that oil to
high-liquidity and solvent markets via safe and cheap delivery routes. The main market is
the EU. The most promising and feasible route that can help
the Bosporus problem is Odessa-Brody-Plotsk. 'A project very
seldom appears so positive and profitable for so many participants. And this underscores
our opinion about the importance of this project, because it attains a strategic goal, it
is commercially realistic and it meets the interests of different nations,' US Ambassador
to Ukraine Carlos Pascual stated when the business plan concept for the Odessa-Brody
project was presented in Kyiv. Now that Ukraine has enlisted the powerful support of two
strategic partners, what about the third one? 'We don’t expect the Russian Federation
to love this project, but we count on its understanding,' Ukraine’s special envoy for
the project Alexander Todiychuk said in Brussels......However, as the recent months have
shown, Moscow is not too happy to see the project make such spectacular headway. It
insists on its own option for using the Ukrainian pipeline. As became known shortly before
the conference in Brussels, Ukraine’s state-run companies Naftogaz Ukrainy [Ukraine’s
Oil and Gas], Ukrtransnafta [Ukraine’s Oil Transportation] and
Russia’s holding companies Transneft [Oil Transoprtation] and TNK [Tyumen
Oil Company] signed a protocol of intention on April 23 on opening a new route to
export an additional 9 million tons of Russian oil annually via Ukraine’s territory
with the use of the Yuzhniy port and the Odessa-Brody pipeline. But, as it later turned out, Ukrtransnafta never decided to pump oil in
the reverse mode. Moreover, the Prime Minister of Ukraine particularly stressed during the
Cabinet deliberations on May 16 that oil should be pumped directly from Odessa to Brody.
Todiychuk called the signing of the protocol and the media campaign
in support of the reverse mode operation (exactly when the Odessa-Brody-Plotsk project was
being presented to Europe) 'a definite provocation'. He said
that the document had been signed without his knowledge by his deputy Ivan Vasylenko, who
was not authorized to do so. 'There is no Ukrtransnafta seal on the document, and it is
not valid legally,' Todiychuk emphasized.... So what is going
on? In our opinion, Moscow’s stubborn insistence on operating the Odessa-Brody
pipeline in the reverse mode is of the same kind as its attempts to drag Ukraine into a
customs or even an economic union in the framework of the so-called Integral Economic
Zone, and its demands that Kyiv agree with Moscow every step toward joining the WTO and
revoke the protocols that have been signed. In other words, these are all attempts to
deprive Ukraine of European prospects, which have become more visible lately, and to put
Kyiv back into Moscow’s orbit. The Kremlin certainly doesn’t want Ukraine to
become a key supplier of Caspian oil to the European market and, consequently, to become
more independent economically. .....Here are some quotations
from the Brussels conference......'By 2005 we are going to substantially increase the
extraction of oil. And it is extremely important for us that our oil go through the
territory of a friendly non-producing country. Odessa-Brody is the best option for us'
(Elshad Nasyrov, Azerbaijan state oil company SOCAR)." "Ukraine is important to world energy markets
because it is a critical transit center for exports of Russian oil and natural gas to
Europe.... Ukraine's geographic location makes it an ideal
corridor for oil and natural gas to transit from Russia and the Caspian Sea region to
European markets. Most of the oil transited via Ukraine is Russian oil, and is sent through
the 1.2-million-bbl/d Druzhba pipeline, the southern fork of which runs through Ukraine (see map). In July
2003, the Ukrainian government approved a new agreement with Russia calling for the
transit of Russian oil through Ukraine to increase by 60%, to 1.6 million bbl/d, for 15 years. However, the
Russian side, in a surprise negotiating tactic, has refused to sign the agreement, owing
to a dispute over Ukraine's
newest oil pipeline, Odessa-Brody (see below)..... Ukraine
also hopes to become a transit center for oil from the Caspian Sea region, which is
expected to increase significantly over the decade. The
leading potential conduit for this oil in Ukraine is the Odessa-Brody pipeline, which was completed in 2001 and extends
from Ukraine's Black Sea port of
Odessa northward to the city of Brody (see map). The pipeline was initially intended to
load Caspian Sea oil from the newly completed Black Sea marine terminal, Pivdenniy (or
Yuzhniy), and carry it northward through the Ukrainian system and on to Europe with an
initial capacity of roughly 300,000 bbl/d. However, for roughly two years the pipeline has
been mostly dormant. Russia has suggested that the pipeline
be used in reverse, to move oil from Russia southwards to tankers in the Black Sea and
shipped onwards to world markets. Since January 2003, the
last 32-mile leg of the pipeline has been used (in reverse) by Russian oil companies for
these purposes. Faced with the possibility of losing direct
access to Caspian Sea region oil, European governments have voiced their opposition to the
reversal project in newspaper articles and public statements.....
To world energy markets, Ukraine's
real significance is as an intermediary connecting Russia, the world's largest natural gas
producer, with growing European markets [click here to view
map of Ukrainian gas pipelines]. In 2002, approximately 4 Tcf of Russian and Turkmen
natural gas transited Ukraine en
route to European markets. This represented roughly 24% of OECD Europe's natural gas
consumption, and 38% of imports. Accordingly, Ukraine's natural gas infrastructure is of growing importance both to European
consumers and Russian producers." Why is there no oil for Odessa-Brody pipeline? United Press International, 29 June 2004 "Ukraine's national oil and gas company Naftogaz Ukrayiny is ready
to increase imports of natural gas from Turkmenistan, said the company’s First Deputy
CEO Vadim Chuprun at the 9th international conference 'Oil and gas of Turkmenistan –
2004'. According to Chuprun, the company has already begun preparatory work to increase
input capacity of Ukraine’s
gas transportation system
from Turkmenistan, Novosti-Ukraina reports referring to the press-center of Naftogaz
Ukrayiny. 'The construction of the new gas pipeline Novopskov-Uzhgorod under the
International Gas Transportation Consortium will significantly increase Ukraine’s capacity to import and
transit Turkmen natural gas,'
he said." "Given the
high strategic stakes involved, observers in Washington believe Russia is willing to go to
great lengths to secure Yanukovich’s election. His victory would free Russia to
devote more attention and resources to bolstering its geopolitical interests elsewhere, in
particular Central Asia and the Caucasus. Moscow is especially keen to improve its
position in the competition over Caspian Basin energy. Moscow’s primary opponent in
this sphere is the United States, which since the September 11 terrorist tragedy has
increased its strategic profile throughout the Caspian Basin. Washington is also the main
sponsor of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, an energy conduit that will break a Russia’s virtual monopoly
on Western-oriented energy export routes." "To be sure, Ukraine's return to Russia's embrace won't be alarming to those
in the Bush administration -- and there do seem to be a few around -- who see President
Putin as a force for good. But for those with a few doubts about the purity of the KGB
careerist's soul, here is a short list of how Ukraine's
lockstep with Russia, precipitated by a stolen election this Sunday, might harm U.S.
interests on the Eurasian land mass ....... Russia will have trumped an energy strategy in which U.S.-financed
Caspian oil was to have flowed through Ukraine to Poland and Western Europe. If the ruling party holds on to power in Ukraine, a new cross-Ukraine
pipeline designed to feed U.S.-financed, Kazakhstani oil from the Black Sea north to
European markets will likely see a peculiar reversal of roles. It's likely the Odessa-Brody pipeline
would literally reverse its flow and instead be used to ship Russian oil south through the
Mediterranean, strengthening Russia's export position, undermining U.S. energy and
investment interests in Kazakhstan, and preventing any European diversification away from
Russian energy." "After
billions of dollars and billions of headaches, BP’s mammoth project to pipe oil from
the Caspian to the Mediterranean is almost complete.... A decade ago Washington threw its
diplomatic weight behind a project that was once dismissed as foolish and dangerous: a
1,760km steel pipe linking oilfields offshore of Baku to a Turkish Mediterranean port.
Passing through the troubled Georgian republic and skirting Armenia, BTC is a political
statement as well as infrastructure: a route for Central Asian oil to reach Western markets without
touching Russian soil." "Next week,
the world will have the answer to a fascinating geopolitical question: whether the pivotal
post-Soviet state of Ukraine will choose to return eastward, toward
Russia, or to move westward, toward Europe......
Yanukovych, the current prime minister, has shown his colors, and they are all shades of
red. Russian intervention in the campaign has been intense, public and utterly clear. For
his part, Yanukovych vowed to introduce Russian as a co-language with Ukrainian, to offer
dual Ukrainian-Russian citizenship to his fellow citizens, and to give Moscow special rights to the oil pipeline in
the south near Odessa." "The latest recipient of Washington's
'regime change' was not some miscreant Muslim state but the the mainly Christian mountain
nation of Georgia. Eduard Shevardnadze, the 75-year-old strongman who has ruled
post-Soviet Georgia's 5.1
million citizens since 1991, was overthrown by a bloodless coup that appears to have been
organized and financed by the Bush administration. Shevardnadze's sin, in Washington's
eyes, was being too chummy with Moscow and obstructing a major U.S. oil pipeline, due to
open in 2005, from Central Asia, via Georgia, to Turkey. Georgia occupies the
heart of the wild, unruly, and strategic Caucasus region, which I call the Mideast
North. In recent months, Shevardnadze had given new drilling and pipeline
concessions to Russian firms.....Washington sent high-level emissaries to warn
Shevardnadze not to do anything that threatened the proposed oil corridor. When he went
ahead with Russian oil deals, Washington denounced the Nov. 2 Georgian elections as
rigged, which they were, although it also turns a blind eye to rigged elections in useful
allies like oil-rich Azerbaijan, Armenia, Russia, Egypt, Pakistan, etc. Cash and
anti-Shevardnadze political operatives from the U.S. poured into Tbilisi to back up the
president's American-educated principal rival, Mikhail Saakashvili.... Washington will
shore up its man in Tbilisi, Saakashvili, and may send Special Forces troops under the
pretext of the faux war on
terrorism. The entire Caucasus is near a boil. The sharply increasing rivalry between the U.S. and Russia for political
and economic influence over this vital land bridge between Europe and the oil-rich Caspian
Basin promises a lot more intrigue, skullduggery and drama."
US backing for Caspian oil pipeline sidesteps Russia London Times, 19 Sept 2002 "I just want to get back to
Russia. No matter how you might try to soft-pedal it, isn't the real significance of this is that this is a long-term strategic
triumph over Russia's historic aspirations and interests in Central Asia? And how will that strategic defeat for Russia, do you think,
affect U.S.-Russian relations? I mean, you talked about the intensity of opposition,
nationalist opposition, in Russia to this project....... On the second of the two early
pipelines you mentioned, one that's been shut down due to the fighting in Chechnya.
Could you tell us what the points -- where that pipeline begins and ends, how much oil it
moves, when it opened and when it got shut down?....." "The Druzhba system supplies much of the Russian energy, mainly gas, on which the EU has become dependent, and while the EU is keen to keep its Russian energy flowing - attaching great importance to maintaining good relations with Moscow - Western governments and companies also regard themselves as being in territorial and commercial competition with Russia . The West has a distinct preference for transit routes which avoid Russian territory or regions under heavy Russian influence, as well as being keen to secure energy markets which are currently, or potentially, lucrative for the Russian energy companies, mainly the giant Gazprom. This company already has the lion's share of the east European market - inherited from the communist era - which is set to grow significantly and which will increase the EU's energy dependency on Russia as these countries accede to the EU. Competition with Gazprom to secure the Turkish gas market is also raging. A crucial piece of this geopolitical jigsaw is the limited capacity of Turkey's Bosphorus Straits to handle the increasing oil tanker traffic from the eastern Black Sea ports out towards the Mediterranean and world markets. This has dictated the need for overland pipelines which bypass this shipping lane: southerly across Turkey (the Baku-Ceyhan plan) or westerly from the Black Sea ports of Bulgaria and Romania. However, for the last decade transit problems closer to source have presented the greatest hurdles, in particular those facing the BP Amoco-led AIOC in its need for an 'early oil' pipeline from Azerbaijan to a Black Sea port. While most of a pipeline route north-westwards to the Russian port of Novorossiisk was already in place, it passed right through Grozny, the war in Chechnya rendering the pipeline often unusable until the Russians built a bypass pipeline around the war zone. Greater investment and time were required for an alternative route through Georgia to its Black Sea port of Supsa, but highlighted the merits of a diverse, multiple pipeline strategy:"A Meeting of Blood and Oil: The Balkan factor in Western energy security Journal of Southern Europe and the Balkans, Vol.4, No.1, May 2002, pp.75-89 Click Here
For Russian Language Map of Pipeline Network Between Ukraine And Caspian INOGATE and TRACECA "The Council believes that the
Caspian Basin could make a major contribution to global oil and gas supplies within a
decade. The EU has an interest in promoting the exploitation of the region's reserves. It
will continue to encourage regional stability, including a peaceful resolution of
conflicts, and the development of robust democratic and economic institutions. Investment
by European companies, particularly in the energy sector, will be a major factor. The EU
will actively help to safeguard those interests. The Council considers that secure export
routes for Caspian oil and gas will be crucial to the future prosperity of the region, to
the foreign companies investing in exploitation of those reserves, and to international
markets. The construction of multiple pipeline
routes is therefore logical and desirable. Foreign investors will need to take account of
all the relevant factors - political, geographical and financial - in reaching strategic
decisions on pipeline routes. The Council believes
that the timing of those decisions and the specific routes chosen should remain
essentially a commercial one for the companies concerned. The Council also attaches
importance to revitalising the existing regional pipeline network. In this context, the European Union's Interstate Oil and Gas Transport to
Europe Programme (INOGATE) should be an important contribution to ensuring security of
supplies . The EU will also continue to support the
development of transport links and networks in the region, notably through the
infrastructure projects linking Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia (TRACECA)." "Yushchenko's prized Azerbaijan-Poland
oil transit corridor is just one project under the umbrella of the TRACECA transportation
project funded partially by the European Union. The project, which envisions ferry, rail,
motor and energy pipeline links between the countries of the Caspian and Black Sea areas
and Western Europe, originally found great support among Western organizations and
leaders. It also served as one of the incentives for Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan and Moldova to form GUAM in October of 1997....
Even before Uzbekistan joined the [GUUAM] alliance, it announced one of TRACECA's first
achievements. On 25 November 1998, the country opened a terminal to export cotton by rail
and tanker to Western Europe through Georgia. The goal of the route was 'to [move] the
trend away from traditional export routes via Russia,' thereby saving on various fees and
taxes and creating a more independent economic base. By early 1999, the number of
accomplishments mounted. A Georgian army platoon was created using Ukrainian equipment in
order to 'guard pipelines.' This action coincided with the opening of the Baku-Supsa
section of the TRACECA pipeline, and the inauguration of a rail link connecting Poti in
Georgia to Ilyichevsk in Ukraine.
