Russia WTO entry – all but guaranteed

Russia’s World Trade Organisation entry has been all but guaranteed after the WTO’s Working Party on Russian membership agreed the precise rules and obligations that Russia will have to meet as a member of the global trading body. The news comes almost immediately after a customs and trade monitoring agreement between Russia and Georgia which [...]

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How the Belarus oil story has grown

I picked up some incoming traffic from Matthew Yglesias’ blog today. Wondering what was going on, I wondered over to his site, to find the following story about the Russian decision to shut down the flow of oil through Belarus: All of Europe gets cut off from crude oil supplies, apparently. His source is the [...]

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Oil wars

It looks as though Russia’s neighbours have made a New Year’s resolution for 2007 – to demonstrate to Russia that they too can flex their energy muscles. In the past few days: Belarus have slapped a tax on Russian oil transiting Belarus, and siphoning off Transneft’s oil to pay for it.  In response, Transneft have [...]

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Belarus-Russia relations sour over gas deal

It looks as if relations between Belarus and Russia are becoming increasingly strained, as reports come through that no agreement has been reached on the future of gas prices.  Although there has been no official announement yet on the outcome of the talks, Reuters are reporting that the talks went so badly that Lukashenko decided to [...]

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Union?

Following last week’s meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin and President of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko, many observers – myself included – chose to make fun of the way in which Lukashenko related or, rather, did not relate to Putin’s pet labrador. But perhaps more was agreed at their meeting than we originally thought.. Pavel Felgenhauer [...]

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