Nepszabadsag Daily Newspaper, Hungary
July 8 2008

Hungarian daily attributes Russia’s support for Azerbaijan to energy
policy

[Editorial by Endre Aczel: "Gem"]

Anyone paying attention could have found a gem last weekend. During
his visit to Azerbaijan, Russian President Medvedev held out the
prospect to his host Ilham Aliyev that Moscow would support the Azeri,
rather than Armenian demands in the issue of the status of
Nagorno-Karabakh province.

Karabakh is an enclave inhabited mainly by Armenians in the territory
of Azerbaijan, and these two Caucasian countries fought a savage and
bloody war in the early 1990s for this territory. Its status is still
disputed. The Armenians would like a legalized independence for their
people, and Azerbaijan insists on its territory which it does not
possess. Until yesterday Moscow quietly favoured the Armenians, namely
Christians against Muslims. Therefore, it must have had a formidable
reason that the Russian sympathy suddenly changed from one side to the
other. The reason is serious but simple. It is called Russian energy
policy. Armenia has nothing, but it is of key importance where the
enormous Azeri gas reserves will be pumped in four years’ time: into
the pipeline called Nabucco, which bypasses Russia, or into the
Turkmen-Kazakh-Russian pipeline, which will (would) give a monopoly
role to the Russians in the transport and delivery of gas coming from
the basin of the Caspian sea. Therefore, in the imaginary dialogue
that took place between former Gazprom chairman and current Russian
President Medvedev and Aliyev in Baku, the former may have said the
following about the Russian stance in the Armenian-Azeri territorial
dispute: I will not give it free; and the latter: I am not asking for
it free. The price is simple. Russia is willing to buy up – on world
market prices – the whole Azeri natural gas production, providing that
Baku will sell it. It is on this that they are now starting
negotiations.

The Turkmen could even be removed from the equation. Which – namely
the fact that Russia is the biggest buyer of Turkmen (and Kazakh)
natural gas – is to be understood in such a way that if there is no
gas from Turkmenistan and not even from Azerbaijan, there is no point
in spending any money on Nabucco, the European Union’s pet project
which is meant to reduce the "dependence on Russian energy." Simply
out of decency, neither Medvedev’s side nor their partners utter the
word Nabucco, but it is clear that Gazprom, also as the Russian
state’s outstretched arm, is in a much better position that the rivals
fighting for the Central Asian energy resources. Partly because, if we
look at the Kazakh, Turkmen, and Azeri regimes, we can see that they
are all authoritarian, although to a different extent, therefore, they
feel Putin’s (or his successor’s) Russia closer to themselves than the
westerners who are buttering them up. They also fear it. They can see
the Russians’ unparalleled and monopolist determination and like some
kind of fresh Machiavellian students, they obviously start from the
premise that a wise prince likes to keep his friends close to him and
his enemies as far as possible. And Russia is close both
geographically and in spirit (they were all Soviets once).

As far as I can see, Medvedev’s tour of Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, and
Kazakhstan has been successful and at the same time symbolic. From
here he set off for Japan, to the G8 summit, where members of this
totally useless club can again keep chattering for a while, as it does
not matter, what they say. He has done his job; he can lie back while
he is pretending to pay attention.

[translated from Hungarian]