At the time, President Kuchma remained an ardent supporter of GUUAM and the TRACECA
project, and noted that the rail link and the pipeline were 'more significant
geopolitically' than they seemed. 'Oil is life,' he suggested, 'as well as a powerful
foundation for a nation's development and well-being. It is the backbone of national
security....Viktor Yushchenko stood as the one man in Ukraine committed and in a position to maintain Ukraine's pro-western and pro-reformist course, including the country's
leadership in GUUAM.'" "Even as the Soviet Union was in its
final death throes, in June 1990 at an EU summit, Dutch Prime Minister Ruud Lubbers
broached the idea of a European-wide energy community which would 'capitalise on the
complementary relationship between the European Economic Community, the USSR and the
countries of Central and Eastern Europe'. With
this 'Lubbers Plan', as it became known, the EU was running for Caspian energy even before
the starting pistol had been fired! The Lubbers Plan and a plethora of EU aid programmes
to eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union were motivated by the bottom line of
European energy security. Europe was already heavily dependent on the region for gas in
particular, and so, in the short term, the complete economic collapse of one of its main
energy suppliers could spell trouble. At the same time, the newly opened-up resources of
the Caspian region presented the EU with an opportunity ultimately to strengthen its
longer-term energy security. Firstly, continued and further exploitation of these energy
resources would require large investments from the West. Secondly, the fragmentation of a
once centrally-controlled energy transit system stretching from Central Asia to eastern
Europe would require some kind of knitting back together. The Lubbers Plan evolved into
the Energy Charter Treaty (ECT), a multilateral agreement - from an early stage including
countries beyond Europe and the former Soviet Union - designed to provide a legal
framework within which these basic aims could be pursued, with various EU programmes
springing up to aid their implementation.....Over the last decade, the EU has run a
battery of aid programmes aimed at advancing its energy security interests in the Caspian
and Black Sea regions and the Balkans. TACIS (Technical Assistance to the Commonwealth of
Independent States and Georgia) emerged soon after the break-up of the Soviet Union as a
way to economically stabilise the region and initiate longer term relations with the New
Independent States. Given the need for infrastructure as a precondition for the
exploitation of the region's energy resources, TACIS spawned two network infrastructure
programmes, TRACECA and INOGATE, under its Inter-state programme..... TRACECA (Transport
Corridor Europe-Caucasus-Asia) was set up in 1993, following a proposal by Georgian
President Eduard Shevardnadze, to create 'a transport/trade corridor on an east-west axis
from Central Asia, across the Caspian Sea, through the Caucasus, across the Black Sea to
Europe.' 45 The programme
organised a large international conference in Baku in 1998, taking the East-West transport
initiative away from Russia. 46
Without the need for infrastructure development to support energy sector operations and
energy transit, TRACECA would most likely never have got off the ground; according to
Azerbaijani State Oil Company President Natig Aliyev '[t]he fundamental issue of the
TRACECA project is the production and transport of energy resources.' 47 For example, under the TRACECA
programme, the EU has loaned $25m to Azerbaijan to upgrade its port near Baku 'to allow up
to 500,000 bbl/d of oil shipments from the eastern Caspian.'. INOGATE (Interstate Oil and
Gas Transport to Europe) was launched in 1995 specifically 'to promote the security
of energy supplies', involving work on 'revitalisation of the existing transmission
network and on new oil and gas pipelines across the Caspian, Black Sea region and
westwards to Europe… and protection of foreign investments.'
Concluding an INOGATE conference, Hans van den Broek described the
programme's 'ultimate objective' as being 'to help free the huge and gas and oil reserves
of the Caspian Basin by overcoming the institutional, technical and financial bottlenecks
which have impeded access to local and European markets.' 50
The programme has done this firstly by funding feasibility studies of the various options
for transporting Caspian oil and gas to central and eastern Europe.51
Under INOGATE, the EU has supported studies of ways to export gas from Shah Deniz, of
possible Armenian routes to export gas from Turkmenistan, and of the condition of the
Druzhba oil pipeline network, and was behind the development of a pipeline from the Azeri
port of Baku to the Georgian port of Supsa..." "The project envisages construction of
a new spur from Delnice to Trieste, 100 kilometers long, and conversion of the Omisalj port into the leading spot-market
for resale of oil in the Mediterranean [Adriatic]..... One should recall that Milosevic
did not end up in the Hague only as a war criminal, but above all because with his
policies he stood in the way of a new network of Euro-Asian
oil pipelines. His political
fate was sealed in Zagreb, where two years ago a large ministerial-business conference of
the EU INOGATE program was held. A hundred
days later, Milosevic was not in power anymore, and at the time of the signing of a new oil pipeline from
Constanta to Trieste he was already on the way to the Hague,
supposedly by chance." "Officials in Brussels, concerned,
inter alia, with improving the security of power supplies to EU countries, are certain
that the EU relies heavily on the Caspian region for its energy independence. One of the
key instruments in assuring such independence is found in Ukraine. The Bosporus and
Dardanelles, with their low capacity, are the Achilles’ heel of Caspian oil
transportation by sea, causing Brussels to search for alternative power supply options.
Therefore, in May the European Union recognized the Odessa-Brody pipeline to be a project
of pan-European significance. The European Commission’s political support of the
project reflects the European oil consumers’ actual needs: Europe is looking forward
to Caspian oil transportation via the Odessa-Brody pipeline. In particular, German oil
refineries are waiting for it..... Presently, a seemingly technical question (which sort
of oil will be chosen for filling the pipe with technological oil: Russian Urals or light
Caspian oil) is, in fact, of strategic nature. The answer to it will determine the
direction in which oil will be pumped along the Odessa-Brody pipeline. Moreover, Europe in
interested in diversifying its oil suppliers by attracting Caspian producers. Remarkable
in this respect is Loyola de Palacio’s complaint that 'Central Europe depends too
much on monopolist suppliers'. That is why Europe is endeavoring to create a new market
for Caspian oil to supplement the existing one dominated by oil of Russian origin. No
wonder, then, that the agreement stresses a special purpose for which the pipeline is to
be built, namely, to transport oil from the Caspian region.....As of today, preliminary
agreements have been reached with several Caspian oil producers about their supplying
crude oil for the Odessa-Brody pipeline. At the initial stage, the oil is most likely to
be coming from Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan. Sporadic supplies of Azerbaijani oil are not
unlikely, either. The volumes of the latter are going to grow as oil production in the
Azerbaijani sector of the Caspian Sea expands. Europe says it needs Caspian oil…
Leonid Kuchma and Vitaliy Haiduk were expected to meet later this week. However,
according to some of the ZN sources, the President’s schedule has changed: instead of
meeting with the Ukrainian Vice Prime Minister he is scheduled to have negotiations with
the Transnafta President Semen Weinstock, who has come to
Kyiv to discuss, yet another time, the reverse use of the Odessa-Brody pipeline." "As highlighted in the European
Commission's Green Paper on the Security of Energy Supply, the European Union has a
specific interest in the extensive oil and gas reserves of the Caspian Basin which will,
in the future, contribute to security of supply in Europe. Discussions on energy
cooperation between the European Union and Azerbaijan have started in the framework of the
PCA, in addition to energy related technical assistance performed under Tacis. First time
the energy cooperation between the EU and Azerbaijan in the form of the dialogue took
place during the third meeting of the EU-Azerbaijan Sub-committee on Trade and Economic
Issues, in Baku on 14-15 March 2003. The priorities of energy dialogue are following: -
facilitating the transportation of oil and gas from Azerbaijan; - security of
transportation of hydrocarbons; - creation of common rules and standards for the
transportation of Azerbaijani oil and gas to Europe; - improvement of investment
conditions for the EU companies in Azerbaijan; - harmonization of Azerbaijani legislation
with rules of the internal market for electricity and gas of the EU; - continuation of
reforms in the oil and gas production. The TRACECA — Transport Corridor Europe
Caucuses Asia was initiated in Brussels in May 1993. The trade and transport ministers
from the five Central Asian republics and three Caucasian republics namely Armenia,
Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrghyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan
decided to run the European Union funded Technical assistance program aimed towards the
development of the transport corridor from the west across the Black Sea, through the
Caucasus and the Caspian Sea to Central Asia. Later on in 1996 the Mongolia and Ukraine and in 1998 Moldova joined the
Traceca....An international conference held in September 1998 in Baku on the initiative of
Azerbaijan will undoubtedly play an important role in the further global development of
the Great Silk Road. Participants in the conference discussed practically every way
possible of implementing the project for the revival of this historically significant and
profitable transport corridor, and made the necessary recommendations, which are now being
successfully carried out.... It is a well-known fact that the European Union is greatly
dependent on external energy supplies. Currently, 50% of its energy requirements are being
met through imports. If current trends persist, not only will this figure rise to about
70% in 2030, but the EU’s dependence on oil and gas will also be greater. The Green
Paper: Towards a European strategy for the security of supply, presented by the Commission
for debate on 29 November 2000, outlines a long-term EU energy strategy aiming at a
diverse, secure, environmentally friendly and cost-effective EU energy supply. This
strategy entails two strategic directions: first, controlling the growth of demand and
second, the management of supply dependence. In managing supply dependence, one of the
main issues to be addressed is ensuring external energy supplies through strengthened
supply networks. So, the ways (both in the geographical and the technical sense) in which
energy is transported is of fundamental importance for the security of supply. The
rehabilitation of existing and the construction of new oil and gas pipelines will make it
possible to import oil and gas from the Caspian Sea Basin and the Southern Mediterranean
region, thereby improving security of supply by diversifying geographic sources of
supply. The INOGATE Program’s overall objective is to promote integration of
the oil and gas pipeline systems and facilitating their transport towards the export
markets of Europe and the West in general. Developed within the institutional 'pillar' of
the INOGATE Program, the INOGATE Umbrella Agreement (UA) is an interstate agreement that
sets out an institutional system designed to rationalize and facilitate the development of
interstate oil and gas transportation systems and to attract the investments necessary for
their construction and operation. To date, it has been signed by 21 states from Central
Asia, Caucasus, Eastern Europe and the EU." "With a highly developed oil pipeline
system, Ukraine plays an
important role as a transit country for Russian oil exports to Europe. The oil trunk line
system has a total length of 4,520 km and is activated by 31 pumping stations. The annual
input capacity of the system is 120,000,000 tons, and the output capacity is 67,000,000
tons. Via Ukraine's trunk line
system crude oil is delivered from Russia and Kazakhstan to the Ukrainian refineries and
also exported to Central European countries. In Ukraine, crude oil is transported by the "Ukrtransnafta" Joint-Stock
Company, affiliated to the Company and having two subsidiaries, Pre-Dniepro Oil-Trunk
Pipelines (Ukraine's
South-Eastern region) and Druzhba Oil-Trunk Pipelines (Ukraine's North-Western region). During the last five years crude oil volumes
transport by the oil trunk line system have been maintained at 64,000,000 to 65,400,000
tons, including the transit of 53,000,000 to 56,400,000 tons. Therefore, Ukraine is today not only a gas transmission,
but also an important crude oil transport crossroads of Europe. As it is known well, it is
the Caspian region that seems today to have best outlooks for oil production growth.
Currently, there are about ten options for delivering Caspian crude oil to the world
markets. The transport of oil by the current route via the Black Sea to the Mediterranean
using the Bosporus and Dardanelles is limited due to the traffic capacity of the straits
and environmental concerns. Presently, the Odessa - Brody pipeline and Pivdenny terminal
are the only route for transporting Caspian oil to Europe. The [Ukrainan] Odessa-Brody oil
transportation system is 674 km long, with an annual projected capacity of 9 to 14.5
million tons and total reservoir capacity of 200,000 cubic meters. The system development
plans provide for the increase of the volume of crude oil transportation to 45 million
tons a year. At the end of 2001, Ukrtransnafta completed the construction of the Pivdenny
oil terminal, which, together with the Odessa -Brody pipeline, enables the annual
transportation of around 9 million tons of oil to the Central and Southern Europe. The
present capacity of the pipeline is limited by the capacity of two Western Ukrainian oil
refineries - OJSC Halychyna and Naftokhymyk Prykarpattya. In September 2002, Ukrtransnafta
announced a tender for a business plan for the operation of the Odessa - Brody pipeline,
linking the major Black Sea port to the Western Ukraine. The tender was won by Nexant Ltd, Ernst & Young, and
PriceWaterHouseCoopers. The Ukrainian authorities are planning to hold negotiations with
Poland and the European Union Member States in December 2002 regarding the extension of
the Odessa-Brody pipeline
to the Polish city of Gdansk. The success of the project would enable diversification of
the sources of supply of crude oil and enhance the
reliability of the world oil transportation system.... Ukraine has an extensive gas transmission
system, which consists of 37,100 km of pipelines, 72 compressor stations (112 compressor
shops) with a total capacity of 5,609 MW, and 13 underground gas storage facilities.
14,000 km of pipelines have a diameter ranging from 1,020 to 1,420 mm. The input capacity
of the system is 290 billion, and the output stands at 175 billion cubic meters a year. Ukraine's gas transmission system delivers
gas to domestic consumers, and is the major corridor for Russian gas exports to European
countries. Gas transit levels have been growing over the years reaching 121 billion cubic
meters in 2000, including 109 billion cubic meters to Western and Central European
countries and Turkey. In Ukraine,
natural gas transmission tasks are performed by Naftogaz subsidiaries SC Ukrtransgaz and
SJSC Chornomornaftogaz.... The real prospects for the export
of Turkmen [Caspian] natural gas, which has a potential of 50 bcm to 70 bcm yearly,
represent an important element in the diversification of the sources of gas supply to
European countries. It would be most efficient to transit
this gas using the operating infrastructure in Central Asia, Russia and Ukraine. In this relation, attention should
be given to the project relating to the construction of the gas pipeline from Russia's
Aleksandrov Gai to Novopskov, that is, from the Russian-Kazakh to Russian-Ukraine borders in the same corridor, which
is used for the Soyuz gas pipeline. With a 28 bcm capacity,
this gas pipeline could serve as a link in the system through which gas is transported
from Central Asia to Europe. It could be built and operated
on a multilateral basis, which would ensure independent and, therefore, secure deliveries
of natural gas to European countries. Thirteen underground gas storage facilities with a
working capacity over 30 billion cubic meters represent an important technological element
of Ukraine's gas transmission
system. The underground gas storage network includes four systems: the West-Ukrainian
(Pre-Carpathian), Kyiv, Donetsk and South-Ukrainian complexes. The facilities are used to
regulate daily and seasonal peak flows. At maximum storage and output rates, Ukraine's storage facilities can transmit 240
million cubic meters of natural gas a day. Connected by a network of pipelines, the
underground gas storage facilities guarantee the reliable operation of the whole gas
transmission system, and provide a stable gas supply to domestic consumers and transit of
Russian gas to Europe. Due to intensive development of the
European gas market, the underground gas storage facilities located in the Western region
of Ukraine could play much more important role in providing safe and secure gas supplies
to neighbouring countries.... On 7 October 2002,
Prime-Ministers of Ukraine and
Russia signed an agreement on establishing an international consortium for the management
and development of the Ukrainian oil and gas transportation systems." " Given the increasing density of the
maritime traffic in the waters around the EU and in the
enclosed Black Sea, it is of utmost importance to give a
higher priority to considering, where economically and technically feasible, the alternative of transporting oil by pipelines...." "When President Bill Clinton -- in a
desperate search for votes from the East European diaspora in the Midwest -- set in motion
the extension of NATO right up to the borders of Russia, it provided all the ammunition
that was needed to those in the Russian establishment who had never been happy about a too
close relationship with the West. George Kennan, the grand old man of Russian diplomacy,
described it as 'the most fateful error of the entire post-Cold War era.' The Europeans
compounded the error by refusing to engage in what Gorbachev termed the construction of 'a
European house' and President Vladimir Putin's musings on the same theme. It was never in
the cards that the eastern part of Ukraine would slip its moorings and go West. This could happen only if Russia
itself decided unequivocally to become part of Europe, but the European Union countries,
both by going along happily with NATO expansion and by their coolness to Russia, have made
that impossible. The West's post-Cold War Russia policy now reaches a denouement of sorts,
one that astute observers have seen coming for a decade. While few in the West will excuse
the rigging of Ukraine's
election, using it as a reason to go to eye-to-eye with Moscow would be counterproductive.
