Russia and Eastern Europe News Digest
Moscow Conference Commemorates Pobisk Kuznetsov
Some 70 scientists and representatives of scientific, political, and military institutions in Russia attended a May 30-June 1 symposium on "New Technologies and the Global Challenges for Civilization," held in Moscow to mark the upcoming second anniversary of the death of Pobisk Kuznetsov, known as "the 20th-century Russian Leonardo da Vinci." Lyndon LaRouche, represented at the event by Dr. Jonathan Tennenbaum, sent a message titled "How To Save a Sinking Ship." A full report will appear in next week's EIW.
Size of Russia's Oil Reserves Debated
Itar-TASS on May 28 reported a finding by the Russian Natural Resources Ministry, that Russia could exhaust its explored oil reserves by 2040, at current rates of exploitation and exploration. Critics of the current hype over Russia's potential to replace the Middle East as an oil supplier have pointed out that the technologies being used to boost output in Russia's mature fields will cause a subsequent steeper fall in output. Also noted is that Soviet-era prospecting on the Eurasian continent was extremely thorough, leaving it unlikely that there are major undiscovered oilfields. A Russian Ministry of Natural Resources official, however, told RIA Novosti on Apil 11 that the Russian continental shelf has untapped potential, comprising 20-25% of the world oil and gas reserves.
LukOIL Scheme for Oil Export Port
Leonid Fedun, vice president of Russia's biggest oil company, LukOIL, talked May 22 about the company's "ambitious" export project, for which it is courting Transneft, the state-owned oil pipeline monopoly. LukOIL wants to build a 1,500-km pipeline to Murmansk on the Barents Sea, and a port there to handle high-tonnage tankers to carry crude oil to the United States. Kommersant reported Fedun's hope that this route, bypassing the ports of Amsterdam, Rotterdam, or Antwerp, would make Russian oil "competitive" in the United States. LukOIL has already obtained 54% ownership of Murmansk's existing port, through ruthless takeover maneuvers.
Transneft's vice president Sergey Grigoryev would not tell Kommersant if his company has accepted Lukoil's proposal, but admitted that "such options have been discussed in private." It would be a $2.5-billion project, costing possibly more if the sea floor has to be dredged. Vedomosti suggests that the project is dubious, calling Fedun's press conference a PR action on the eve of the Bush-Putin summit.
French Banker to Gazprom: Raise Domestic Prices
Jerome Guillet, formerly of the notoriously bankrupt Credit Lyonnais bank, penned an op-ed in the May 31 Wall Street Journal under the headline "Fix Gazprom's Fatal Leak," also published in Russian, in Vedomosti of June 3. The alleged "leak" is Russia's failure to let Gazprom approach so-called "world market prices," in what it charges domestic consumers of the natural gas it supplies. Elaborates Guillet, "Gazprom's core obligation is to reliably deliver gas (512 billion cubic meters in 2001) to export markets in Europe and domestic consumers. The export monopoly to Europe accounted for just a quarter of its production and generated $14.5 billion last year; the rest is distributed in Russia at a tenth of what Europe pays, meaning that most of what Gazprom produces generates little economic benefit for the company." The domestic prices must rise, and soon, according to Guilllet.
Alarm Sounded About HIV Infection Rate in Russia
On UN Secretary General Kofi Annan's agenda during his early-June visit to Moscow, besides the Eurasian war crises, was the spread of HIV/AIDS. Itar-TASS reported that Annan met June 5 with officials from HIV prevention and treatment programs in Russia, who told him that the growth rate of HIV infection in the country is among the highest in the world. Over 2.5% of teenagers in Russia have been infected with HIV, they said.
According to a June 2 Interfax release, the Russian Health Ministry reported 88,120 new HIV cases mong Russian citizens in 2001, out of a total of 194,033 registered HIV infections since 1987. Urban Weber, UN adviser on HIV, was quoted June 2 in the London Observer as saying that "Ninety percent of Russian HIV cases [have] caught the disease since 1999. This means that the first wave of people will start arriving in hospital in three years."
The occasion for the Observer article, titled "Russian AIDS plague to hit Europe," was the forthcoming release of a report from the Imperial College in London, which projects that 5% of the adult population of Russia will be HIV-positive by the 2007. The Observer quoted one doctor who took part in the study, saying that in Russia, "four million adults will develop AIDS," and "it could easily be a lot worseat least double. And these people will die within 10 years." The highest rates of infection have been among intravenous drug users, but HIV is now spreading more widely through heterosexual contacts. The Imperial College study was commissioned by the UN AIDS program, UNAids, for presentation at a World Health Organization conference in Barcelona in July.
Chief of Staff Says Russian Military Resources 'Critical'
At a conference in Moscow May 30, Chief of the General Staff Gen. Anatoli Kvashnin said that "the declining level of combat readiness may become irreversible" for the Russian Armed Forces, unless emergency measures are taken to address a situation he termed "worse than critical." Kvashnin called for raising officers' salaries to double the average wage in Russia, "otherwise in three to five years, we will have no officers corps at all. Those in service since Soviet times will leave, and there will be no one to replace them."
A May 30 article in Moskovsky Komsomolets reported that 15,000 officers under the age of 30 have resigned from the service within the past two and one-half years. One-third of all lieutenants have left the military. MK quoted another General Staff officer, Gen. Valeri Astanin, who said that only 12% of officer-school graduates remain in the service, leaving "no one to command platoons and companies in units." Like Kvashnin, he used this statistic to demand more pay, also suggesting that those who leave should have to pay the state for the training they got.
Trans-Siberia Container Train on Demo Run
RIA Novosti reports that on June 5, a fast "demonstration train" departed Nakhodka Vostochnaya station in Russia's Primorsky (Maritime) Territory, bound for Buslavskaya station near the Finnish border, via the Trans-Siberian Railway. It is supposed to make the Pacific-Baltic trip in nine days, demonstrating to cargo-shippers that the TSR is viable for commercial transit across Eurasia, RIA Novosti reported. The event is being staged in connection with an international conference in Primorsky Territory, on East-West containerized freight shipping.
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