Federico Bordonaro

Analisi di Bruce Pannier per RFERL, contenente parte di una mia intervista.

Medvedev’s Caspian excursion can be seen as a visit by the new Russian leader with some counterparts in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). But there is wide agreement that this trip, which will also take the former Gazprom chief to Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan, is aimed at shoring up Russian’s interests in the Caspian energy-exporting countries.

Federico Bordonaro, an analyst with Milan-based equilibri.net, notes that Azerbaijan remains a strategic thorn in Russia’s side — the place where Moscow’s near monopoly on Caspian energy resources first ran into trouble.

“Azerbaijan escaped the grip of Russian power and influence between the end of the 1990s and the beginning of this decade,” Bordonaro says. “The United States’ support for the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline and the Baku-Tbilisi-Erzurum gas pipeline has been key to Azerbaijan as an alternative to the control of the Russian state monopoly Transneft in order to convey its natural resources toward the West. So Russia has viewed its influence eroding in recent years and particularly the old Baku-Novorossiysk pipeline has been in part replaced by the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan for conveying oil to the West.”