Ukrainians must work it out for themselves, which means finding a way of resolving this
crisis in a way that Russia can accept. The West for its part needs to rethink its whole
post-Cold War policy toward Russia. The United States should put a stop to its aggressive
geopolitical strategy of challenging Russian interests in the 'near abroad,' and Europe
must use the lure of European membership for both countries to keep Russian and Ukrainian
democracy and behavior on the straight and narrow. Otherwise a return to the hostilities
of the Cold War cannot be ruled out, and it will be as much the West's fault as
Russia's." ".... Certainly attitudes in Russia
are likely to harden. Mr Putin came to power promising to rebuild Russia from the chaos of
post-communism and project Russia’s influence abroad, particularly in the former
Soviet republics now in the CIS. Yet under his rule Russia has seen an erosion of
influence in countries where its authority once went unchallenged. This time last year, a
popular revolt in neighbouring Georgia saw the rise of another pro-Western leader when
Mikhail Saakashvili came to power in Tbilisi. The three Baltic States, Latvia, Lithuania
and Estonia joined the European Union and Nato this year. US forces, involved in the War
on Terror, are now based in Georgia and Uzbekistan. Oil-rich Azerbaijan remains hostile to
Russia’s interests in the region and even once-loyal Armenia is having second
thoughts.... Oksana Antonenko, an expert on the region at the International Institute of
Strategic Studies, predicted that the current crisis would embolden the growing
nationalist movement. 'Everything that is happening in the Ukraine is being portrayed in the Russian media as the fault of the West,' she
said. This will only increase the growing power of the Right in Russia.'” "If there is one good reason why
Russia is battling to keep Ukraine in its strategic orbit, it is floating in the tranquil
waters of the Crimean port of Sevastopol. Russia’s southern fleet has used this
deep-water harbour as a base to patrol the Black Sea and beyond ever since Catherine the
Great annexed Crimea in 1783. Even after Ukraine won independence from the Soviet Union,
the fleet maintained its presence here — after splitting its ships with the new
Ukrainian navy — and hatched a deal to rent the port until 2017. Russia now fears it
will have to withdraw the fleet for good if Viktor Yushchenko, the opposition leader who
advocates joining Nato and the EU, wins the re-run of the presidential election on
December 26. It is a prospect that most Russians find hard to stomach — a final
humiliation in their own backyard after the arrival of US
troops in Afghanistan, Uzbekistan and Georgia, and Nato warplanes in Lithuania this year." "... for Russia the geopolitical
stakes in this campaign are high .... if Russian money was spent [on supporting
Yanukovich], it wasn't to safeguard Ukraine's oligarchs..... The Baltic states and Georgia
have already slipped out the Russian sphere of influence. People around Putin also regret
allowing the Americans to establish a military base in Uzbekistan straight after 9/11,
thereby weakening Russia's hold over Central Asia. So now Putin is trying to stop Ukraine
from leaving the fold." "The Russian
daily Kommersant published a report on Nov. 29 stating that up to 800 Russian special
forces, or spetsnaz, began arriving in Kyiv early on the morning of Nov. 23 and changed
into Ukrainian uniforms at a Ukrainian military base just outside the capital. The report
says that at 1:32 a.m. on Nov. 23 a Russian Antonov An-26 (serial number RA-26410) arrived
at a Ukrainian military base near Irpen, located 10 km from the city center. The base is
adjacent to a compound operated by the BARS government security agency, which has as many
as 3,000 service personnel protecting the Presidential Administration in central Kyiv.
According to the Kommersant report, at 3:17 a.m. on Nov. 23, a second plane arrived, a
Ukrainian-registered heavy lift Ilyushin Il-76. The occupants of both the Antonov
and the Ilyushin boarded buses waiting on the tarmac and were transported to the base at
Irpen. Kommersant also reported that up to 800 such spetsnaz forces of the Vityaz regiment
have arrived in Ukraine from
Russia on Russian military transport aircraft, many also having landed at Kyiv's Boryspil
International Airport from Nov. 24-26. The location of the troops is currently
unknown." "Russian special forces have
reportedly been deployed in the Ukrainian capital Kiev as thousands of demonstrators
besieged government buildings to protest the results of the presidential election. A
1,000-strong contingent of Russian special forces have put on Ukraine uniforms upon their arrival in Ukraine, said Boris Tarasyuk, chairman of Ukraine's parliamentary European integration commission and an envoy of the
Ukrainian opposition's presidential candidate Viktor Yushtchenko. In an interview for
Bulgarian private bTV channel Tarasyuk said the soldiers arrived
in Kiev by plane and were armed with machine guns, which spoke of their 'serious
intentions'". "A cold war-style confrontation over Ukraine’s presidential election
escalated yesterday as Moscow and Washington traded heated words and an EU-brokered deal
to end the deadlock in Kiev fell through. Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, sharply
rejected an accusation by President Putin of Russia that the West was playing
'sphere-of-influence' politics by backing Viktor Yushchenko, the Ukrainian opposition leader.... Russia
openly backed Viktor Yanukovych, the Prime Minister, who advocates closer ties with
Moscow, fearing that Mr Yushchenko would pull Ukraine out of its strategic orbit and into
Nato and the EU." "Russia has revealed that it is
fitting its strategic bombers with cruise missiles capable of delivering a massive
precision strike thousands of miles away. This follows months of hints from the president
that Russia is developing a missile program to rival the West’s. The official
Rossiyskaya Gazeta headline announced that Russia’s long-range air force finally has
a new weapon and the country now has a strategic cruise missile with a non-nuclear
warhead. Russia has broken the U.S. monopoly on the use of long-range conventional cruise
missiles, Itar-Tass news agency quoted an unnamed senior air force commander as saying.
These cruise missiles have a range of more than 3,000 kilometers and can hit a target to
within a few meters while carrying a warhead of hundreds of kilotons....... The
announcement followed months of cryptic statements from Russian President Vladimir Putin
and his top generals that Russia was developing a new missile program that is a step ahead
of any Western rivals — including technology developed by the United States. The
Russian government daily says tests of the new system are being conducted in military
exercises now underway in southern Russia." "President Vladimir Putin told a
conference of top military officials Wednesday that Russia was planning to deploy a
nuclear missile of a kind that other nuclear powers were unlikely to develop. Putin gave
no other details, but over the last several months Russian military officials have spoken
about developing a ballistic missile that could penetrate any missile defense system, such
as the one being put in place by the United States. It reportedly would have the
maneuverability of a cruise missile after reentering the atmosphere from space, helping it
to evade interceptor rockets." "I just want to get back to
Russia. No matter how you might try to soft-pedal it, isn't the real significance of
this is that this is a long-term strategic triumph over Russia's historic aspirations and
interests in Central Asia? And how will that strategic defeat for Russia, do you
think, affect U.S.-Russian relations? I mean, you talked about the intensity of
opposition, nationalist opposition, in Russia to this project....... On the second of the
two early pipelines you mentioned, one that's been shut down due to the fighting in
Chechnya. Could you tell us what the points -- where that pipeline begins and ends,
how much oil it moves, when it opened and when it got shut down?....." "While it would be a distortion of
history to claim that the struggle between Russia and Chechnya arises solely because of
the of the jockeying for control of the Chechen oil deposits, refineries as well as the
crucial pipeline which passes through Grozny,
there is no doubt that petroleum has played a central role in the dispute. Given the
potential of what seem to be vast untapped deposits in the Caspian Sea and the fact that
the best if not only pipeline route from the Caspian through Russia to the West runs
through Grozny,
the odds are that tensions between Russia and Chechnya will not soon disappear. That will
be the case even if constitutional matters dealing with regional rights and the integrity
of the Russian Republic can be resolved.... Much more important in today's world is the
fact that that Grozny
is at the hub of Russia's pipeline network from the Caucasus' and most important to the
vast deposits in the Caspian sea off Azarbajian........ If Russia's only concern was the
Chechan rebellion, Russia would not be so anxious about the development of mineral
reserves in the Caspian. However, in the aftermath of the breakup of the USSR, and the
emergence of a newly assertive 'independent' Azerbaijan, Russian oil policy has suddenly
taken on a new importance. This is due to the fact that there is a real possibility that
russia may find itself looking on from the outside as Azerbaijan, not Russia, becomes the
recipient of billions of dollars worth of royalties from the sale of Caspian oil. Given
the growing likelihood of such a development, the Caucasus, the Caspian Sea and the
Chechan pipeline have suddenly become matters of international power politics, not only in
the Kremlin, but because of the intense interest in the area by American oil companies, by
the Washington White House.... It is easy to understand the Russian concerns. Oil from
Caspian Sea deposits were first developed in the days of the czars and expanded in the
Soviet era. Why should other governments now become the beneficiary of this initial
work.... This hardening of attitudes is part of the growing suspicion by the Russians of
western intentions. It is not just that oil companies from Russia's former enemies have
been gathering data and control over what was once the Soviet Union's most valuable
resources, but that their efforts seem to be part of a strategy to cut Russia off
completly from the Trans Caucasus. How else can the United States support of Chechnya and
'The Confederation of Mountain Peoples' be explained..... As if all this were not
threatening enough, the United States and its obedient oil companies have also begun to
insist on the opening of a second pipeline route from the Caspian Sea....The real reason
the American oil companies want to ship through Georgia they insist is to deprive the
Russians of the transit fees and insure that the Russians will lose monopoly control over
the pumping and shipping of Caspian Oil." Click Here
For Russian Language Map of Pipeline Network Between Ukraine And Caspian "Why would a group of
leading American neo-conservatives, dedicated to fighting Islamic terror, have climbed
into bed with Chechen rebels linked to al-Qaeda? The American Committee for Peace in
Chechnya (ACPC), which includes Pentagon supremo Richard Perle, says the conflict between
Russia and Chechnya is about Chechen nationalism, not terrorism. The ACPC savaged
Russia for the atrocities its forces have committed in the Caucuses, said President
Vladimir Putin was 'ridiculous', claimed Russia was more 'morally' to blame for the
bloodshed than Chechen separatists and played down links between al-Qaeda and the 'Chechen
resistance'. The ACPC's support for the Chechen cause seems bizarre, as many of its
members are among the most outspoken US policymakers who have made it clear that Islamist
terror must be wiped out. But the organisation has tried to broker peace talks between
Russia and Chechen separatists. The ACPC includes many leaders of the neo-conservative
think-tank, Project for the New American Century (PNAC), which advocates American
domination of the world.... ACPC executive director Glen Howard said the continuation of
the 'brutalising tactics' of Russian forces would only lead to 'the resistance employing
more brutal tactics' like the assault on School Number One in Beslan...... The nurturing
of Chechen fighters against Russia recalls America's support for the Mujahideen in
Afghanistan - an act that went on to spawn al-Qaeda and the Taliban.... Howard said
hardliners like Richard Perle were backing Chechnya as they 'understood what it feels like
to be under the Russian yolk'. Some critics believe the support for the Chechens may be a
cold war hangover or part of a policy to keep Russia weak through bloodletting in the
Caucuses.... According to Howard, due to the vast energy resources in the Caucuses, the
West, which is heavily dependent on foreign energy, has strategic interests in the area to
which it cannot afford to turn a blind eye." CONFLICT-CAUCASUS: Petrodollars Behind the Chechen Tragedy Inter Press Service - 7 Dec 1999 "Forget the war on terrorism. The United States is once again supporting the drug dealers, gangsters and warlord fundamentalists. The other day a State Dept. official met Chechnya’s self-declared foreign minister, Ilyas Akhmadov. The Russians were dismayed. Having thrown their lot in with the supposed common struggle against terrorism, they find the Americans giving support to terrorists. Last month, after a post-Sept. 11 lull, the U.S. stepped up its criticism of human rights abuses in Chechnya. The Russians professed to be 'amazed' that the United States, as Agence France Presse reported, would meet with Chechens, 'whose direct links with Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda are being proven with constantly emerging, irrefutable evidence' ... Chechnya has always been seen here as a rerun of Kosovo, which itself was a rerun of Afghanistan.... Consider Kosovo: The U.S. is currently brokering a deal on the distribution of power. Leaders of the three leading Kosovo Albanian parties recently met the head of the U.S. office in Pristina, John Menzies, and it was proposed that the job of prime minister should go to Hashim Thaci’s Democratic Party of Kosovo (DPK). Thaci is the leader of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). Its links to Islamic terrorism and bin Laden have been amply documented.... The KLA-NLA terrorists are funded by U.S. military aid, the UN peacekeeping budget, Al Qaeda and by drug trafficking and prostitution. If everything goes according to plan, their leader is about to be appointed prime minister thanks to U.S. efforts. O what a lovely war! Now on to Central Asia..... Washington now has 13 bases in nine countries ringing Afghanistan and in the Gulf..... Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz says the bases will serve to facilitate cooperation and training with the local military. In other words, the U.S. will, as in the Balkans, play the Islamists and anti-Islamists off against each other and reduce the countries to abject dependence. If the fates of Kosovo and Macedonia are anything to go by, the Soviet Union era will soon seem like a glorious one. " TAKI'S TOP DRAWER New York Press, 6 February 2002 "From the start of the Beslan hostage
crisis, President Putin drew clear parallels with 9/11. He asked the United Nations
Security Council to condemn the siege under Resolution 1373, which Washington pushed
through on September 28, 2001.... Sergei Lavrov, his Foreign Minister, asked Britain and
the US to extradite prominent Chechen separatists. Driving the point home, Mr Lavrov even
met Rudolph Giuliani, who was Mayor of New York in September 2001. But, say analysts, the
parallels end there.... The Kremlin accuses Britain and the US of double standards
for granting political asylum to Chechen rebel representatives and advocating negotiations
with moderate separatist leaders. Several hundred people joined a rally outside the
British Embassy yesterday demanding that Britain extradite the rebel representative Akhmed
Zakayev, who was granted asylum last year. 'Blair, prove that you are against terrorism!
