Arctic Progress is a new blog from Anatoly Karlin devoted to the Arctic region.
I’m singin’ in Ukraine…
Fighting in Ukraine’s Parliament as it ratifies the extension of Russia’s Crimean lease until 2042.
Gazprom’s private army
The Russian Duma has today voted in favour of allowing Gazprom to form its own private army. Reuters reports: A law backed by 341 lawmakers in the 450-seat State Duma lower house of parliament gave Gazprom, and oil pipeline monopoly Transneft, special exemption from strict limits on private businesses wielding arms. The two state-controlled companies [...]
Australia to export Uranium to Russia
Australia and Russia have signed a deal allowing Australia to supply uranium to Russian nuclear reactors. Initially this struck me as rather odd – I’d always assumed that Russia was pretty much self-sufficient when it comes to uranium. But, interestingly, Russia doesn’t mine anywhere near enough uranium to fuel all its nuclear reactors (military or civilian) [...]
Joseph Nye – what Russia is doing wrong
Joseph Nye (the soft power guy) offers up four reasons why Russia will not be a major power in 2020: They are failing to diversify away from energy and develop a broad based economy rapidly enough. They need a rule of law that protects entrepreneurs and helps foster a middle class that will support a [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Belarus reaches last minute deal with Russia over gas price
Just minutes before Gazprom implemented their threat to cut of gas supplies to Belarus, a deal was reached to secure gas deliveries until 2011. Under the terms of the deal, Belarus will pay $100 per thousand cubic metres this year, but the price will steadily rise until it reaches around $250 per thousand cubic metres [...]
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 [...]
Closed cities from the inside
Last week I wrote about the disgraceful number of closed cities in Russia, another of those leftovers from an anarchic age that Russia remains addicted to, despite (or perhaps because of) the restrictions it places on the human rights of their 1.7 million residents. In a rather timely decision, the BBC have just decided to [...]