Putin seals Russia-Ukraine gas deal, boosting EU energy security
By Fred Weir | 11.20.09
MOSCOW – Russia and Ukraine stepped back Friday from the brink of repeating their annual winter “gas war” amid surprisingly warm smiles and handshakes between prime ministers Vladimir Putin and Yulia Tymoshenko.
The Russia-Ukraine agreement, sealed after a night of talks in the Crimean resort city of Yalta, makes several unexpected concessions to Ukraine. Moscow agreed to an estimated 60 percent increase in transit fees paid by Russia’s state gas monopoly Gazprom and to lifting stiff penalties that it could have imposed on Ukraine for not fulfilling its 2009 purchasing pledges. The bargain will also peg Ukrainian purchases of Russian gas to market rates for the first time.
“It would be very good to meet the New Year without shocks,” Mr. Putin told journalists in Yalta Friday.
Ukraine and Russia have engaged in regular spats over gas supplies for the past four winters, since Russia sends gas westward through Ukraine, with a shivering western Europe watching anxiously downstream.
Chill in Ukrainian politics
Several times in the past few years, a stand-off between Russia and Ukraine has slashed energy supplies to Europe during the coldest winter months. Europe is heavily dependent on Russia gas, much of which is delivered via Ukraine’s pipelines.
The problem has been aggravated by fierce geopolitical differences between Russia and the former Soviet state of Ukraine, especially President Viktor Yushchenko’s insistence on bringing Ukraine into the NATO military alliance. Arguments between the two have seemed nearly incomprehensible due to a near total lack of transparency in the gas trade between Ukraine and Russia.
This year, there’s an added twist – an escalating political battle between Ms. Tymoshenko and Mr. Yushchenko ahead of January presidential elections. The two former allies led Ukraine’s 2004-05 Orange Revolution that unseated a pro-Moscow leader, but they now despise each other.
Reading between the lines of Friday’s gas accord, some see Mr. Putin swinging Russia’s considerable weight to subtly endorse Tymoshenko in her bitter struggle to succeed Mr. Yushchenko in the upcoming Ukrainian presidential polls, slated for Jan. 17.
‘Yushchenko is out of the game’
On Thursday, Yushchenko, whose name is anathema in Moscow due to his pro-Western policies, dispatched an open letter to Mr. Medvedev, warning that Ukraine’s economic crisis necessitated revisions in the two countries’ gas accords, including a sharp increase in transit fees.
But Kremlin official Sergei Prikhodko responded harshly, saying Yushchenko’s letter “is something from the sphere of political blackmail” and rejecting any concessions. The next day, Putin handed Tymoshenko almost exactly the package of concessions that Yushchenko had called for.
“Yushchenko is out of the game,” says Andrei Klimov, deputy chair of the Russian State Duma’s foreign affairs committee. “Yushchenko has never been an advocate of Russian-Ukrainian cooperation, and it would probably be better if someone else sat in his place… Tymoshenko has shown that cooperation is possible, if there is realism. This [Putin-Tymoshenko] accord shows that realism can bring good results.”
Though Putin insisted he was not trying to influence Ukraine’s elections, he offered lavish praise for the former “Orange Revolution” hero, Tymoshenko.
“She’s a tough negotiator,” he said in Yalta, with a smiling Tymoshenko at his side. “But we’ve always been able to agree, despite all difficulties, and we have managed to keep all of our commitments.”
Ukrainian experts say Tymoshenko has probably emerged the winner in her power struggle with Yushchenko and, in any case, relations between the two can hardly get any worse.
“Yushchenko may be president, but he couldn’t disavow the gas agreement without changing the government, and his power to do that is limited,” says Vladimir Horbach, of the independent Institute of Euro-Atlantic Cooperation in Kiev (Kyiv).
“Tymoshenko, who hopes to be the next president, is happy to make herself look like a decisive and weighty leader who can make deals with the Kremlin, even if these are discriminatory toward Ukraine in the long run,” he says.
Sign that Putin calls the shots in the Kremlin?
Experts are also taking careful note of Putin’s role in sealing the international deal with Tymoshenko, because it sends a not-too-subtle message about who is actually calling the shots in the Kremlin.
“It’s hard to understand why Yushchenko sent his open letter to [President Dmitri] Medvedev, when everyone knows that Putin is the chief gas manager in Russia,” says Viktor Nebozhenko, director of Ukrainian Barometer, an independent Kiev (Kyiv) political consultancy.
