Federico Bordonaro

Analisi scritta per il Power and Interest News Report

The impression is that Russia wants to reposition itself clearly as a re-established global power before the United States elects a new president in the fall of 2008. American pre-election tactics, Washington’s difficult Middle East campaign, and high oil and gas prices give Russia an opportunity to accelerate its comeback. Nevertheless, it is unlikely that Moscow will seek an extreme diplomatic crisis with Washington in the coming months and years. Instead, it will presumably formulate a broad proposal, designed to re-negotiate its strategic relations with the West. Briefly said, Russia wants to re-negotiate what it had to do in 1990-1992 from a weak position, during its deep political, economic, and military crisis that followed the perestroika years.

Analisi di Sergei Blagov su Eurasia Daily Monitor. Uno dei problemi maggiori per l’Europa occidentale è che il sistema di reti su cui si basa Gazprom necessita maggiori investimenti. Tuttavia, la struttura del potere politico-economico alla base del colosso russo rende difficili i miglioramenti necessari.

[…]Gazprom appears to remain reluctant to allow independent players into its pipeline fiefdom, despite efforts by some government officials, notably the Economic Development and Trade Ministry. The Russian RBK Daily quoted anonymous Gazprom sources as saying that the gas monopoly would allow independent gas producers to invest no more than 25% of the funds needed to build new gas pipelines. Meanwhile, such capital would not guarantee any gas transit privileges for these investors anyway, the sources said (RBK Daily, July 6).

Simultaneously, Gazprom is watching for potential market openings that do not require building new pipelines. On June 14 Ananenkov pledged to develop infrastructure to expand into liquefied natural gas (LNG) markets, aiming to deliver Russian gas to markets currently inaccessible by pipelines. Russia’s UGSS would eventually include LNG capacities, he said.

Russian gas policies continue to evolve around the nexus of the country’s ageing pipelines. Therefore, Moscow’s ambitious export-oriented gas pipeline projects would remain largely dependent on the existing pipeline network, at least until the emergence of the country’s LNG industry.

John C.K. Daly su Eurasia Daily Monitor:

On July 26 Italian Minister for Economic Development Pier Luigi Bersani, Greek Development Minister Dimitris Sioufas, and Turkey’s Minister of Energy and Natural resources Turkish Hilmi Guler signed an intergovernmental agreement to build a $1.36 billion natural gas pipeline that will connect Azerbaijan’s Shah Deniz gas field to Italy via Turkey and the Adriatic (Corriere Della Sera, July 26). The Turkey-Greece-Italy (TGI) pipeline, with a completion date of 2012, has a projected annual capacity of 11.5 billion cubic meters of natural gas. The Turkish-Greek link is expected to begin operations later this month, while construction of the 131-mile-long Greek-Italian undersea portion of the pipeline is to begin next year. Turkey will take 15%, or 1.74 billion cubic meters annually, of the TGI’s natural gas.

Nonostante i progetti alternativi al grande network russo di gasdotti siano spesso oggetto di critiche, non mancano nuove iniziative, per la riuscita delle quali il ruolo turco appare sempre più decisivo.