What the Russian papers say

MOSCOW, November 25 (RIA Novosti) Tehran threatens legal action against Moscow/Support for Ukrainian premier may cost Russia dearly/President fails to convince Russian people/New proposal: divert Siberian rivers to Kazakhstan

RBC Daily, Kommersant

Tehran threatens legal action against Moscow

Worries mount in Tehran as Russia strives to improve relations with the new U.S. administration. Fearing Moscow's tougher stance, especially on sanctions and arms supplies, Iranian authorities have been making bold statements. The Iranian military has, for example, threatened legal action against Russia, warning that it will develop its own systems similar to the S-300 surface-to-air missile systems.

Moscow believes Tehran should be given time to consider an International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) proposal to swap enriched uranium for research reactor fuel. Russia's Western partners in the Group of Six have been forced to agree to this approach. They are waiting for Moscow to agree to tougher sanctions against Iran.

But Iran is receiving little comfort from Russian. On Tuesday, Brigadier General Mohammad Hassan Mansourian, deputy commander of Iran's air defense forces, threatened legal action against Russia for failing to honor a contract to sell S-300s to Iran. He said the case could be taken to international courts of justice because Russia is refusing to live up to its obligation. Gen. Mansourian also said on Tuesday that Iran is capable of developing a system similar to Russia's S-300 itself.

This statement by the Iranian military looks like a bluff, believes Marko Lukovic, principal defense consultant at British Frost & Sullivan. He said Iran's air defenses are mainly equipped with imported weapons, for example, Russian Tor-M1 systems supplied in 2007. Iran has over 3,050 units, including Russian 2K12 Kub, S-200, and ZSU-23-2 Yenisei systems. It is likely that this statement was made to demonstrate the Iranian military's willingness to maintain the country's security itself.

Tehran is presently trying to exert psychological pressure on Moscow. Ramin Mehmanparast, an official spokesman for Iran's Foreign Ministry, on Tuesday hinted that public opinion of the Islamic Republic might worsen toward Moscow. Iranian public opinion, he said, is very sensitive to how certain countries fulfill their promises. Iranian society should not be allowed to cultivate a sense of being wronged, he added.

Kommersant

Support for Ukrainian premier may cost Russia dearly

The Russian and Ukrainian prime ministers were in agreement regarding the issue of natural gas transit to Europe, as they indicated at their meeting in Yalta, Ukraine, a Russian analyst writes.

Mikhail Krutikhin, a partner and analyst at RusEnergy agency, said that on Tuesday Russia's Gazprom and Ukraine's Naftogaz sealed Friday's agreements between Vladimir Putin and Yulia Tymoshenko on the volume of Russian gas deliveries next year and also Russia's pledge not to fine Ukraine for failure to take delivery of the contracted amounts of gas this year.

This demonstration of good will cost Russia dearly, Krutikhin writes. According to Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko, the sum of possible fines could exceed $8.7 billion this year.

Also, Russia's willingness to review the contractual terms based on lower guaranteed amounts of delivered gas is a bad example for other Gazprom clients in Europe, who may demand similar benefits, the analyst writes.

Russia had a difficult period that led to a change in the tone of its propaganda campaign. At the end of each month since last summer, Moscow said Ukraine was unable to pay for the gas it bought from Gazprom and that it would therefore have to lower pressure in the pipeline and demand advance payment for future gas deliveries.

Krutikhin writes that the warning was intended for European countries, which were told that Ukraine would again steal transit gas.

Russia clearly tried to demonstrate the unreliability of the transit route via Ukraine as a way of promoting alternative routes such as the pipelines across the Black and Baltic seas, while in fact Ukraine paid for Russian natural gas on time and in full, the analyst writes.

Moscow's current decision to stop angry debates and not to fine Ukraine can be viewed as the end of the promotional campaign for the Nord Stream and South Stream pipelines, the construction of which is to start soon. Russia now needs to build the pipelines and then divert the transit gas currently delivered via Ukraine.