Some experts suggest Yushchenko may have been trying to exploit the perceived tensions between Putin and Medvedev to his advantage.
If so, it didn’t work.
“What we’re seeing is that whenever it comes to an issue of policy, it’s Medvedev who makes a broad statement of principle, but Putin who actually closes the final agreement,” says Sam Greene, deputy director of the Carnegie Center in Moscow.
“Putin is clearly the decider,” he says.
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Obama grants ‘interview’ to Cuba blogger Yoani Sanchez
By Sara Miller Llana | 11.20.09
MEXICO CITY – Cuban blogger Yoani Sanchez has quickly emerged as one of the best-known critics of the Castro regime. The Monitor met with her last year in a café in Havana after she had won Spain’s prestigious Ortega y Gasset award. Since then she has been chosen as one of Time’s 100 most influential people for her daily blog, Generation Y, and won Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism’s Maria Moors Cabot Prize (which made even more news because Cuban officials denied her a visa to travel to New York to accept the award).
Now she is in the spotlight again: President Obama just granted her an “interview,” answering questions on her blog that she posed to both the American president and Raul Castro, the Cuban leader who took the reigns from brother Fidel in early 2008.
“Thank you for this opportunity to exchange views with you and your readers in Cuba and around the world,” President Barack Obama begins, also congratulating her for the Columbia University award. “You richly deserve the award. I was disappointed you were denied the ability to travel to receive the award in person.”
She asks the president whether Cubans’ limited access to technology is the fault of the US embargo or Cuban officials. He responded:
“My administration has taken important steps to promote the free flow of information to and from the Cuban people particularly through new technologies. We have made possible greater telecommunications links to advance interaction between Cuban citizens and the outside world. This will increase the means through which Cubans on the island can communicate with each other and with persons outside of Cuba, for example, by expanding opportunities for fiber optic and satellite transmissions to and from Cuba.
“This will not happen overnight. Nor will it have its full effect without positive actions by the Cuban government. I understand the Cuban government has announced a plan to provide Cubans greater access to the Internet at post offices. I am following this development with interest and urge the government to allow its people to enjoy unrestricted access to the internet and to information. In addition, we welcome suggestions regarding areas in which we can further support the free flow of information within, from, and to Cuba.”
His answers do not indicate any radical shift in American policy toward Cuba, even though Mr. Obama has eased rules regarding travel and money transfers. But in simply getting the president to respond to her, Ms. Sanchez continues to break new ground with information technology, as is a new class of young people in Cuba, many of whom the Monitor profiled in a series.
Will Raul Castro reply? No one is holding their breath. These days, the Cuban leader has been under fire after a Human Rights Watch report came out saying that restrictions on civil liberties and human rights abuses are just as bad under the Raul government as they were under that of older brother Fidel Castro. And Sanchez has not exactly made friends with the government for her blog chronicling the trials of daily life in Cuba. Last week, she says, she was detained briefly and beaten by state authorities.
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Tony Blair loses EU presidency bid, Belgium’s Van Rompuy wins job
By Dan Murphy | 11.19.09
Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair lost his shot at the European Union presidency Thursday, when the UK withdrew its support for his nomination at a meeting of the group’s 27 leaders in Brussels. Current Belgian Prime Minister Herman Van Rompuy won the job.
Supporters of the Blair candidacy had argued that he was an internationally known figure that would give the new EU presidency the sort of star power and clout that could make it a powerful voice on the international stage.
The recent passage of the EU’s Lisbon Treaty created the post of president and foreign minister, with the intent of giving a united foreign policy voice to a group of nations that have increasingly integrated their economies but have strongly independent foreign policies. Until now, the EU presidency has been rotated every six months between the group’s national leaders. The new post will be for two-and-a-half years.
But the fact that the Blair candidacy was being pushed by a British Labour government that is expected to be dumped in favor of the conservative Tories in elections next year undermined his bid – as did Blair’s past vigorous support for the unpopular Iraq war.
A larger factor at play may have been the fact that a number of European nations (France and Germany) were uncomfortable with creating a foreign policy voice that could swamp that of their own leaders – allowing heavyweights like Britain to drown out the voices of their partners. In other words, Blair was seen as having too much star power.
In the choice of Mr. Van Rompuy, the president will be a low-key center right politician who is well-respected in regional circles as a consensus builder, but is relatively unknown on other continents.
