MOSCOW. (Dr. Igor Tomberg for RIA Novosti) - There are signs of a chill in Russian-Kazakh relations, as shown by Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev's visit to Moscow on March 19-20.
Despite obvious achievements in trade and economic cooperation, the Kremlin is left with fewer and fewer possibilities of influencing its former-Soviet neighbor. Nevertheless, the cooling of bilateral relations should not be exaggerated.
While Europe, the United States, China and Russia compete for Eurasian resources, Kazakhstan is playing its own game, called "multi-vector politics." The heightening confrontation between Russia and the West on energy security issues is forcing the government in Astana, the Kazakh capital, to distance itself from Moscow, which naturally irritates the latter.
In their press statements after the meeting in Moscow, both the Kazakh president and Russian President Vladimir Putin named joint development of Caspian Sea hydrocarbon resources as a priority area of cooperation. Yet there are differences in their positions on the issue.
Kazakhstan is already connected to a pipeline that carries Caspian oil from Baku (Azerbaijan) to Tbilisi (Georgia) and on to Ceyhan (Turkey), from which it is shipped to Western markets bypassing Russia. Nazarbayev discussed the construction of gas and oil pipelines across the Caspian Sea, also bypassing Russia, with U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney last May and with U.S. Secretary of Energy Samuel Bodman last September. In late February, Assistant Secretary of State Richard Boucher reminded Nazarbayev of the agreements reached during his visit to Washington last September.
Moscow is dissatisfied with its Central Asian partner also because of Nazarbayev's plans to attend an energy summit that will be held in Poland in May. The Polish president, Lech Kaczynski, is expected to meet the leaders of four ex-Soviet countries - Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan - to discuss the possibility of extending Ukraine's Odessa-Brody oil pipeline to the Polish city of Plock to pump Kazakh oil to Poland. Last month, Astana announced the formation of a Kazakh-Polish working group to discuss the project. Kaczynski also wants to raise the issue during his visit to Astana on March 28.
There are also problems with Russian-Kazakh projects announced earlier. The parties have so far failed to agree on terms for the supply of associated gas from the Karachaganak gas condensate field in Kazakhstan to the Orenburg gas processing plant in Russia.
The problem of increasing the capacity of the Caspian Oil Pipeline Consortium's pipeline (CPC) to 67 million metric tons of oil a year remains unresolved. The CPC pumps oil from the Tengiz field in Kazakhstan to the Russian port of Novorossiisk, from which it is shipped by tankers through the Turkish straits to global markets. In 2005, Moscow promised Astana that it would consider the construction of a second CPC pipeline, but after Russian managers were put in charge of the consortium the issue stalled again.
Remarkably, the signing of a trilateral Russian-Bulgarian-Greek agreement on the construction of an oil pipeline from Burgas in Bulgaria to Alexandroupolis in Greece coincided with Nazarbayev's visit to Moscow. Admittedly, it will be difficult to fill the new pipeline to capacity without Kazakh oil. Astana is perfectly aware of that. It is no coincidence that Nazarbayev said in an interview with a Russian television channel that the project would not be economically feasible unless it involved Kazakhstan. However, the Russian oil companies that are the pipeline's major shareholders are in no hurry to invite Kazakhstan's state-owned oil company, Kazmunaigaz, to join the project. Apparently, such a move would require a political agreement.
All these circumstances make the bilateral energy dialog more difficult, causing suspicions and irritation. Nazarbayev even had to emphasize that Russia and Kazakhstan were partners, not rivals, in the oil and gas sector.
At the same time, problems in Russian-Kazakh energy cooperation should not be over-dramatized. Russia remains an important transit country for Kazakh oil exports. During his visit, Nazarbayev noted that Kazakhstan had exported over 40 million metric tons of oil (its entire output totalled 65 million tons) and 24 billion cubic meters of gas through Russia. A joint venture was set up to develop offshore resources in the Caspian Sea.
Now, the resurgence of interest in nuclear power generation has opened up another important area of cooperation in the energy sphere. Russia and Kazakhstan have set up three joint ventures in the sector: a uranium enrichment plant in Angarsk, in Russia's Irkutsk region, and two companies registered in Almaty, Kazakhstan: Atomnye Stantsii and Akbastau. The latter two are working on generation units with low- and medium-power nuclear reactors and are developing the Yuzhnoye Zarechnoye and Budyonovskoye uranium fields in Kazakhstan. That both countries are interested in the sector has been proven by Nazarbayev's proposal to Putin, inviting him to visit Kazakhstan this summer to discuss the joint development of Kazakh uranium fields and nuclear-fuel enrichment.
The diversification of foreign ties is of course inevitable. Moreover, Kazakhstan will be increasing its commodities exports and competing with Russia for influence in Central Asia and among all former-Soviet republics. Obviously, Nazarbayev now has several scenarios to choose from, because the players in the region include not only the United States and Russia but also China, which is becoming an increasingly significant factor in regional geopolitics. So the Kazakh president's visit to Moscow had both practical and strategic goals. The latter was a simultaneous demonstration of Kazakhstan's continued desire to be friends with Russia and the limits of its loyalty to Moscow, which is fully in accordance with the principles of its "multi-vector diplomacy."
Igor Tomberg is a senior research fellow with the Energy Research Center at the Institute of World Economy and International Relations, the Russian Academy of Sciences.
The opinions expressed in this article are the author's and do not necessarily represent those of RIA Novosti.