It is time to do away with empty talk. A Ukraine that will not transit Russian gas will become a different country, and Russia and Europe will develop a different relationship with it.

Gazeta.ru

President fails to convince Russian people

The Russian public does not believe their president's promises and instructions as delivered in his state of the nation address. They view the prime minister's planned televised Q-and-A session as a more important event, according to a survey.

Unlike Vladimir Putin, President Dmitry Medvedev seems to have failed to convince the nation that he meant what he said in his address to parliament, according to a survey conducted by the Levada Center on November 20-23.

About 39% of respondents apparently found out about the president's important annual speech in parliament from the interviewer. Another 25% said they knew about the address but nothing about its content.

Most Russians have remained unconvinced that the ideas and proposals put forth by Medvedev are feasible: 36% of respondents said his plans were hard to implement, and over 6% ticked the "totally unrealistic" box.

Levada Center analysts explain people's skepticism about Medvedev's ideas by the non-businesslike manner in which he talked about them, as if discussing some distant dreams.

"The very tone of his address was dream-like," the pollster's deputy director Alexei Grazhdankin told Gazeta.ru. "He addressed ideas that would be good to do, but the speech lacked specific proposals about how they should be done - no action plan. At the same time Medvedev is generally seen as a political lightweight compared with Putin, and people fail to take his plans seriously enough. He has failed to convince the nation that he is capable of doing what he says."

To prove his point, Grazhdankin cited other figures from the November poll: 43% of Russians see Putin's upcoming televised Q-and-A session (the prime minister's reserved niche) as a more important event than the president's address to parliament, while only 16% think otherwise.

Vedomosti

New proposal: divert Siberian rivers into Kazakhstan

Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov has found a new way to create tens of thousands of jobs and to bolster the federal budget at the same time. He proposes diverting Siberian rivers, primarily the Ob and the Irtysh, to water Russian regions and to sell water to Kazakhstan.

Although drinking water shortages in arid regions and the reasonable redistribution of water resources are a major problem, the methods for implementing such projects and their environmental impact should be assessed.

Luzhkov wants to resurrect a Soviet-era project that was rejected in 1986, to divert the flow of northern rivers. At that time, Moscow wanted to divert the Pechora River into the Volga River and the Irtysh and Ob rivers into Central Asia.

There were plans to detonate nuclear devices in the constriction of the first 65-km-long canal along the Pechora-Kama watershed.

However, the Soviet government put an end to this plan after a device with the same yield as two Hiroshima-class bombs was detonated in the Perm Region, now part of the Perm Territory in the Urals Federal District, in March 1971 resulting in a radioactive lake.

A total of 48 design-and-prospecting and another 112 research institutes were involved in an even more ambitious project to construct a huge 2,550-km-long canal measuring 130-300 m wide.

The project required tremendous human, financial and material resources. The canal was to have dwarfed the Dnieper and the Don rivers, which are 2,200 km and 2,000 km long, respectively.

Although initial project costs were estimated at 32 billion Soviet rubles ($19.2 billion in the 1980s), environmentalists claimed that they would have soared three-fold.

Scientists and activists warned that northern rivers would become shallow, if diverted, that local forests would be destroyed and numerous fish, bird and animal species killed. Water seeping through canal walls would have created swamps in the Baraba steppe, an important Russian agricultural district in western Siberia, and part of Soviet virgin lands.

The new river diversion project would cost an estimated $25-40 billion, excluding right-of-way purchase allocations. Nature faces the same hazards as before, environmentalists say.

Luzhkov wants to sell 25 cu. km. of water or nearly 50% of the Ob River's annual water runoff. Existing lining/coating technology cannot prevent substantial water loss through the canal.

In addition, the experience of diverting the Snowy River in Australia in the 1980s shows that deserts turn into salt-marshes when irrigated.

Most of the water would seep into the sand because over 90% of Central Asian canals lack an artificial coating.

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