Extradite Zakayev!' read one banner. Another rally was held at the US Embassy to demand
the extradition of the Chechen separatist, Ilyas Akhmadov." Geopolitical
Chess "U.S.
post-Cold War era foreign policy has designated Central Asia and the Caucasus as a
'strategic area.' Yet this policy no longer consists of containing the 'spread of
communism', but rather in preventing Russia and China from becoming competing capitalist
powers . In this regard, the U.S. has increased its military presence along the entire
40th parallel, extending from Bosnia and Kosovo to the former Soviet republics of Georgia,
Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, all of which have entered into bilateral military
agreements with Washington. The 1999 war in Yugoslavia and the subsequent outbreak of war
in Chechnya in September 1999 was a crucial turning point in Russian-American relations.
It also marked a rapprochement between Moscow and Beijing, and the signing of several
military cooperation agreements between Russia and China. U.S. covert support to the two
main Chechen rebel groups (through Pakistan’s ISI) was known to the Russian
government and military. (For further details, see Chapter II.) However, it had previously
never been made public or raised at the diplomatic level. In November 1999, the Russian
Defence Minister, Igor
Sergueyev, formally accused Washington of supporting the Chechen rebels. Following a meeting held behind closed
doors with Russia’s military high command, Sergueyev declared that: 'The national
interests of the United States require that the military conflict in the Caucasus
[Chechnya] be a fire, provoked as a result of outside forces', while adding that 'the
West’s policy constitutes a challenge launched to Russia with the ultimate aim of
weakening her international position and of excluding her from geo-strategic areas'. In the wake of the 1999 Chechen war, a new 'National Security
Doctrine' was formulated and signed into law by Acting President Vladimir Putin, in early
2000. Barely acknowledged by the international media, a critical shift in East-West
relations had occurred. The document reasserted the building of a strong Russian State,
the concurrent growth of the Military, as well as the reintroduction of State controls
over foreign capital. The document carefully spelled out what it described as '
fundamental threats' to Russia’s national security and sovereignty. More
specifically, it referred to 'the strengthening of military-political blocs and alliances'
[namely GUUAM], as well as to 'NATO’s eastward expansion' while underscoring 'the
possible emergence of foreign military bases and major military presences in the immediate
proximity of Russian borders.' The document confirms that 'international terrorism is
waging an open campaign to destabilize Russia.' While not referring explicitly to CIA
covert activities in support of armed terrorist groups, such as the Chechen rebels, it
nonetheless calls for appropriate 'actions to avert and intercept intelligence and
subversive activities by foreign states against the Russian Federation.' The cornerstone
of U.S. foreign policy has been to encourage — under the disguise of 'peace-keeping'
and so-called 'conflict resolution' — the formation of small pro-U.S. States which
lie strategically at the hub of the Caspian Sea basin, which contains vast oil and gas
reserves...." "Like most controversial
figures, there are a number of widely different assessments of this Chechen leader. For
many Russians, he embodies the ruthless, criminal characteristics of a terrorist. His name
became well known during the bloody events in June 1995, when Basayev and a handful of
Chechen combatants, held some 1,500 Russian civilians hostage within the Budennovsk city
hospital. Among his countrymen, however, Basayev is a great hero.... Basayev and a handful
of accomplices hijacked a passenger plane in the nearby town of Mineralnye Vody, demanding
that the Russians lift the state of emergency or the plane would be blown up..... For
the next 2 years, Basayev gained considerable combat experience. Wherever fighting
occurred within the Caucasus, Basayev was there. Fighting alongside the Azerbaijanis in
Nagorno-Karabakh or conducting combat operations against the Georgians in Abkhazia,
Shamil Basayev became more and more adept at the use of force. In addition to this combat
experience, he traveled to Afghanistan and Pakistan for guerrilla training from the
Mujahadin. While fighting in Abkhazia, Russian military specialists (who were secretly
assisting the Abkhaz separatists) shared their knowledge with Basayev. This
experience would not go to waste..... the US must be wary with whom it shares its military
skills and secrets. Basayev well illustrates the problems that can develop when legitimate
governments elect to provide military training and equipment to dubious allies. Today's
freedom fighter might be transformed into tomorrow's terrorist..... the methods Basayev
has employed are cruel and vicious, and have often been in violation of recognised laws of
warfare. At the same time, however, his actions, when cast in the light of Chechen
independence, are courageous and praiseworthy." "Russia's main pipeline route transits
through Chechnya and Dagestan. Despite Washington's perfunctory condemnation of Islamic
terrorism, the indirect beneficiaries of the Chechen war are the Anglo-American oil
conglomerates which are vying for control over oil resources and pipeline corridors out of
the Caspian Sea basin. The two main Chechen rebel armies (respectively led by Commander
Shamil Basayev and Emir Khattab) estimated at 35,000 strong were supported by Pakistan's
ISI, which also played a key role in organizing and training the Chechen rebel
army......Following his training and indoctrination stint, Basayev was assigned to lead
the assault against Russian federal troops in the first Chechen war in 1995. His
organization had also developed extensive links to criminal syndicates in Moscow as well
as ties to Albanian organized crime and the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). In 1997-98,
according to Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) 'Chechen warlords started buying up
real estate in Kosovo... through several real estate firms registered as a cover in
Yugoslavia'.Basayev's organisation has also been involved in a number of rackets including
narcotics, illegal tapping and sabotage of Russia's oil pipelines, kidnapping,
prostitution, trade in counterfeit dollars and the smuggling of nuclear materials..." "Putin, who has been angered by U.S.
and European denunciations of the Ukraine election as rigged unacceptable, began a three-day visit to India with
continued criticism of Washington, saying it seeks a 'dictatorship of international
affairs.'.... in an interview in a Hindu newspaper, Putin said the United
States and European nations practiced double standards by allowing into their countries
some Chechen rebels whom Moscow considers to be terrorists. Britain has granted refugee
status to Akhmed Zakayev, an envoy for rebel leader and former Chechen President Aslan
Maskhadov. lyas Akhmadov, a former Chechen foreign minister, has been granted U.S. asylum.
'We cannot have double standards while fighting terrorism and it cannot be used as an
instrument of a geopolitical game,' Putin said at a public lecture." Putin Knows How Effectively The White House
Has Used The Terrorism Card To Promote Empire "Chechnya had declared its
independence during the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, but Russia refused to
recognize it. Fearing independence would spark separatist
movements throughout the region, the Kremlin was obsessed with keeping Chechnya in the
federation.... for President Vladimir Putin and his supporters, the only solution is
to stay the course. They insist that that any negotiations, any withdrawal of Russian
troops, would be a capitulation to terrorism.... The normally unflappable Putin reacts
angrily to suggestions that Moscow should hold talks with rebels. 'Why don't you meet
Osama bin Laden, invite him to Brussels or to the White House, engage in talks, ask him
what he wants, and give it to him so he leaves you in peace?' he told Western journalists
and scholars shortly after Beslan."
Replacing Their Oligarchs With Ours "Yesterday’s crowds in Kiev
appeared on the brink of a remarkable triumph in their week-long revolt against the
Ukrainian election result. A U-turn by the outgoing President, Leonid Kuchma, and a
hearing of the supreme court seemed to presage new elections, or at least the engineered
coronation of the opposition leader, Viktor Yushchenko. The world’s media has
supported this revolt to the hilt. Front pages are adorned with pictures of pretty girls
inserting flowers in police shields and dancing to rap music..... This week America’s
Colin Powell added his weight to Mr Yushchenko’s cause and demanded that the country
not split in two..... We are obsessed with ordering the world to our will — and
complaining bitterly when it declines to be so odered. Mr Yushchenko may be 'our sort' of
oligarch, as opposed to Russia’s. His victory is probably in Europe’s interest,
though not if Ukraine’s
wealth, mostly in the east, goes to Russia. But even if justice is on Mr Yushchenko’s
side, by its vociferous partisanship the West plays a dangerous game. It may drive eastern
Ukraine into separation,
dismembering a potential buffer state on the borders of Russia. And all this assumes that
Mr Putin will eat humble pie with good humour. Will we then encourage partition in
Chechnya?" "... 300 out of the 450 Ukrainian MPs
are dollar millionaires, and we'll hear more about Yushchenko's other wealthy backers
later on... both the present election candidates have much in common. At the beginning of
the campaign one businessman in Kiev compared the Yushchenko and Yanukovich teams to the
difference between Coca Cola and Pepsi. After all both men have served as Kuchma's prime
minister. During his time Yushchenko, a former central bank chairman, pushed for
market reforms and greater financial transparency. That doesn't mean to say he was a great
champion of democracy..... His right hand woman, once his deputy prime minister, has also
been busy reinventing herself as a new Joan of Arc. The most radical voice of the last
fortnight belongs to Julia Timoshenko a former brunette, who now wears blond plaits around her head like a
young Carpathian folk dancer. This demure peasant look hides a woman once know as
Ukraine's iron lady, a ruthless operator in the gas supply market who succeeded in turning
her government connections into enormous personal
wealth...."
"Considering the bad
payment behaviour of Ukrainian gas consumers, which led to arrears for gas deliveries
estimated at about $ 1 bn as of the end of 1999, the country's domestic gas market does
not look very attractive for private businesses. Nevertheless, private gas importers were
able to make immense profits by simply paying even less to gas producers in Russia and
Turkmenistan than they received from their Ukrainian clients. However, they could realise
these profits only with the help of state support. The government had to grant them an
import quota and assign them to relatively solvent customers. In addition the state had to
ensure that gas producers -- first of all, Russia's Gazprom -- could not collect their
debts from Ukrainian importers. The result of this situation was that a network of
corruption was established between state officials and gas traders. The amount of money
involved has been highlighted by the Lazarenko affair. According to a report by the
Financial Times, Pavlo Lazarenko, who was Ukraine's prime minister in 1996-97, received at
least $ 72 mm in bribe money from gas importer UESU. In return, Lazarenko helped UESU to
become one of Ukraine's leading companies with an annual turnover of $ 10 bn. When
Lazarenko was sacked as prime minister, his successor Valery Pustovoitenko started a
comprehensive investigation into the business of UESU, which led to the first accusations.
In December of 1998, Lazarenko was arrested in Switzerland on charges of money laundering.
He fled to the United States, where he was again arrested and charged with the laundering
of $ 114 mm received as bribe money during his time in office. This June, while still
being held in the United States, Lazarenko was sentenced for money laundering in
Switzerland. Yuliya Tymoshenko,
who was president of UESU when Lazarenko was prime minister, has so far avoided criminal
prosecution. In 1997, she left the company and went into politics. In December of 1999,
she became a deputy prime minister with special responsibility for energy matters. Her
husband, who still is a member of the board of UESU, was arrested last month on charges of
embezzlement of state property." "Tymoshenko's peasant look is somewhat misleading. She is in fact a very wealthy woman,
who gained her fortune in highly debated circumstances before entering politics. She made
the transition from a member of Ukraine's disliked new moneyed elite to a skilled marshal
of the anger of the public square three years ago, when she mounted an energetic, if
ultimately unsuccessful, campaign to topple the increasingly loathed president, Leonid
Kuchma. Her original entry into politics came earlier, in the mid-1990s; but her Hromada
party was seen then as only one of a rash of factions cynically created by the new tycoons
to advance their business interests..... According to Matthew Brzezinski's 2001 book
Casino Moscow, which devotes a chapter to Tymoshenko entitled The Eleven Billion Dollar
Woman, she was guarded by an entire platoon of ex-Soviet special forces bodyguards. She
once sent a plane to collect Brzezinski from Moscow, fly him to Dnipropetrovsk to meet her
for lunch, and drop him off back at Moscow in the evening. When Brzezinski said he didn't
want to tie up the company plane, Tymoshenko said: 'Don't worry. I have four of them.'
According to Brzezinski, as a result of Lazarenko's patronage, 'Tymoshenko gained control
over nearly 20% of Ukraine's gross national product, an enviable position that probably no
other private company in the world could boast.' Her rapid rise, and her friendship with
Lazarenko, would later return to haunt her. Lazarenko fell from favour, was sacked amid
accusations of corruption in 1997, and fled Ukraine. In June this year, he was convicted
of money-laundering and extortion in California. At first, Tymoshenko was able to distance
herself from the scandal - in the short-lived premiership of Yushchenko, she became deputy
prime minister - but as her relationship with Kuchma cooled, she became drawn into the
scandal. She was accused of having given Lazarenko kickbacks in exchange for her company's
stranglehold on the country's gas supplies. It is an accusation she has always denied,
although Brzezinski maintains it is true. 'The US government has evidence of wire
transfers from her to Lazarenko personally while he was PM,' he told me yesterday [which if true means that she is potentially open to blackmail by the US
government once in power with Yuschencko, 'Fight Smart']." "Western
interests in Ukraine’s geopolitical orientation is largely bound up – as it is
in many post-Soviet states – with energy. Ukraine’s regional electricity network
(Oblenergo) was privatised under the government of Viktor Yushchenko in fulfilment of a
Western condition for the granting of credits to open the Rivne Nuclear Power Station. The
West evidently wanted to neutralise the potential revenue that such greatly increased
energy producing capacity would bring to Ukraine by raising domestic tariffs on
electricity. Ukraine serves as a major transit corridor for Russian natural gas, and
several 'entrepreneurs' set up private gas 'marketing' companies in Ukraine during the
1990s to take gas from the Russian pipeline and re-sell it at inflated prices to
consumers, both industrial and domestic. Among these companies was Unified Energy Systems
of Ukraine (UESU) headed by Yulia Timoshenko, who reaped massive profits from the resale
of gas - in Ukraine and abroad – under the protection of prime minister Pavel
Lazarenko from 1996-97. Mrs. Timoshenko’s company more than doubled the price of gas
not only for the biggest industrial consumers in Ukraine, but also for domestic consumers. Some observers suspect the West would like to see Mrs. Timoshenko return to political office to make sure Ukrainian gas
prices remain high and cannot undercut Western producers. During her brief spell in the
Yushchenko government Timoshenko set about doing that. She was sacked, indicted and jailed
for several weeks in 2001 on charges of money laundering. Mr. Lazarenko has been in prison
in the U.S. on charges of money laundering since fleeing Ukraine in 1997 and is still
wanted in Ukraine for a variety of crimes. He is also accused of ordering the murders of
several Ukrainian politicians. Mrs. Timoshenko’s past association with Lazarenko
never seemed to taint her election campaign in the eyes of the West.... Rumours of Western
involvement in the election process were rife in Kiev in the months leading up to the
election. In January 2002, the Communist Party leader Pyotr Simonenko, called for the
director of the Central Election Commission, Mykhaylo Ryabets to resign, after he had
signed an accord with the US ambassador to Ukraine over US funding to the Central Election
Commission. In December the US Congress had approved a large donation for 'democratic
reform' in Ukraine. Shortly before the election, a documentary called 'PR' appeared on
Ukraine’s ICTV channel about Gongadze and the 'Ukraine Without Kuchma' movement.
