MOSCOW, February 6 (RIA Novosti) Russia needs foreign observers to monitor presidential elections / CIS leaders pin their hopes on Moscow / Ukraine outruns Russia to WTO / Environmentalists threaten Sochi Olympics/ CPC's western shareholders dissatisfied with Transneft's tariffs / Chief of staff may soon step down
Kommersant
Russia needs foreign observers to monitor presidential elections
Russia's Central Election Commission (CEC) yesterday made an unprecedented concession to the OSCE's Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) regarding its observers at the March presidential elections. However, the concession did not suit the ODIHR and so the talks will most likely continue.
Russia's readiness to make concessions may show that Russia needs foreign observers to monitor its presidential elections.
CEC head Vladimir Churov said yesterday morning that the commission had failed to agree with the ODIHR, and that discussion of the mission's format would most likely resume in four years.
However, in the afternoon, Russia agreed to move the arrival of the main part of the ODIHR mission (50 members) from February 28 to February 20, and to allow 20 members to come on February 8 and five technical specialists on February 5. This is much closer to what the ODIHR demands.
A source in the CEC told the popular business daily that the commission had made the concession on the "recommendation" of highly-placed officials.
If the ODIHR mission refuses to come to Russia again, it will be the CEC's second conflict with the international observers. In December 2007, the ODIHR refused to monitor Russia's parliamentary elections because the CEC had cut the number of observers and the duration of their stay in the country.
The CEC seems to be ready for dialogue this time.
Yevgeny Minchenko, director of the International Institute of Political Expertise, said: "The new president will need to maintain normal relations with the Western community during his four-year term, and so there should be no questions about the legitimacy of his election."
"Compared to the parliamentary campaign, the presidential race is much calmer and legally correct," the political analyst said. "We should have removed all limitations for the ODIHR mission at the start, instead of holding these strange talks. I can understand the ODIHR, as I monitored elections in Kazakhstan on behalf of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. I can tell you that coming to the country on election day is quite senseless."
Nezavisimaya Gazeta
CIS leaders pin their hopes on Moscow
The most important question today is not who replaces Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin, because the election of Dmitry Medvedev is almost assured, but how the new president will act.
A desire to calculate his possible moves - provided he wins the March 2 election - is encouraging many CIS leaders to seek meetings with both Putin and Medvedev.
Some of them have held one-on-one talks, while others will meet with the two Russian leaders soon. The rest plan to discuss the most pressing problems with them at an informal CIS summit in Moscow on February 22. All the CIS leaders are certain to attend this summit in order to express their hopes regarding Medvedev's potential victory.
Logically, the pro-Western CIS countries are looking to the West, which expects Russia's new president to promote democracy.
Alexander Rahr, program director for Russian and CIS affairs at the German Council on Foreign Relations, said: "Medvedev has not uttered a single critical word about the West during his campaign, which is viewed as a political sensation in the corridors of power here, especially considering Putin's speeches made last month. Ukraine and other GUAM countries have accepted the Western policy of not criticizing Russia, hoping for the best, and avoiding new conflicts. Georgia is a relevant example."
GUAM is a regional organization comprising Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan and Moldova.
The CIS countries that look to Russia hope Putin will remain in power with Medvedev as president. According to Rahr, Kazakhstan and Belarus fear that a weak president might lose grip of the country, allowing the situation to destabilize and economic progress to falter. Nursultan Nazarbayev and Alexander Lukashenko apparently hope that Putin will somehow stay in power.
But everyone admits that Russia, no matter who leads it, will be worthy of interest above all as a supplier of strategic energy resources.
Gazeta.ru
Ukraine outruns Russia to WTO
The World Trade Organization (WTO) has admitted Ukraine, and it is now only a matter of formal ratification by Ukraine's parliament, the Supreme Rada. Now Moscow will also have to negotiate its own WTO accession with Kiev.
Experts say the two post-Soviet countries are racing each other to the WTO for political reasons.