British Labour politician David Miliband, currently the UK foreign secretary, was at one point considered in the running for the EU’s foreign minister post, though he insisted he didn’t want the job and preferred to focus on domestic politics. Catherine Ashton, a less internationally well-known Labour politician who current serves as the head of the EU Trade Commission, was named the first EU foreign minister.
The exact powers and role of the president are still being worked out. The Lisbon Treaty says the role of the president is to create “cohesion and consensus” among members states, “drive forward” the EU’s programs, and “ensure the external representation of the Union on issues concerning its common foreign and security policy.”
Those first two points aren’t controversial, but some EU members states remain uncomfortable with the concept of a “common foreign policy and security policy.” Before Thursday’s selection of Van Rompuy, Sweden, which held the last rotating presidency of the EU, circulated a memo seeking to outline the new president’s job that omitted the reference to a common foreign and security policy.
Observers say that as a practical matter, a Europe in lockstep on questions of international diplomacy and war and peace remains as unlikely today as it did on the eve of the Iraq invasion six years ago, when the UK committed major troops to the effort and France considered the war a mistake.
In addition to including international powers like France, the UK, and Germany, the EU’s 27 members include smaller nations with dramatically different political outlooks, such as Poland and Sweden.
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Afghanistan President Karzai inaugural speech: top four points
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Hong Kong: Developer profits off ‘lucky’ 88th floor apartment
By Peter Ford | 11.19.09
• A local, slice-of-life story from a Monitor correspondent.
HONG KONG – You’d think, wouldn’t you, that if you bought an apartment on the 88th floor you would have a pretty spectacular view, even in Hong Kong’s notoriously crowded skyline.
In Hong Kong, though, you can buy a pied-à-terre on the 88th floor but find yourself only 46 stories above ground level – practically a bungalow by local standards.
That’s because local developers, cashing in on Cantonese Chinese numerology, have taken to skipping dozens of floors so as to be able to sell property on “lucky” floor numbers such as 66, 68, and 88.
Hong Kong lawmakers have taken the issue up, with one party proposing capping the number of floors that can be skipped.
The row broke out recently when a prominent Hong Kong developer, Henderson Land, built a 46-story apartment block, but after completing the 43rd floor, numbered the top three 66, 68, and 88.
They know what they are doing. Henderson set a world record with one property in the building, selling it for $9,200 a square foot. Part of the reason it was so expensive (apart from the gym) was that it was on the 68th floor.
Except that it wasn’t. In the real world it was on the 45th floor. But 68 is a much better number.
Better still, though, is 88 (a homonym for “fortune fortune”). Henderson’s general manager says he is hoping to sell an apartment on that floor (physically the 46th), for more than $11,000 a square foot, which would be a new world record.
I hope the buyer will be able to see Victoria Harbour from the saddle of his exercise bike.
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Afghanistan President Karzai inaugural speech: top four points
By Ben Arnoldy | 11.19.09
NEW DELHI – Hamid Karzai took the oath of office Thursday for his second term as president of Afghanistan. With US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in attendance, President Karzai delivered an inaugural address that focused on cleaning up corruption, talking with the Taliban, and setting a five-year goal for Afghans to take over their own security.
Here are his top cuts:
On security:
“Within the next three years, Afghanistan, with continued international support and in line with the growth of its defense capacity, wants to lead and conduct military operations in the many insecure areas of the country. We are determined that by the next five years, the Afghan forces are capable of taking the lead in ensuring security and stability across the country.”
On the Taliban:
“We welcome and will provide necessary help to all disenchanted compatriots who are willing to return to their homes, live peacefully and accept the Constitution. We invite dissatisfied compatriots, who are not directly linked to international terrorism, to return to their homeland. We will call Afghanistan’s traditional Loya Jirga [grand council] and make every effort to ensure peace in our country.”
On corruption:
“Security and the rule of law can only be effectively ensured when both the government and the citizens are equal before the law.”
“To conduct research on this problem [of corruption], we will soon organize a conference in Kabul so that we can find new and effective ways to combat this problem.”
“To prevent corruption, we will adopt a law in consultation with the National Assembly for making it obligatory for senior government officials to identify the sources of their assets.”
“The Government of Afghanistan considers it to be its responsibility to dismiss all government employees who are connected to the cultivation and trafficking of illicit drugs, and to deliver them to the hands of the law.”
On the US relationship:
“The people of Afghanistan will never forget the sacrifices made by American soldiers to bring peace to Afghanistan. Afghanistan hopes to acquire the status of a major non-NATO ally of the United States.”
Read the full speech here (pdf).