Produced by former Financial Times journalist Charles Clover, in conjunction with others,
the film repeated the rumour that 'Ukraine Without Kuchma' had received financing from the
United States through the US Embassy and various American NGOs. 'PR' said that 'secret
informers' had brought tape recordings to Kiev of Kuchma's conversations with senior staff
members, and had offered them to both the US media watchdog, Freedom House and Communist
Party of Ukraine (KPU) leader Pyotr Simonenko. The KPU refused to accept the cassettes,
but the Socialist Party leader, Alexander Moroz, took the tapes and publicised them. It is
difficult to know what to make of the 'PR' film. Much of it seems sensationalist, since
Gongadze (and Ukrainskaya Pravda) were unknown to probably 99% of Ukrainians before the
scandal broke. But a few sympathisers of the Yushchenko-Timoshenko-Moroz opposition forces
did appear indignant to BHHRG over the 'PR' allegations that 'Ukraine Without Kuchma' had
received foreign financial assistance for the purpose of staging demonstrations. BHHRG met
with 'Ukraine Without Kuchma' organiser Vladimir Chemeris, head of Ukrainian NGO the
'Respublika' Institute and a majoritarian candidate for the Verkhovna Rada. Chemeris (who
appeared in the film) claimed the producers had manipulated his interview to make it look
as though he had received US funding to help organise ant-Kuchma demonstrations. He did,
however, show BHHRG copies of documents confirming the receipt of funds from both the
Soros Foundation and Freedom House after the demonstrations had died down." "There are more than 10 million
Russian-speaking Ukrainians here in an industrial belt that produces 80% of the country's
national income. The exports from the Donbass coal mines, steel mills and factories go
northward and eastward, not westward. These 10 million Ukrainians may be just as fed up as
Kiev and Lviv are with the post-Soviet oligarchs and with the corrupt semi-authoritarian
regime of Leonid Kuchma, the outgoing president. They may have groaned at Putin's
cack-handed appearances on the campaign trail and the blatant attempts to fix the vote for
Yanukovich in the east (as also certainly happened in the
west for Yushchenko). But are 10 million people who did not
vote Yushchenko all to be dismissed as latterday Soviet clones? Do they only jerk into
life when Putin and the revamped KGB press the remote control? What do they want? How do
they think they are going to get it? Virtually no one has bothered to find out. The entire
western media coverage of the Ukrainian upheaval has been limited to Kiev. There have been
few if any camera crews in the cities of Kharkov, Donetsk, Dnepropetrovsk. These are
streets through which western champions of the well-funded
orange revolution should walk before declaring Yushchenko and
his friends tribunes of freedom." "The former prime minister of Ukraine who now leads the Our Ukraine forces in the Verkhovna Rada, Viktor
Yushchenko, spent three days here seeking U.S. support for strengthening democracy in Ukraine and keeping Washington engaged in his
country despite the recently deteriorating official relationship...... Mr. Yushchenko
began his meetings with senior administration officials on February 5 with Vice-President Richard Cheney and concluded
them on February 7 with Deputy Secretary of State Richard
Armitage..... One of the most serious unresolved bilateral issues between Washington
and Kyiv in recent months was the allegation that President Leonid Kuchma approved the
sale of the Kolchuha air-defense system to Iraq...... Their tight schedule also included
meetings with members of the U.S. Congress - Sens. John McCain, Charles Hagel and Carl
Levin, and members of the Congressional Ukrainian Caucus - with former Secretary of State
Madeleine K. Albright; two former U.S. ambassadors to Ukraine, Steven Pifer, who now serves as deputy assistant secretary of state for
European and Eurasian affairs, and his predecessor, William Green Miller; as well as with
Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was national security advisor to President Jimmy Carter..... The
visiting Our Ukraine deputies
were the guests of honor at two evening receptions. One was hosted by three organizations
involved in democracy-building efforts in Ukraine - the National Endowment for Democracy, the National Democratic Institute
and the International Republican Institute, which assisted in setting up the group's Washington visit
schedule." "In early 2004, chaos overwhelmed
Haiti. In January, a rebellion erupted against President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the
former slum priest who had frequently angered the United States with his leftist rhetoric.
Aristide had twice been elected, but he had alienated many Haitians with his increasing
demagoguery and use of violence against the opposition. Yet polls showed that Aristide
remained relatively popular, so even experienced Haiti watchers were surprised when, in
late February, armed militias marched on the nation’s capital while demonstrators
shut down the streets. In the violence, some 100 Haitians were killed. At dawn on February
29, with the militias closing in, Aristide left Haiti on a U.S. government plane. But did
the rebellion really spring from nowhere? Maybe not. Several leaders of the demonstrations
-- some of whom also had links to the armed rebels -- had been getting organizational help
and training from a U.S. government-financed organization. The group, the International Republican Institute (IRI), is
supposed to focus on nonpartisan, grassroots democratization efforts overseas. But in
Haiti and other countries, such as Venezuela and Cambodia, the institute -- which, though
not formally affiliated with the GOP, is run by prominent Republicans and staffed by party
insiders -- has increasingly sided with groups seeking the overthrow of elected but flawed
leaders who are disliked in Washington. In 2002 and 2003, IRI used funding from the U.S.
Agency for International Development (USAID) to organize numerous political training
sessions in the Dominican Republic and Miami for some 600 Haitian leaders. Though
IRI’s work is supposed to be nonpartisan -- it is official U.S. policy not to
interfere in foreign elections -- a former U.S. diplomat says organizers of the workshops
selected only opponents of Aristide and attempted to mold them into a political force. The
trainings were run by IRI’s Haiti program officer, Stanley Lucas, the scion of a
powerful Haitian family with long-standing animosity toward Aristide -- Amnesty
International says some family members participated in a 1987 peasant massacre....
According to an internal report by the USAID inspector general obtained by Mother Jones,
in July 2002 the U.S. Embassy in Haiti protested that IRI’s actions were undermining
the official U.S. policy of working with all sides in Haiti and that Lucas was spreading
unsubstantiated rumors about the U.S. ambassador. In response, USAID barred Lucas from
running the IRI program for 120 days. Lucas, according to several observers, threatened to
use Bush administration connections to have embassy officials fired. He continued to
essentially run the IRI Haiti program while serving as a 'translator,' in what IRI
officials acknowledged was a violation of USAID’s ban, according to the inspector
general’s report. In 2004, several of the people who had attended IRI trainings were
influential in the toppling of Aristide. Among them, according to Kim Ives, a journalist
with the newspaper Haiti Progres, was André Apaid, a conservative Haitian politician who
had backed a previous anti-Aristide coup in 1991. Apaid became one of the leaders of the
Group of 184, which organized the street demonstrations against Aristide. When the
uprising against Aristide began in late 2003, the White House did little to stop it. In
February 2004, as the militias were marching on Port-au-Prince, President Bush issued a
statement blaming Aristide for the violence. In late February, the administration urged
Aristide to leave Haiti, and on February 29 he was flown into exile in the Central African
Republic on a U.S. plane dispatched by the Pentagon. Today, conservative politicians and
the military are reinstalling themselves in power, Haiti experts report; the
country’s infamous intelligence services are being re-created, and violence against
Aristide supporters is commonplace. Haiti is not unique. In Venezuela, Cambodia, and other
nations, IRI—unlike other government-funded democratization groups—has
increasingly focused on training opposition parties intent on toppling elected
governments. The institute is one of several democracy-promotion groups financed by USAID
and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).... IRI’s Latin America
program was led by Georges Fauriol...... has been Bush’s closest adviser on Latin
America policy. Reich, who according to Congress’ Government Accountability Office
conducted 'prohibited covert propaganda' on behalf of the Nicaraguan Contras in the
1980s..... At the time, all the major U.S. democracy-promotion groups were active in
Venezuela, including both IRI and NDI. But documents obtained through the Freedom of
Information Act show that while NDI worked with parties across the political spectrum, IRI
staffers spent much of their time cultivating the opposition.....And despite a warning
from the National Endowment for Democracy not to take sides in Venezuela, IRI also used
its own money to bring opposition figures to Washington, where they met with top U.S.
officials.... In April 2002, a group of military officers launched a coup against Chavez,
and leaders of several parties trained by IRI joined the junta. When news of the coup
emerged, democracy-promotion groups in Venezuela were holding a meeting to discuss ways of
working together to avoid political violence; IRI representatives didn’t attend,
saying that they were drafting a statement on Chavez’s overthrow..... Yet
IRI’s singular focus on groups seeking to overthrow leaders seen as hostile to the
United States can sometimes harm American diplomatic efforts. In Cambodia, notes one
official with considerable experience in the country, 'it hurt the U.S. government’s
credibility as an honest broker in the election processes.' In Haiti, IRI has had a
similar impact, experts say, by unbalancing an already volatile situation and causing
people to wonder what the United States’ true agenda was. In 2003, after being
threatened by IRI’s Stanley Lucas, the departing U.S. ambassador, Brian Dean Curran,
gave a farewell speech to the Haitian chamber of commerce. 'There are many in Haiti who
prefer not to listen to me,' he said, 'but to their own friends in Washington—the
sirens of extremism.' Then he added, using the Haitian word for 'thugs': 'I call them the
chimères of Washington.'” "Arriving with Mr. Yushchenko for the
three days of talks in Washington were three of his Our Ukraine colleagues in the Verkhovna Rada: Roman Bezsmertnyi, Yevhen Chervonenko
and Oleh Rybachuk. The International Republican Institute, a non-governmental organization whose goal is to foster the growth of
democratic institutions worldwide, facilitated their visit scheduling." Click here for the full text of Vice President Richard B. Cheney's speech after he was presented with the International Republican Institute's 2001 Freedom Award (Washington Post) "The soft-spoken Yushchenko is very
much an International Monetary Fund kind of man, committed to liberalizing the state-run
economy. The fact that his wife is American has even led his enemies to accuse him of
being a Western agent.... " "Yet, even for many Ukrainians, Mr.
Yushchenko himself remains something of an unknown quantity. His supporters may call him
'the Messiah', but his background and nature are more that of a moneychanger than a
charismatic radical...... His wife Kateryna Chumachenko, with whom he has three children,
has also been dragged into the fray. A US citizen of Ukrainian descent, she worked in the White House during the Reagan presidency, a fact that deeply irks Mr. Yushchenko's political rivals. Although he
is portrayed as the people's president, Mr. Yushchenko has powerful wealthy friends. One
close associate is Petro Poroshenko, the owner of car and confectionery factories and a
shipbuilding yard. Other supporters include David Zhvania, a Georgian businessman, and
Wolodymyr Martynenko, an oil and gas magnate who is one of Ukraine's 10 richest people. " "According to the U.S. government, and
commentators on the left as well as the (neoconservative)
right, the crisis in the Ukraine is a clear-cut case of 'democracy' versus
authoritarianism, 'the people' versus 'the oligarchs,' and the forces of enlightened
Europhilia up against the sinister specter of a resurgent Russia and a revivified KGB. The
only problem with this narrative is that it is unmitigated bunk. Let's start with the
central figures in this drama: the two Viktors – Yushchenko and Yanukovich. To begin with, you'll note that the
former has a website in English, while the latter's site is only in the native Ukrainian
and Russian. Yushchenko's audience is primarily the West, while Yanukovich is speaking to
his own people. Right off the bat, the line of demarcation is drawn..... Yushchenko was a
key figure in a conspiracy to defraud the West of over $600 million. The idea that
Yushchenko is some kind of outsider, whose victory will cause the fresh winds of
free-market reform to blow through the sealed chamber of corruption that is the Ukrainian
economy is another Western fairy tale that has no basis in reality. Yushie is a key figure
in the oligarchic system of 'crony capitalism' that has enriched the few at the expense of
the many since the fall of the USSR. Yushchenko is a creature of this system, and his
tenure at the National Bank of the Ukraine was marked by the corruption so characteristic
of the political culture: a scandal involving falsification of the country's credit ledger
– essentially lying to the International Monetary Fund about the quantity of
Ukrainian cash reserves..... Ms. Timoshenko went on to become a deputy prime minister, in
1999, with special authority over energy matters. Her husband, still a member of the board
of UESU, was arrested on charges of embezzlement of state property. Ms. Timoshenko, too,
was arrested, and –
after much posing and posturing as a 'political prisoner' – was freed. It is entirely
appropriate that the 'gas
princess,' as Ms. Timoshenko is known, should become the La Passionaria of Ukraine's
phony 'velvet revolution.'... The Lazarenko-Timoshenko wing of the oligarchy is naturally
grateful to Yushie – after all, he fronted for them in bilking the IMF. Now they are
paying him back with their fulsome support. This isn't the struggle of valiant pro-Western
'democrats' versus sinister pro-Russian neo-communists: Timoshenko's histrionics represent
a falling out among thieves. In any case, from the Gas Princess to the Boadicea of the 'democracy'
movement in Ukraine is a fanciful transformation, at best, but Western propagandists are
counting on the American public's ignorance of the Ukrainian scene to pull off one of the
biggest frauds since the selling
of convicted embezzler Ahmed Chalabi as the Iraqi George Washington. Few remember now
that one of the alleged economic benefits of the
'cakewalk' war was supposed to have been a huge
drop in the price of oil: Iraq would be pumping as much and as fast as required by
Washington, and the profits were going to finance the reconstruction. Well, that didn't
exactly work out, now did it? So our grand strategists in Washington have turned to the
legendary Caspian
'Silk Road' to oil riches,
reviving the dream of a Trans-Caucasian oil pipeline that will fill the gas tanks of
Europe, bring down prices rapidly – and hand over control of much of the world's
hydrocarbons to U.S. corporate interests and their allies. Forget all this melodramatic
folderol about Ukraine's 'orange
revolution' – and follow the money....