For Ukraine, the admission to the WTO was part of its economic integration with Europe policy, said Alexei Makarkin, deputy director of the Center for Political Technologies, a Moscow think tank.
Ukraine has said on multiple occasions that it was not interested in building a common economic space with Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan. On the other hand, it hopes that WTO membership will help it at free trade zone negotiations with the European Union, he said.
As a full-fledged WTO member, Ukraine will now be able to advance economic demands for Russia's accession. It has not started yet, but there are certainly enough tensions between Russia and Ukraine to complicate the issue further.
For example, Ukraine could raise the issue of reducing the price it pays for Russian natural gas and increasing the transit tariffs it charges to deliver Russian gas to European consumers.
The Ukrainian president also said earlier this week that he was anticipating "very interesting negotiations" on the anti-dumping measures and other limitations Russia had imposed on Ukrainian exports, thus inflicting an estimated $3 billion loss on the latter.
On the other hand, Mikhail Vinogradov, head of the Center for Current Politics in Russia, said it was difficult to assume anything with certainty because Ukraine would not have a stable policy at least for another year.
Kiev has worked for this WTO accession for the past 14 years. Experts say the long preparation period should shield it against any drastic rethinks in economic policy. However, the country eventually had to pay a price for accelerating the process.
Russian officials had mentioned that for Russia, an early WTO accession was not an end in itself and that it was most important to uphold the interests of domestic producers. The conditions for Russia's admission have been mainly outlined, and they are quite acceptable, Vinogradov added. In particular, Moscow has insisted on its right to set import quotas on meat and to provide government support to domestic aircraft manufacturing. It is also negotiating annual state subsidies for agricultural companies of up to $9 billion.
In the long run, the lack of haste might provide Russia with more dividends from its WTO membership than Ukraine obtained.
Gazeta
Environmentalists threaten Sochi Olympics
President Vladimir Putin yesterday requested that environmentally friendly technology be used in building venues and facilities for the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics. His words gave inspiration to environmentalists. On the same day, the Russian branch of Greenpeace demanded that the Krasnaya Polyana area (where the Caucasus nature preserve and the Grushevy Ridge are located) be put off limits to the construction of a bobsleigh route, a mountain Olympic village, a chain of electric power plants, the terminus of the Adler-Grushevaya Polyana rapid railway line, and nine holiday centers. The Greens handed their written ultimatum to Prime Minister Viktor Zubkov.
If the construction goes ahead, Greenpeace said, it will sue the International Olympic Committee, which on July 5, 2007 chose Sochi as the capital of the 2014 Olympic Games. According to Andrei Petrov, manager of Greenpeace World Heritage project, the claim will be filed with a Swiss court if matters come to this.
"A review of the decision to hold the Olympics in Sochi has not been not ruled out," Greenpeace said.
This is not the first time Greenpeace has challenged the legality of Krasnaya Polyana construction. In the spring of 2006, when Sochi was bidding for the Games, the Supreme Court rejected the environmentalists' demand to ban the construction.
The IOC hopes that a compromise could be reached. "Consultations are currently underway [between IOC and Greenpeace}, and we are interested in an out-of-court settlement," the IOC said.
Russian officials do not want to aggravate things either - they are considering alternative sites for future Olympic facilities. Two independent sources familiar with Olympic preparations said Olympstroi (Olympic construction corporation) would agree to relocate future projects because that would cut back Olympic estimates.
However, the Olympic Games Organizing Committee is opposed because it will have to coordinate the shifting of Olympic facilities with the IOC.
The environmentalists warn that if the process is delayed, it could push the building timeline back, ultimately stripping Sochi of the right to be called Olympic Capital 2014.
Kommersant
CPC's western shareholders dissatisfied with Transneft's tariffs
On February 5, the board of directors of the Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC), the only non-state oil trunk pipeline, did not approve proposals to expand its capacities. CPC's western shareholders are now looking into the possibility of signing a new memorandum with the Russian Federation's government which will restrict Transneft's tariffs to its present prices.
