MOSCOW, March 12 (RIA Novosti)
South Ossetia ready to host Russian bases for 99 years / Pirated Chinese weapons worry Russia / Nazarbayev tries to shift Kazakhstan's currency risks to Russia / Moscow no longer city of billionaires
RBC Daily
Novye Izvestia
South Ossetia ready to host Russian bases for 99 years
South Ossetian President Eduard Kokoity yesterday proposed that Russian military bases be deployed in the republic for 99 years. He said the final decision was to be made by parliament, which is to be elected in May.
Analysts think Russia will keep its bases in South Ossetia for as long as it has the maintenance money.
The Russian Defense Ministry said the bases in South Ossetia would be manned by 3,700 servicemen, and that several units would protect the republic's borders. Another 4,000 Russian troops will be deployed in Abkhazia, whose authorities have agreed to host Russian bases for 49 years.
Military analysts have calculated that the development of Russian bases in the two newly independent republics will be completed by the end of 2009, and will cost over 27 billion rubles ($769 million).
Dmitry Suslov, deputy director of research at Russia's Council for Foreign and Defense Policy, said: "A military solution for the problem is reasonable in view of the possible resumption of Georgian moves to restore control over the republics, but this is not the point. The main thing is that the reality which Russia created by recognizing the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia is being formalized."
Alexander Khramchikhin, an expert at the Russian Institute for Military and Political Analysis, said: "Russian troops are the only factor supporting the independence of South Ossetia, which is why they should stay there for a long time."
Political analyst Dmitry Oreshkin thinks Russian "military bases are bound to be deployed in South Ossetia, but it would be premature to discuss a duration of 99 years."
He said Russia would have to pay a lot for the maintenance of the bases because South Ossetia's economy lies in ruins.
"As long as Russia acts as a donor, like the Soviet Union did, it will have bases in the republic," Oreshkin said. "But if the Russian economy starts sagging, these bases will repeat the fate of former Soviet bases abroad."
Russia closed several Soviet military bases abroad due to lack of maintenance money.
Vedomosti
Pirated Chinese weapons worry Russia
Spokespersons for the Russian defense industry have dismissed foreign media reports on Moscow's refusal to sell Sukhoi Su-33 Flanker-D carrier-borne fighters to Beijing over fears of piracy as a "newspaper hoax."
However, this denial will not solve the problem of Chinese piracy with regard to state-of-the-art Russian defense technology.
Although the Russian defense industry has profited from the sale of military airplanes and helicopters to China, Beijing has not assembled Su-27 Flanker fighters from Russian components under a license contract since 2004.
It is also unclear how many Shenyang J-11 (JianJi-11) advanced fourth-generation fighters similar to the Su-27 have been manufactured for the Chinese Air Force to date.
Moreover, China has started copying Russia's S-300 surface-to-air missile (SAM) systems and X-55 cruise missiles. A Chinese version of the Mil Mi-171 Hip helicopter, being assembled in Sichuan province under another license contract since 2008, may appear soon.
In December 2008, Russian Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov visited Beijing. However, there are no guarantees that China will honor an intellectual property protection agreement signed during his visit.
Analysts from the Moscow-based Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies said, apart from popular tea kettles and steam irons, China was now copying motor vehicles, locomotives and other sophisticated technology, and could also launch weapons production in the near future.
Such weapons will have the same specifications as their Russian equivalents and will be just as reliable and easy to repair, the analysts said. In the next five years, cheap Chinese planes, helicopters, tanks and other military equipment will probably offer tough competition to their Russian equivalents on South Asian, African and Latin American markets.
It is impossible to stop the Chinese arms-export surge because Beijing has enough funding to buy the required prototypes in or through third countries. Consequently, Moscow must develop and manufacture competitive military equipment in order to defeat its rivals who are dumping cheap and substandard weapons on global markets.