The mythologizing of the Ukrainian 'democratic' opposition serves certain Western economic
interests, as
John Laughland has pointed out: 'Efforts are being
redoubled to crank into action the various pipelines which are supposed to transport
Caspian oil to Western markets. One of these is the Brody pipeline which runs between the
Ukrainian town of that name and the Black Sea port of Odessa (a Russian city but also in
Ukraine). The Brody pipeline was initially supposed to take US-controlled Caspian oil to
Western markets, but it has instead been pumping Russia oil, something the Americans do
not like. So the New World Order strategists are determined to put their man in control of
Ukraine, at the presidential election on 31st October. Huge influence, and presumably
money, is being pumped in to ensure a victory for Victor Yushchenko.'.........The
bottom line is that our oligarchs have allied with a faction of Ukrainian
oligarchs..... The Yushchenko-Timoshenko forces want to align with Georgia, Uzbekistan,
Azerbaijan, and Moldova (the other nations in the GUUAM
configuration of junior league NATO aspirants) in erecting a ring of iron around Putin and
the former Soviet Union. U.S. troops are already in Georgia, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan. How
long before they are in Kiev, training 'President' Yushchenko's NATO-ized military in the
use of American equipment – and advising a spiffed-up Ukrainian military within
striking distance of the Kremlin?...... " "To be sure, Ukraine's return to Russia's embrace won't be alarming to those
in the Bush administration -- and there do seem to be a few around -- who see President
Putin as a force for good. But for those with a few doubts about the purity of the KGB
careerist's soul, here is a short list of how Ukraine's
lockstep with Russia, precipitated by a stolen election this Sunday, might harm U.S.
interests on the Eurasian land mass ....... Russia will have trumped an energy strategy in which U.S.-financed Caspian
oil was to have flowed through Ukraine to Poland and Western Europe. If the ruling party holds on to power in Ukraine, a new cross-Ukraine
pipeline designed to feed U.S.-financed, Kazakhstani
oil from the Black Sea north to European markets will likely see a peculiar reversal
of roles. It's likely the
Odessa-Brody pipeline would literally reverse its flow and instead be used to ship Russian
oil south through the Mediterranean, strengthening Russia's export position, undermining
U.S. energy and investment interests in Kazakhstan, and preventing any European
diversification away from Russian energy." "The current hot spots for major oil companies are the oil reserves in the
Caspian Sea region. Former Soviet states Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan all are
seeking to quickly develop their oil reserves, which languished during the years of
Russian domination, says Halliburton Co. Chief Executive Officer Dick Cheney. Cheney was in Amarillo
during May for the Panhandle Producers and Royalty Owners Association annual meeting.....The potential for this region turning as volatile as the Persian Gulf does
not concern Cheney. 'You've got to go where the oil is,' he said. 'I don't worry about it
a lot.' Cheney's ties to the region grow out of his international connections when he was
part of first the President Ford administration, then the Reagan administration and his
term as secretary of defense under President Bush. Now he is
on the 12-member Kazakhstan Oil Advisory Board.... Various
forecasts indicate that the growth in petroleum demand will average about 2 percent a
year, while the depletion of oil reserves is averaging about 3 percent a year, he said.
That means within the next 12 years the oil industry will need to produce 48 million
barrels of oil per day more than the current amount of about 73 million to 74 million
barrels per day, Cheney said." "James Giffen, an independent banker
described by former CIA agent Robert Baer in his book 'See No Evil' as 'Mr Kazakhstan,'
features prominently in investigations that Mobil violated the US trade embargo. Baer says
Giffen was the de facto US ambassador to Kazakhstan, and that he arranged high-ranking
meetings, fixed deals, and got chunky commissions. In April 2003, a grand jury in New York
issued indictments against Giffen and Bryan Williams, senior executive in charge of
Mobil's overseas crude transactions. All the accused deny any wrongdoing. The ties between
big oil and political power also get too close for comfort. Nowhere are they closer than
in the US. During the period in which the bribery and the illegal oils swaps took place in
Kazakhstan, Vice President Dick Cheney was president of Halliburton. Halliburton, the world's biggest provider
of oil services, is involved with ExxonMobil and BP in Kazakhstan." "Federal prosecutors have said that
President Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan accepted large bribes in connection with dispensing his country's oil
concessions during the 1990's, and later tried to obstruct the federal inquiry into the
payments, which came from American oil companies, according to legal documents. The
allegations were made by the [US] Justice Department in a sealed motion and described
recently in a letter of complaint from Kazakhstan's lawyers to the deputy attorney
general. The letter was part of a quiet effort to exempt Mr. Nazarbayev from
prosecution.... Kazakhstan is a crucial part of the administration's strategy to reduce
dependence on Persian Gulf oil and to stem Islamic militancy in Central Asia. But the
corruption inquiry and its fallout illustrate the diplomatic and economic difficulties
that can arise in a quest for energy security." "Here we are
in an election year and Mr. Dick [Cheney] is our Republican nominee for vice president. He
used to sit on the Oil Advisory Board of Kazakhstan and out of that nation has surfaced
quite a scandal and our Major Media just cannot seem to get around to telling us 'mushroom
Americans' about it. Mobil Oil (now ExxonMobil), Texaco, (now Chevron / Condoleezza [Rice]
/ Texaco), Amoco, (now BP Amoco) and Phillips Petroleum (from the same place former neocon
CIA Director James Woolsey is from), have all been implicated in a sweeping bribery
scandal in Kazakhstan, regarding oil and gas rights in that nation. Apparently those
bribes started during the period of time that Mr. Dick was sitting on that Kazakhstan Oil
Advisory Board, and that advisory board was deciding who was 'favored' to get those oil
and gas deals. I can smell this one all the way from Kazakhstan. A Mr. James H. Giffen has been
indicted in the U.S. District Court, Southern District (Manhattan) and is now facing a
64-count criminal indictment. He is a U.S. citizen and merchant banker and that our major
media has hushed up this story is something to behold. Darn, they went to Mr. Dick to keep
things quiet. Quote: 'Nazarbayev himself has gone personally to Vice President Dick
Cheney and other top U.S. officials to try to quash the investigation.'" "British Petroleum is the major
stakeholder in a consortium of oil companies funding another
multi-billion dollar Caspian Sea pipeline intended to link the region to the
Mediterranean. This pipeline is also strongly backed by the United States as part of a
strategy which Bush himself heralded the same month that Hunter left Downing St. On 28 November
he confirmed that the pipeline formed part of a system which 'advances
my Administration's National Energy Policy by developing a network of multiple Caspian
pipelines .... These projects will help diversify U.S. energy supply and enhance our
energy security, while supporting global economic growth.'.In preparation
for and following the invasion of Afghanistan the US has succeeded in establishing a
military presence in various neighbouring oil and gas rich former Soviet countries in the
Caspian Sea region reaching as far west as Georgia. As [Richard] Armitage told the Australian
Broadcasting Corporation 18
February '.......Central Asia now is a repository for a lot of oil. We have the
Caspian Sea, Kazakhstan, places of that nature. It seems to me that this is going to give
us many more choices and certainly lessen somewhat our dependency on the Persian Gulf for
oil but oil is a valuable commodity and any shortage anywhere affects all of us whether
you live in Brisbane or whether you live in Adelaide or whether you live in Washington DC
and it's going to be a factor for some time to come." Armitage's Caspian knowledge is
not second hand. In addition to his work for his own consultancy Armitage became a founding
Director of the US-Azerbaijan Chamber of Commerce in 1996 along with a formidable
phalanx of captains from the oil industry including Unocal President John Imle. At the
time the Chamber extended 'deep appreciation to the following companies which have
contributed to its establishment: Amoco, BP America, Chevron, Exxon, Mobil, Occidental,
Panalpina, and Unocal.' Not too many internet start up companies there. Other interesting
characters who have held positions with this innocuous-sounding oil industry funded
organisation include: James
Baker, Dick
Cheney, Henry
Kissinger, Brent
Scowcroft, John
Sununu, and Richard
Perle . That's quite a lot of Bush related heavyweight attention for a small country
that most people would not even be able to pin point on a map. As one commentator put it 'Azerbaijan
looks like [the] first big winner in [the] Caspian oil race. International consortium,
A.I.O.C., has started oil export on November 12, 1997, and [the] country's abundant
reserves could bring prosperity within a decade.' Unocal is one of 10 shareholders in the
AIOC (Azerbaijan International Operating Company) consortium with a 10.28-percent
interest. BP is the operator for both AIOC and the associated BTC pipeline project which
is planned to pass through Georgia
on the way to the Mediterranean.Addressing
a later Caspian Sea Senate hearing, and expressing concerns about the upholding of US sanctions against
Azerbaijan following the development of the Nagorno Karabakh conflict, the Chairman of the
Armenian Assembly of America could clearly see where all this was heading: 'The confusion
over what the U.S. government should be pursuing was initially caused by reports .......
about the Caspian's oil reserves constituting a strategic alternative to established
resources in the Persian Gulf and elsewhere.... U.S. political and economic interests can
end up paying a fairly high price for compromising American principles which value clean
government, fair play, and respect for human rights..... Local public resentment of U.S.
regional influence is likely to occur once governments realize that the U.S. government
officials they once trusted as impartial negotiators are now working for oil companies...
Imagine the reaction in the region when Ambassador Maresca upon leaving government service
went to work for one of the major oil companies [Unocal] lobbying Washington to ingratiate
itself with Azerbaijan.... upon leaving government service, the official responsible for
negotiating Section 907 language, Richard Armitage, joined many other Administration officials by enthusiastically lobbying
for repeal of Section 907. Instead of observing the law, prior and present Administrations
are working to circumvent it, while promising Azerbaijan that Congress would repeal it.'
That was in 1998, the year that Maresca himself gave evidence to the House of
Representatives on behalf of Unocal. His evidence concerned the need for a sympathetic
government in Kabul in order to proceed with the company's proposed trans-Afghan pipeline
for the transportation of Caspian region gas. At the time the proposals had hit the buffers
in negotiations with the Taliban. Now it's 2002 and things have moved on a little in the
Caspian 'great game'. Apart from continuing interest in Vice President Dick Cheney's former
position on the Kazakh
government’s oil advisory board - at a time when
bribes currently under investigation were alleged to have been paid by BP Amoco and
ExxonMobil - Afghanistan is now where much of the action is. Just as it seems to be in
the case of Armitage
himself, the interim leader of Afghanistan installed by the United States, Hamid Karzai,
is a former consultant to Unocal. Following the successful occupation of Afghanistan by US
forces and their allies, Karzai met with President Musharraf of Pakistan and the President
of Turkmenistan in Islamabad on
30 May. At the meeting a memorandum of understanding for the construction of the $2
billion trans-Afghan pipeline was finally signed. The pipeline will transport gas from
Turkmenistan through Afghanistan terminating at the Pakistani port of Gwadar on the
Arabian sea. According to the BBC 'The Pakistani leader said once the project is
completed, Central Asia's hydrocarbon resources would be available to the international
market'. By means of a spur extension across the Pakistani border the gas from the
pipeline had also previously been scheduled to service a giant energy plant in northern
India. It happened to be a plant owned by an American company who had donated up to $300,000 towards the
inauguration of President George W. Bush at the
beginning of 2001. That company is Enron." "Russia is not
now a superpower and is unlikely to regain such status in the foreseeable future.
Nevertheless, Russia remains a potential challenge to American national interests in the
twenty-first century though the nature of its challenge is changing....Russia’s
location, military power, natural and human resources, and technology could make it a key
player in a variety of potential ad hoc regional coalitions aimed at countering
America’s international leadership. It is an extremely important US interest to head
off such a result by discouraging Russia from seeking such a role.... A threat to their
[former Soviet states] independence could destabilize the situation in Europe,
damage US-Russian relations,and create the potential for subsequent serious conflict. Moreover, as essential choices such as
those surrounding pipeline routes from the Caspian Basin are made, it is important for the
US that they be taken without undue Russian pressure." US Election Interference For Oil "In the Ukraine, citizens are in the streets protesting what they charge is a fixed
election. Secretary of State Colin Powell expresses this nation's concern about apparent
voting irregularities. The media give the dispute around-the-clock coverage. But in the
United States, massive and systemic voter irregularities go unreported and unnoticed. Ohio
is this election year's Florida. The vote in Ohio decided the presidential race, but it
was marred by intolerable, and often partisan, irregularities and discrepancies. U.S.
citizens have as much reason as those in Kiev to be concerned that the fix was in....
Democracy should not be for export only. " Election Fraud 2004 'Democracy' And The Dirty Oil
Games GETTING
WESTERN PROXIES INTO POWER
MASSIVE
WESTERN FUNDING OF OPPOSITION GROUPS "The world’s media has supported
this revolt to the hilt. Front pages are adorned with pictures of pretty girls inserting
flowers in police shields and dancing to rap music..... Mr Yushchenko may be 'our sort' of
oligarch, as opposed to Russia’s..... But even if justice is on Mr Yushchenko’s
side, by its vociferous partisanship the West plays a dangerous game. It may drive eastern
Ukraine into separation,
dismembering a potential buffer state on the borders of Russia. And all this assumes that
Mr Putin will eat humble pie with good humour. Will we then encourage partition in
Chechnya?" "The [Ukrainian electoral] commission
said the bear-like Mr. Yanukovych had beaten the pro-Western Mr. Yushchenko by 2.85 per
cent and should therefore become Ukraine's next president, succeeding Leonid Kuchma, the pro-Russian incumbent who
handpicked his premier to take over his mantle months ago. Western election observers, the
United States, the EU and Yushchenko supporters cried foul immediately, saying the ballot
was a fix marred by irregularities and cheating.... Ukraine, a country bigger than France with a population of 47 million, is not the
Czech Republic. Its history of independence is sporadic and, crucially, it borders Russia and hosts that nation's warm-water fleet. Neither is it Romania. Leonid Kuchma, the man who has ruled the country
with a rod of steel for most of its post-Soviet period of independence, is no Nicolae
Ceausescu. He may stand accused of bribery, corruption, stifling authoritianism and
complicity in the murder of a critical journalist. But he is by no means a universal
figure of hatred; he commands serious respect among large swathes of the populace.... Ukraine is strategically and historically
sacred for the Kremlin. Regarded as the cradle of Slav culture, it spawned a medieval
empire from which Russia itself eventually emerged, and 13 years after the collapse of the
Soviet Union Ukraine remains
vitally important to Moscow. Its rolling steppe is criss-crossed with Russian gas pipelines and it is
geopolitically central to Kremlin attempts to reassert Russia's enfeebled grip over a
region it regards as its backyard, which it does not want to see absorbed into the EU and Nato..... Yet, even for many
Ukrainians, Mr. Yushchenko himself remains something of an unknown quantity. His
supporters may call him 'the Messiah', but his background and nature are more that of a
moneychanger than a charismatic radical...... His wife Kateryna Chumachenko, with whom he
has three children, has also been dragged into the fray. A US citizen of Ukrainian
descent, she worked in the White House during the Reagan
presidency, a fact that deeply irks Mr. Yushchenko's
political rivals. Although he is portrayed as the people's president, Mr. Yushchenko has
powerful wealthy friends. One close associate is Petro Poroshenko, the owner of car and
confectionery factories and a shipbuilding yard. Other supporters include David Zhvania, a
Georgian businessman, and Wolodymyr Martynenko, an oil and
gas magnate who is one of Ukraine's 10 richest people. " "Behind the
scenes, a Cold War-style battle for Ukraine
has been waged for some time. Western governments have poured money into pro-democracy
organisations that back the opposition leader, Viktor Yushchenko, while Kremlin
spin-doctors have directed the campaign of the Prime Minister, Viktor Yanukovych. The
ideological differences may not be as extreme as during the Cold War, but they have
intensified since President Putin began rolling back democracy in Russia. Now the West is
acknowledging the strategic importance and economic potential of this country sandwiched
between Russia and the expanded European Union..... [it] transports Russian gas to Western markets through its
pipelines. Over recent years
Mr Putin has looked on helplessly as the United States established military bases in Central Asia and conducted military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq.
