Vedomosti: "Talking crisis"
International Conference on Russian Gas Supplies
An urgent gas summit held in Moscow produced an agreement with Ukraine, the Kremlin says. Kiev, however, thinks it has merely distracted Putin and Tymoshenko.
The gas summit, proposed by Dmitry Medvedev on Wednesday and held on Saturday, ended up being billed as an International Conference on the Delivery of Russian Gas to Consumers in Europe. Russia and Armenia were represented by their Presidents and Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Moldavia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Serbia were represented by their Prime Ministers. The European Union was represented by its Energy Commissioner Andris Piebalgs and the Czech Minister of Industry and Trade Martin Riman.
The participants sat at a round table taking turns speaking. Later Mr Medvedev told a press conference about the Russian proposals for resuming transit: an international consortium and an irrevocable letter of credit from a European bank in the amount of a billion dollars. In light of the agreement reached later between Prime Ministers Vladimir Putin and Yulia Tymoshenko, President's proposals were rendered irrelevant, a source from the President's staff said.
Mr Medvedev said that Russia was not satisfied with the existing international documents that regulate energy relations, including the Energy Charter (which Moscow has signed but not ratified). New legal mechanisms are needed, Mr Medvedev said, promising to raise the issue at the G8 and G20 summits in London.
The President also spoke of the need to diversify Russian supplies. Belarusian Prime Minister Sergei Sidorsky proposed building a second strip of the Yamal-Europe gas pipeline that passes through Belarus. This project would take a year or a year and a half, whereas the South Stream and Nord Stream would not be operational before 2012.
During the closed part of the meeting, European Commissioner Piebalgs reportedly said that the important thing for the EU was resuming gas supplies, no matter how it was done. The Czech Republic, which holds the EU presidency, released a statement in Brussels on Saturday expressing "dissatisfaction" with the results of the Moscow meeting. On the other hand, the European Commission was pleased with the results of the overnight talks between Putin and Tymoshenko and welcomed the agreements in a communiqué.
Judging from the fact that Putin and Tymoshenko managed to reach an agreement in the wake of the summit, it was an unqualified success, a member of the President's Staff summed up: all its participants spoke of the need to break the deadlock and the message was clear that Ukraine could no longer drag its feet. However, a member of the Ukrainian delegation doubts that the summit was a success, saying that the level of representation was not high and that the meeting merely took away from time that could have been spent more usefully in negotiations. As a result, the negotiations lasted into the night. A similar summit in Kiev held on Friday involved only two Presidents and one Prime Minister.
* * *
Who is to blame?
On the eve of the summit Putin had talks with Chancellor Angela Merkel in Germany. He told a press conference after the meeting that it was Ukraine and not Russia that was to blame for the crisis. Ms Merkel noted, however, that "there is seldom only one guilty party". However, Putin retorted that responsibility rested not on one or even two sides: "I think that the position of the EU, which puts Ukraine and Russia on the same footing, in practice amounts to support of Ukraine".
Maxim Malkov; Maria Tsvetkova