Nezavisimaya Gazeta
Nazarbayev tries to shift Kazakhstan's currency risks to Russia
A dramatic worsening of the situation in Kazakhstan has forced the country's leadership to search for unusual routes out of the crisis. President Nursultan Nazarbayev yesterday made public his idea of creating a new currency for the Eurasian Economic Community (Eurasec), comprising Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia and Tajikistan.
Analysts say he is trying to ease the dollar pressure on the Kazakh national currency, the tenge, including by lowering the reliability of the Russian ruble.
This is not Nazarbayev's first currency experiment. He recently proposed creating a new global currency, akmetal, to replace the dollar and the euro. Some time ago he advocated the introduction of a common currency, altyn, in Eurasec.
The situation in Kazakhstan is similar to that in Russia, with foreign currency revenue falling as exports (energy and metals) are becoming cheaper. However, Russia's gold and foreign currency reserves are only 33% smaller than the debt of the state and private companies before foreign creditors, while Kazakhstan's international reserves are almost 60% smaller than its foreign debt.
The idea of a common currency for Eurasec countries is aimed at sharing currency risks with the other members. However, it is unlikely to attract Russia, which, although it has the world's third largest international reserves, has devalued the ruble by 33% against the dollar over the past six months.
The introduction of a common currency is a lengthy process entailing precise coordination. Most importantly, the partners should decide whose central banks will have the right to issue the new currency, and how to coordinate their issue policies. In fact, this problem has derailed the idea of a common currency for Russia and Belarus.
Dmitry Pushkarev, chief of financial and economic analysis at 2Trade.ru, said: "Nazarbayev knows that the tenge will not stand up against the dollar. This is why he has proposed creating a common currency zone where the dollar pressure could be divided between the tenge and the ruble."
"The idea of a common currency for Eurasec is unviable, because the development levels of the member states are too different," the analyst said.
Vedomosti
Moscow no longer city of billionaires
Most Russian billionaires have not survived the financial crisis. Forbes has already crossed 55 of them off the list, while the remaining 32 have also lost part of their wealth. However, they have nothing to be ashamed of, as 87% of the world's richest individuals still on the list have been hit just as hard.
The world's richest people lost $2 trillion during the economic crisis year. Their aggregate net worth has fallen to $2.4 trillion. There are now only 793 billionaires, while 332 more are no longer on the list.
Billionaires were affected for the first time since 2003, when their number decreased to 476 and their cumulative fortune to $1.4 trillion. The downslide was soon followed by a boom on the emerging, commodity, and lending markets, and the trend was reversed.
In 2005, Russians came third after the United States and Germany (27 billionaires, up from seven in 2002). In early March 2008, Global Forbes included 87 Russian billionaires, and six weeks later Russian Forbes hit 110 due to uncontrolled growth on the stock markets.
The fall was all the more painful for that, as the aggregate worth of listed Russian billionaires plummeted to $102.1 billion from $471.4 billion between February 11, 2008 and February 11, 2009, when the data were last taken.
While in 2008, Moscow was the top billionaires' city with 74 billionaire residents, ahead of New York with 71 and London with 36, now New York has 55, London 28 and Moscow 27.
Oleg Deripaska's plunge was the most severe. The richest Russian, and the world's ninth richest person with a net worth of $28 billion in 2008, when he outranked Roman Abramovich by boosting his wealth by another $14.7 billion, Deripaska is now estimated by Forbes at $3.5 billion (down 88%) and ranks 164th.
Mikhail Prokhorov now tops the list of wealthiest Russians, who entered the crisis with more assets than debts. The two deals with his former business partner Vladimir Potanin fetched him about $8.5-$9 billion, according to his friends. UC Rusal owes him another $2.8 billion. However, his net worth fell to $9.5 billion from $19.5 billion.
Abramovich is Russia's second richest man, as before. "The $8.5 bilion estimate is very close, considering his core assets [stake in Evraz Group] and estimating what was left after the sale of Sibneft and acquisition of Evraz," said a source close to the owner of Chelsea.
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