In the past year alone, a pro-Western leader seized power in Georgia in the 'rose'
revolution, the EU expanded up to Russia’s western borders, and Nato planes were
stationed in Lithuania." "A few years
ago, a friend of mine was sent to Kiev by the British government to teach Ukrainians about
the Western democratic system. His pupils were young reformers from western Ukraine, affiliated to the Conservative party. When they produced a manifesto
containing 15 pages of impenetrable waffle, he gently suggested boiling their electoral
message down to one salient point. What was it, he wondered? A moment of furrowed brows
produced the lapidary and nonchalant reply, ‘To expel all Jews from our
country.’ It is in the west of Ukraine that support is strongest for the man who is being
vigorously promoted by America as the country’s next president: the former prime
minister Viktor Yushchenko. On a rainy Monday morning in Kiev, I met some young Yushchenko
supporters, druggy skinheads from Lvov. They belonged both to a Western-backed youth
organisation, Pora, and also to Ukrainian National Self-Defence (Unso), a
semi-paramilitary movement whose members enjoy posing for the cameras carrying rifles and
wearing fatigues and balaclava helmets. Were nutters like this to be politically active in
any country other than Ukraine or the Baltic states, there would be instant
outcry in the US and British media; but in former Soviet republics, such bogus nationalism
is considered anti-Russian and therefore democratic. It is because of this ideological
presupposition that Anglo-Saxon reporting on the Ukrainian elections has chimed in with
press releases from the State Department, peddling a fairytale about a struggle between a
brave and beleaguered democrat, Yushchenko, and an authoritarian Soviet nostalgic, the
present Prime Minister, Viktor Yanukovych. All facts which contradict this morality tale
are suppressed..... It has also been repeatedly alleged that foreign observers found
the elections fraught with violations committed by the government. In fact, this is
exclusively the view of highly politicised Western governmental organisations like the
OSCE — a body which is notorious for the fraudulent nature of its own reports, and
which in any case came to this conclusion before the poll had even taken place — and
of bogus NGOs, such as the Committee of Ukrainian Voters, a front organisation exclusively
funded by Western (mainly American) government bodies and think-tanks, and clearly allied
with Yushchenko. Because they speak English, the political activists in such organisations
can easily nobble Anglophone Western reporters. Contrary allegations — such as those
of fraud committed by Yushchenko-supporting local authorities in western Ukraine, carefully detailed by Russian election observers but available only in
Russian — go unreported. So too does evidence of crude intimidation made by
Yushchenko supporters against election officials. The depiction is so skewed that
Yushchenko is presented as a pro-Western free-marketeer, even though his fief in western Ukraine is an economic wasteland; while Yanukovych is presented as pro-Russian
and statist, even though his electoral campaign is based on deregulation and the economy
has been growing at an impressive clip. The cleanliness and prosperity of Kiev and other
cities have improved noticeably. There is, however, one thing which separates the two main
candidates, and which explains the West’s determination to shoo in Yushchenko: Nato.
Yanukovych has said he is against Ukraine joining; Yushchenko is in favour. The West wants Ukraine in Nato to weaken
Russia geopolitically..... " "With each day of drama and
denunciations, more and more Ukrainians poured into Independence Square to challenge the
official outcome. The whole capital was, in the words of one Russian TV correspondent,
'one big demonstration.' Pro-Yushchenko youth organizers, some of them trained by the same
dissidents who helped coordinate successful electoral revolutions in Serbia and Georgia,
rallied volunteers with rock music, puppet shows and free food...." "In Ukraine, Yushchenko
got the western nod, and floods of money poured in to groups which support him, ranging
from the youth organisation, Pora, to various opposition websites. More provocatively, the
US and other western embassies paid for exit polls, prompting Russia to do likewise,
though apparently to a lesser extent..... Intervening in foreign elections, under the
guise of an impartial interest in helping civil society, has become the run-up to the
postmodern coup d'etat, the CIA-sponsored third world uprising of cold war days adapted to
post-Soviet conditions. Instruments of democracy are used selectively to topple unpopular
dictators, once a successor candidate or regime has been groomed. In Ukraine's case this is playing with fire.... Ukraine has been
turned into a geostrategic matter not by Moscow but by the US, which refuses to abandon
its cold war policy of encircling Russia and seeking to pull every former Soviet republic
to its side. The EU should have none of this. Many Ukrainians certainly want a more
democratic system. Putin is not inherently against this, however authoritarian he is in
his own country. What concerns him is instability, the threat of anti-Russian regimes on
his borders, and American mischief." "...the gains of the orange-bedecked
'chestnut revolution' are Ukraine's,
the campaign is an American creation, a sophisticated and brilliantly conceived exercise
in western branding and mass marketing that, in four countries in four years, has been
used to try to salvage rigged elections and topple unsavoury regimes. Funded and organised
by the US government, deploying US consultancies, pollsters, diplomats, the two big
American parties and US non-government organisations, the campaign was first used in
Europe in Belgrade in 2000 to beat Slobodan Milosevic at the ballot box. Richard Miles,
the US ambassador in Belgrade, played a key role. And by last year, as US ambassador in
Tbilisi, he repeated the trick in Georgia, coaching Mikhail Saakashvili in how to bring
down Eduard Shevardnadze. Ten months after the success in Belgrade, the US ambassador in
Minsk, Michael Kozak, a veteran of similar operations in central America, notably in
Nicaragua, organised a near identical campaign to try to defeat the Belarus hardman,
Alexander Lukashenko. That one failed. 'There will be no Kostunica in Belarus,' the
Belarus president declared, referring to the victory in Belgrade. But experience gained in
Serbia, Georgia and Belarus has been invaluable in plotting to beat the regime of Leonid
Kuchma in Kiev. The operation - engineering democracy through the ballot box and civil
disobedience - is now so slick that the methods have matured into a template for winning
other people's elections.... Officially, the US government spent $41m (£21.7m) organising
and funding the year-long operation to get rid of Milosevic from October 1999. In Ukraine, the figure is said to be around
$14m." ".....With financial assistance from
the US Government and Western pro-democracy foundations, [Yushchenko] Pora activists have
been tutored by their Serbian and Georgian counterparts in the tactics and strategies of
peaceful protest and resistance to authoritarian rule..... 'Student leaders from Serbia
and Georgia have given us seminars about their experiences and what worked for them, and
we have sent quite a few of our people to Serbia to learn,' says Yarina, 24, one of Pora's
founders. A graduate from the western city of Lviv, she says the Ukrainians learned things
ranging from the importance of avoiding violence on picket lines, to organising its
estimated 10,000 members on the internet and using computer spreadsheets to manage rosters
of activists. Pora has also borrowed many of its 'branding' and communication strategies
from the Serbian activists, some of whom are now advising them in Ukraine. The Serbian movement used a striking
one-word title, Otpor, or 'Resistance', and plastered Belgrade with a logo of a clenched
fist and a single slogan about Milosevic: 'Gotov je' or 'He's finished'." "Russia accused the West of fomenting
unrest in Ukraine Saturday,
further ratcheting up the rhetoric between Moscow and Western capitals over the political
crisis in the former Soviet republic. 'We get the feeling that certain forces in the West
have decided that the strength of post-Soviet territory can be tested by using these means
of street anarchy, street democracy if you will,' said Sergei Yastrzhembsky, who holds the
European brief at the Kremlin. 'The signature is the same,' Yastrzhembsky said in a
televised interview. 'Apparently it's the same resources, the same puppet masters, the
scenarios look alike... (and) were tested at one time in Poland during the times of
Solidarity, and were tested relatively recently in Belgrade.' 'Unfortunately... we are
getting the impression that somebody wants to train citizens of countries on post-Soviet
territory that many serious political, constitutional and electoral questions can be
decided with the help of the crowd, with the help of the street. This is very dangerous.'
The political crisis in Ukraine
has split the world community in two, with Washington and the European Union backing the
opposition protests led by Western-leaning Viktor Yushchenko and Russia, China and several
former Soviet republics backing the pro-Moscow Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich. In his
interview, Yastrzhembsky specifically pointed the finger the United States. 'You can no
longer ignore the direct involvement of the American Congress, that individual congressmen
spend their days and nights in Kiev, the non-governmental organizations, consultants,
experts,' he said. 'The only thing left to do is to throw your hands in the air and say,
'come on guys, we're all adults here and we understand what you're up to there and your
stakes in this game,' he said. Yastrzhembsky said the protests in Ukraine bore an unmistakeable similarity to
those that swept aside the Soviet-era leadership in the Caucasus republic of Georgia a
year ago and warned that Moscow's reaction this time would be much firmer. 'It is a test
case,' he said. 'Taking into account the importance of this country, taking into account
its special position on geopolitical maps, taking into account the plans that certain
circles in the West have exhibited toward Ukraine... this test is more trying than the famous events in Georgia a little
while ago." "If the scenes of young people blowing
whistles, banging drums and handing out cough drops amid the throng of protesters in Kiev
last week looked familiar, they should: student-led mass protests also followed disputed
elections in Tbilisi last year and in Belgrade in 2000, and each time the opposition
prevailed. At least one group has played a role in all three movements. Serbia's Otpor, or
Resistance, the student organization that spearheaded the revolution that ousted Slobodan
Milosevic in 2000, sent 'trainers' to aid activists who helped unseat Georgian President
Eduard Shevardnadze in 2003. And earlier this year, the group provided training to
Ukraine's Pora, the biggest opposition youth group in Kiev. In each case, Otpor
coordinator Sinisa Sikman told TIME, Otpor taught local students organization and
negotiation skills, street-protest tactics, and how to 'monitor the elections so that they
could fight fraud.' News of Otpor's interest in the Ukraine vote — and the fact that
the group received funding from the U.S. government as well as dozens of other private and
non-American donors — drew alarmed speculation on Russian state TV that the group is
an American tool agitating for regime change 'on the doorstep of Russia.' Pora and Otpor
deny the charge." "During the 1999 Balkans war, some
of the critics of Nato's intervention alleged that the western powers were seeking to
secure a passage for oil from the Caspian sea. This claim was widely mocked.... [However]
For the past few weeks, a freelance researcher called Keith Fisher has been doggedly
documenting a project which has, as far as I can discover, has been little-reported in any
British, European or American newspaper. It is called the Trans-Balkan pipeline, and it's
due for approval at the end of next month. Its purpose is to secure a passage for oil from
the Caspian sea. The line will run from the Black sea port of Burgas to the Adriatic at
Vlore, passing through Bulgaria, Macedonia and Albania. It is likely to become the main
route to the west for the oil and gas now being extracted in central Asia. It will carry
750,000 barrels a day: a throughput, at current prices, of some $600m a month. The project
is necessary, according to a paper published by the US Trade and Development Agency last
May, because the oil coming from the Caspian sea 'will quickly surpass the safe capacity
of the Bosphorus as a shipping lane'. The scheme, the agency
notes, will 'provide a consistent source of crude oil to American refineries', 'provide
American companies with a key role in developing the vital east-west corridor', 'advance
the privatisation aspirations of the US government in the region' and 'facilitate rapid
integration' of the Balkans 'with western Europe'...." "The routes of potential trans-Balkan oil pipelines were laid down according to the interests of
their future [EU and US] users....The territory of Yugoslavia (both former and present
federation) is significant, therefore, because of its geographic position. Influential
American analysts insist on the claim that Yugoslavia is in the immediate neighborhood of
a zone of vital US interests - Black Sea/Caspian Sea region. And wherever there are vital
US interests, there are NATO troops to protect them. European interests, claim our
interlocutors, are even greater, because it is definitely not in the interest of the
European Union countries that the key to their supplies is held by someone else....The
project SEEL (South East European Line), initiated by the Italian company ENI is actually
the corridor for transportation of Caspian oil from Constanta to Trieste, which passes
through Serbia and uses the existing system of the Adriatic oil pipeline, all the way to
Omisalj... Because of the political situation in Serbia this project was delayed for some
better times... Until the fall of Slobodan Milosevic's regime
Croatia insisted that the connection with Constanta bypass Serbia by going through Hungary [a less econimc route]. However, after
October 5 and the political changes in Yugoslavia, the meeting of this same group held in
Brussels on October 26 and 27, 2000, expressed support for the transport of Caspian oil
following the route from Black Sea, Romania, Yugoslavia and Croatia, respectively from
Romanian port Constanta, through Pitesti, and Pancevo to Delnice in Croatia, from where
the new pipeline would go towards Trieste and the old one continue to Omisalj on the
island of Krk." "The project envisages construction of
a new spur from Delnice to Trieste, 100 kilometers long, and conversion of the Omisalj port into the leading spot-market
for resale of oil in the Mediterranean [Adriatic]..... One should recall that Milosevic
did not end up in the Hague only as a war criminal, but above all because with his
policies he stood in the way of a new network of Euro-Asian
oil pipelines. His political
fate was sealed in Zagreb, where two years ago a large ministerial-business conference of
the EU INOGATE program was held. A hundred
days later, Milosevic was not in power anymore, and at the time of the signing of a new oil pipeline from
Constanta to Trieste he was already on the way to the Hague,
supposedly by chance."