Transneft, Russia's oil transportation monopoly which manages the state-owned share package in the consortium (24% of its voting shares), proposed a rise in oil transportation tariffs from $38 to $40.5 per metric ton. The pumping of about 20 million metric tons of oil, which will take the consortium six months to do, would be enough to pay for the elaboration of a feasibility study for extending the application period of the increased tariffs.
However, according to Kommersant's data, Transneft's intention to maintain the increased tariffs did not suit foreign shareholders. Earlier, Transneft's representatives announced CPC's possible final tariff of $52.
Disputes around tariffs hinder the expansion of CPC's design capacity to 67 million metric tons (last year the company transported 32.6 million metric tons of oil). The Russian side would agree to the expansion only if the tariffs are raised and the interest on loans cut.
In September, CPC's shareholders agreed to raise the tariff from $24.5% to $38 and reduce interest rates on loans from 12.66% to 6%. However, the Russian side insists that CPC's expansion should be synchronized with the project to build another [oil transportation] system, the Bourgas-Alexandroupolis pipeline.
During meetings of the working groups prior to the last session of CPC's board of directors, a radical version of synchronizing CPC and the Bourgas-Alexandroupolis pipeline was offered envisaging a through tariff for both pipelines. Some sources say that the working groups based their calculations on the Bourgas-Alexandroupolis pipeline's projected tariff of $10-$12 per a metric ton.
Thus, after CPC's expansion and considering the price of oil shipping via the Black Sea ($5 per metric ton), the through tariff will amount to $69, which is 1.5 times higher than the tariff in the rival Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline system.
Judging by all signs, these purely unofficial estimates influenced the positions of ExxonMobil and Chevron, CPC's main western shareholders. Their representatives refused to discuss the rise in tariffs even by $2.5 and initiated a new idea: to propose that the Russian government should sign a new memorandum on CPC's expansion which would fix CPC's tariff at its current level. However, the timeframe for introducing it is not yet known.
Vedomosti
Chief of staff may soon step down
Yury Baluyevsky, chief of the General Staff of Russia's armed forces, is not on a short list of candidates for the boards of directors of defense plants. This is a sign of the general's early retirement, said a source in the Defense Ministry.
The government-approved list of state representatives to the boards of directors in defense industry has been drastically altered.
The board of the United Aircraft Corporation (UAC) and the Tactical Missile Armaments Corporation (TMAC) will no longer see Air Force Commander-in-Chief Vladimir Mikhailov, who has been pensioned off and is replaced by the new commander, Anatoly Zelin.
The place of Boris Alyoshin, a former director of Rosprom (Federal Industrial Agency), in the TMAC has been taken up by Andrei Dutov, the agency's new boss, while Yury Koptev, a departmental head from the Industry and Energy Ministry in the UAC, has given way to Denis Manturov, a new deputy minister of industry and energy.
This is a scheduled shake-up of state representatives, said a government source. The same scheduled replacement is that of Sergei Chemezov, the head of the Russian Technologies Corporation, on the Almaz Antei Air Defense Concern's board of directors by Anatoly Isaikin, the new general director of Rosoboronexport, Russia's state arms exporter, said a source in the corporation.
The absence of Baluyevsky from the list of candidates for the TMAC and Almaz Antei, where he had worked for many years, is remarkable. Nikolai Makarov, the new armaments chief, will represent the Defense Ministry there.
According to the ministry's source, this means that this year Baluyevsky will retire. In 2007 he turned 60, and his tenure was extended by two years.
Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov and Baluyevsky outwardly appear politically correct, though they have some differences - both on military-technical policy and on the transfer of the Main Command of the Navy to St. Petersburg, the source said.
The practice of dropping candidates from the list ahead of their planned retirement is something new, noted military expert Ruslan Pukhov.
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