Oil and US Backed Islamic Terrorism In The Balkans - Click Here "President Clinton has authorised an all-out campaign to topple Slobodan Milosevic, according to sources close to the US Government. Earlier this spring, Mr Clinton signed a secret presidential 'finding' giving the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) the green light to try to bring down the Yugoslav president, said sources quoted in the US news-magazine Time. The reported campaign has two tracks, overt and covert....Now, six new radio transmitters outside Serbian territory will beam a 24-hour diet of pro-Western broadcasts to bolster dissident elements. "'CIA ordered to topple Milosevic': US report BBC Online, 6 July 1999 "[In order to topple Milosevic]
Approximately $30 million, predominantly from America, were channeled into the country
[Serbia] via an office in Budapest, in order to equip the opposition for the election
campaign with computers, telephones and office materials. Hundreds of election helpers
were trained abroad for these tasks." "The latest recipient of Washington's
'regime change' was not some miscreant Muslim state but the the mainly Christian mountain
nation of Georgia. Eduard Shevardnadze, the 75-year-old strongman who has ruled
post-Soviet Georgia's 5.1
million citizens since 1991, was overthrown by a bloodless coup that appears to have been
organized and financed by the Bush administration. Shevardnadze's sin, in Washington's
eyes, was being too chummy with Moscow and obstructing a major U.S. oil pipeline, due to
open in 2005, from Central Asia, via Georgia, to Turkey. Georgia occupies the heart of the wild, unruly, and strategic
Caucasus region, which I call the Mideast North. In recent months, Shevardnadze had
given new drilling and pipeline concessions to Russian firms.....Washington sent
high-level emissaries to warn Shevardnadze not to do anything that threatened the proposed
oil corridor. When he went ahead with Russian oil deals, Washington denounced the Nov. 2
Georgian elections as rigged, which they were, although it also turns a blind eye to
rigged elections in useful allies like oil-rich Azerbaijan, Armenia, Russia, Egypt,
Pakistan, etc. Cash and anti-Shevardnadze political operatives from the U.S. poured into
Tbilisi to back up the president's American-educated principal rival, Mikhail
Saakashvili.... Washington will shore up its man in Tbilisi, Saakashvili, and may send
Special Forces troops under the pretext of the faux war on
terrorism. The entire Caucasus is near a boil. The sharply increasing rivalry between the U.S. and Russia for political
and economic influence over this vital land bridge between Europe and the oil-rich Caspian
Basin promises a lot more intrigue, skullduggery and drama." "Eduard
Shevardnadze wants to scrap a contract with US company PA Consulting, which is currently
operating in Georgia. The Georgian president made this announcement yesterday at a
government assembly. The US company was granted the right to manage the national energy
distributing company but, in the president's opinion, the company is not fulfilling its
responsibilities. He said electricity is not being supplied to those regions which have
paid for it while other regions which have not paid electricity tariffs are receiving
electricity.... Experts say it is likely that Georgia will decide to replace its American
partner with another company, possibly a Russian one." "It is hard
to imagine anything duller than oil pipelines - but the unfortunate fact is that oil makes
our world go round and that oil is often found in places that are inhospitable and require
pipelines to deliver us our daily energy bread. Like the Baku-Tiblisi-Ceyhan pipeline. The
BTC is a $3.6-billion (U.S.) pipeline down one of the routes through which oil from the
Caspian Sea can flow from Azerbaijan through Georgia to Ceyhan in Turkey. BTC is the route
favoured by the Americans to get an estimated 20 billion barrels of oil to the market. The
Americans have been propping up the Shevardnadze regime with good old-fashioned 'military
aid,' ignoring the fact that much of that military aid was being siphoned off by Mr.
Shevardnadze's cronies. The U.S. got mad when it became clear that the wily old man was
playing games. As The Globe's Mark MacKinnon has reported, Georgia's future went pop! when
Mr. Shevardnadze signed a secret 25-year deal to 'make the Russian energy giant Gazprom
its sole supplier of gas' and then had the nerve to sell the electricity grid to another
Russian firm - muscling out AES, the company that the U.S. administration had backed to
win the deal. The whole episode stinks of oily geopolitics. Think of a conflict and you
can be sure that a pipeline is not far away. Of course, most of us, if we're lucky, won't
be directly affected. At worst, we might get despondent that 14 years after the fall of
the Berlin Wall, we're back to the good old days of power games between Russia and the
United States."
"Russia will
fight to bring Georgia back into its fold, while the US will fight to keep it in its
corner to safeguard its oil pipeline. Shevardnadze was a US puppet who did not go far
enough for the US. Saakashvili is one of the new breed of US-educated leaders that are
being hoisted on peoples in this part of the world. Leaders who will commit fully to the
corporate-controlled world." "On Georgia,
where he played a vital mediation role last weekend, [Russian Foreign Minister] Mr Ivanov
sharply criticised what he called American 'outside interference', which he said even the
former President Shevardnadze had admitted. Mr Ivanov, who flew to Kiev after Mr
Shevardnadze's resignation for an emergency meeting of the former Soviet republics making
up the Commonwealth of Independent States, voiced CIS concern at what it saw as a
dangerous precedent in Georgia. 'We can see that these methods, which the US used, are
methods of pressure and attempts to interfere in the internal affairs of our
countries.'" "The unrest
is becoming a showdown between Shevardnadze and Saakashvili, a radical pro-U.S. reformer
Washington ... has tried hard to wean the Caucasus away from Moscow's orbit. Under a $300
million training program, Georgian military officers are being equipped and coached by
U.S. instructors in counterterror operations against allegedlyQaeda-linked Chechen
separatists. And that military presence may yet increase. At a Nov. 4 conference at the
U.S. military's European commandin Stuttgart, top military brass were briefed on the
options fordeploying U.S. troops to guard the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline." "Some Russian
commentators have suggested that the change of regime in Georgia was engineered by
Washington, in accordance with a blueprint previously tried in Yugoslavia (successfully)
and Belarus (unsuccessfully). It is a theory that finds backing among other critics of US
foreign policy. The argument goes like this: as corruption and poverty grew in Georgia,
and as Mr Shevardnadze's flirting with Russia became warmer, 'regime change' became
increasingly desirable. This view is inextricably linked with oil. It is based on the idea
that the US commercial interest in a new pipeline from the Caspian to the West means
ensuring a friendly and compliant regime in Tbilisi... The politicians in the ascendancy
in the new Georgia - opposition leader Mikhail Saakashvili and the Acting President Nino
Burdzhanadze - are even more pro-western than Mr Shevardnadze. As Georgia establishes a
new regime and prepares for fresh elections, the battle for influence over Georgia between
Russia and the United States will intensify." "Ousted
Georgian president Eduard Shevardnadze has accused the US of helping to remove him from
power........ he suspected the involvement of US ambassador Richard Miles, who was posted
to Belgrade before the overthrow of former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic in 2000.
The US has denied any involvement. 'In relation to the ambassador, I have serious...
suspicions that this situation that happened in Tbilisi is an exact repetition of the
events in Yugoslavia,' Mr Shevardnadze said. 'Someone had a plan.' The main opposition
leader, Mikhail Saakashvili, has already said that he went to Belgrade earlier this year
to study the events there three years ago and wanted to repeat them in Georgia.... " "Belgrade,
Serbia and Montenegro--Serbian television viewers were cheerfully amused during the
Georgian crisis that led to President Eduard Shevardnadze's overthrow. Otpor! was founded
in early 2000, and quickly spread from Belgrade to every corner of Serbia. The
breaking-news footage from Tbilisi, beamed into their living-room TVs, showed symbols and
political iconography they had grown deeply familiar with. The posters of a clenched fist,
plastered everywhere, were identical to those used by Serbia's Otpor! (Resistance!)
movement in 2000, during the campaign to oust Slobodan Milosevic. Even the slogans on
billboards were familiar: 'Gotov je!' ('He's finished'), the Latin-script letters
proclaimed--in Serbian. Clearly, young Georgian protesters didn't have time to translate
the propaganda material they'd borrowed from their Serbian friends.... And yes: Otpor!
militants have confirmed that they were consulted by Georgian opposition--and that they
provided advice, material, and help. ... [in Serbia] The European Union, the United
States, and many non-governmental organizations provided training in political marketing
and resistance tactics, advice--and yes, money too.... The campaign was massive, the
expenses high, and the funding was foreign--smuggled across the border and carefully
concealed." "The United
States has poured about $1.3 billion (£735 million) in aid into Georgia since the
collapse of the Soviet Union. The EU and individual EU states have contributed a similar
amount, and funds continue to flow in. In the past week alone, the US Embassy announced a
package worth $21 million to pay for heating bills, pensions and salaries during the harsh
winter that will challenge Mr Saakashvili's fledgeling government from its first days.
Washington's interests go far further than propping up the economy, however. A contingent
of US special forces is rebuilding Georgia's ramshackle army, while Richard Miles, the US
Ambassador, has become a constant presence at negotiations during the political upheaval
that followed the ousting of Mr Shevardnadze. The focus on Georgia is explained mainly by
the building of a pipeline to carry Caspian Sea oil from neighbouring Azerbaijan through
to the Turkish Mediterranean port of Ceyhan for export to Western clients. The pipeline,
which will run through Georgia and bypass Russia, has long been a favourite American idea.
Until now, Russia has been able to control most routes for exporting the Caspian's huge
energy resources. Although the pipeline, in which BP has a leading stake, is due to be
completed only in 2005, it has already transformed Georgia's place in the world. 'For us,
it's a matter of survival to have this pipeline,' Mr Saakashvili said." "Washington's
support for Shevardnadze's overthrow certainly had nothing to do with its love of
democracy, which was not much in evidence when Azerbaijan, just east of Georgia and
another pipeline country, held even more outrageously rigged elections in October. For the
Bush administration, the goal is to freeze Russia out of the new oil bonanza in the
Caspian and Caucasus countries, all former Soviet fiefdoms, and Shevardnadze's crime was
to be too accommodating to the Russians. ... when Shevardnadze signed a deal last year
with the Russian gas giant Gazprom, Washington went ballistic. Bush's energy adviser
Steven Mann flew in to warn Shevardnadze not to go ahead with the deal, Mikhail
Saakashvili denounced it - and Shevardnadze signed it anyway. So no illusions
about America's motives for opposing him - but on the other hand, most Georgians really
did want to be rid of Shevardnadze." DIRTY OIL GAMES IN THE CAUCASUS - CLICK HERE
"The Bush
Administration put huge effort yesterday into preaching two contradictory messages on
democracy. On one side, we had Colin Powell, the Secretary of State, in north Africa to
champion the cause of democracy and human rights. On the other, we had Donald Rumsfeld,
the Secretary of Defence, congratulating the President of Azerbaijan on his landslide
October poll victory, which even the State Department has said was tarnished by fraud, and
which triggered street riots. But the contradiction is not between Powell and Rumsfeld,
notorious though their different views of the world are. It
lies at the heart of the Administration’s foreign policy:
does it always want to promote democracy, when that would produce a government hostile to
its interests? That is the question the US faces in Iraq, above all — one it has
chosen so far to duck. First Rumsfeld, who stopped in Baku on his way from Brussels to
Kabul. The reason for the US’s interest is no mystery.
Azerbaijan’s Caspian oilfields are an attraction as the US looks for alternatives to
the Gulf.... Rumsfeld emphasised the closeness of those links
yesterday: 'We have a military-to-military relationship, as well as political and economic
relationships. And certainly we intend to continue that military-to-military relationship
with the new administration here in this country.' The problem is the nature of that
administration. The elections allowed Ilham Aliyev to succeed
his father, Heider Aliyev, longtime leader of the Soviet-era Communist Party, who returned
to power in 1993 after a military coup [alleged
to have been sponsored by British Petroleum, 'Fight Smart']. Senior opposition figures are among 100 said still to be in jail after
post-election riots. So is Ilgar Ibrahimogul, imam of a mosque in the capital, and founder
of Azerbaijan’s Centre for Religious Freedom, together with Rauf Arifoglu, editor of
the biggest-circulation newspaper. The State Department has called for an investigation
into intimidation and ballot-rigging. In that light Rumsfeld’s remarks amount to a
bald statement of the bargain that the US will strike to pursue its strategic interest." "In the Ukraine, citizens are in the streets protesting what they charge is a fixed
election. Secretary of State Colin Powell expresses this nation's concern about apparent
voting irregularities. The media give the dispute around-the-clock coverage. But in the
United States, massive and systemic voter irregularities go unreported and unnoticed. Ohio
is this election year's Florida. The vote in Ohio decided the presidential race, but it
was marred by intolerable, and often partisan, irregularities and discrepancies. U.S.
citizens have as much reason as those in Kiev to be concerned that the fix was in....
Democracy should not be for export only. " Election Fraud 2004 Not for the people
in the Middle East, the Caucasus or
the Balkans "Optimists about world oil reserves,
such as the Department of Energy, are getting increasingly lonely. The International
Energy Agency now says that world production outside the Middle Eastern Organization of
Petroleum Exporting Countries (opec) will peak in 1999 and world production overall will
peak between 2010 and 2020. This projection is supported by influential recent articles in
Science and Scientific American. Some knowledgeable academic and industry voices put the
date that world production will peak even sooner—within the next five or six years.
The United States cannot afford to wait for the next energy
crisis to marshal its intellectual and industrial
resources.... Our growing dependence on increasingly scarce Middle Eastern oil is a fool's
game—there is no way for the rest of the world to win. Our losses may come suddenly
through war, steadily through price increases, agonizingly through developing-nation
poverty, relentlessly through climate change—or through all of the above." "Our industry can certainly be proud
of its past achievements. Yet the challenges we will face in the coming years will be
every bit as great as those encountered in the past, due in part to ever-increasing global
energy use. For example, we estimate that world oil and gas production from existing
fields is declining at an average rate of about 4 to 6 percent a year. To meet projected
demand in 2015, the industry will have to add about 100 million oil-equivalent barrels a
day of new production. That's equal to about 80 percent of today's production level. In other words, by 2015,
we will need to find, develop and produce a volume of new oil and gas that is equal to
eight out of every 10 barrels being produced today." "The energy crisis we are in today is
entirely different from the temporary problems we experienced in 1973-74, 1979-86, 1990-91
and 2000..... There was always sufficient worldwide geological capacity to produce
additional barrels of crude oil to meet the world's needs. No longer. In the next major
energy crisis, that capacity will likely be eroded. So the crisis should have a severe
impact, be global in scope, and be difficult to solve. Plainly, it will be
unprecedented.... Over the next 25 years, a new world energy economy will arrive in three
waves. We are near the top of the first and smallest one, a warning wave. A second more
powerful wave likely will hit in the 2009-2010 period when the non-OPEC world may reach
its all-time highest output of crude oil, subsequently declining to become ever more
dependent on OPEC for incremental barrels of production. The final wave should break
around 2020, or earlier, as even OPEC's vast reserves are tapped at a maximum rate of
production. After that, oil volume should head down and keep falling, never to revive.....
An international economic disturbance of this magnitude will
create potential conflicts between nations and civil competition within societies. These could be a trial for us and for our children, made worse in the
early years by our lack of preparation and our failure to
understand what is already happening to us."
NATURAL LAW PARTY WESSEX |
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