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From the Vol.1,No.7 issue of Electronic Intelligence Weekly
RUSSIA AND EASTERN EUROPE NEWS DIGEST

Putin Proposes 'Arc of Stability' Security Doctrine

Russian President Vladimir Putin has proposed a Eurasian "Arc of Stability" security doctrine, set forth April 19 in discussions with the visiting President of Iceland, Olafur Ragnar Grimsson. The arc, in the Russian President's conception, would stretch from Europe to China. "As with the West, Russia maintains very good relations with many Asian countries including China, and we believe that to counter the 'arch of instability' in the South we can create an 'arch of stability' to face new challenges," RIA Novosti quoted Putin as saying.

Also reporting aspects of the Putin proposal were The Hindu, The Times of India, the Chinese news agency Xinhua, and the Russian Pravda.

This "arc" would have two pillars: a new, closer relationship between Russia and NATO, in which Russia would have to be on an equal footing with the other NATO members, and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, of Russia, China, Kazahkstan, Kyrgystan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, Putin said.

Russia is to play a central role in the "arc," Putin indicated. "We have very close ties with Asian states by sheer virtue of our geographic position and large territory," Putin said. "We have developed very good relations with the People's Republic of China in the format of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. This could add up to an arc of stability that would include very many countries and eventually evolve into a highly promising global security set-up."

The NATO-Russia summit is to be held in Rome May 28. Final arrangements for the summit are to be made at a pre-meeting of NATO foreign ministers, May 14-15 in Reykjavik.

"In this framework [of new Russian-NATO ties], we could come closer to creating a very promising organization for world security," Putin announced to the press at the Kremlin. Because of security problems requiring "a prompt reaction" by the international community, there must be an effective new mechanism for Russia-NATO cooperation. "This mechanism will work only if all of its participants are equal. In this respect, the role of the 'twenty' could be very large," he stressed.

Putin's proposal is clearly being seen as being in "stark contrast" to George W. Bush's "axis of evil," The Hindu wrote. The Russian Kommersant remarked that Putin was using the "notion of the curve of stability in opposition to the theory of the former assistant to the American President for national security affairs Zbignew Brzezinski, who called the Asian-Pacific countries the curve of instability," according to Pravda.ru. (Jimmy Carter's National Security Adviser Brzezinski referred to the countries bordering the then-Soviet Union on the south, including, e.g., Afghanistan, and the Central Asian republics of the Soviet Union, as the "arc of crisis.")

The key to this concept is that no nation is to be hegemonic in this security framework, Putin told the press. He stated that "we proceed from the necessity to strengthen the United Nations, the Security Council of the UN, the OSCE [Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe], realizing that these structures are supposed to play a key role in guaranteeing security. We have to act quickly and in a balanced way for efficient reaction on several problems, including terrorism, and the issue of weapons of mass destruction," Pravda reported.

"However," Pravda continued, "you can set forth an idea, and it is okay, but the way that you are going to realize this idea is a completely different thing. Especially if this idea touches upon Washington's interests [and] the restriction of America's supremacy in the world."

LaRouche's Writings in Russian on Website

Lyndon LaRouche's December speech, "Russia's Crucial Role in Solving The Global Crisis," is now on the Internet in Russian at www.larouchepub.com/russian/lar/index.html.

Addressing the International Symposium dedicated to the memory of Pobisk Kuznetsov, Lyndon LaRouche last Dec. 14 discussed the development of Central and North Asia as "the greatest transformation of the biosphere, in the history of humanity." The speech was published in English in the EIR magazine of Dec. 28, 2001.

Other recent additions to the Russian site include the Russian translation of "What Is Primitive Accumulation; On Academician Lvov's Warning," more proceedings of the Nov. 27, 2001 conference on Vernadsky and the Noosphere, links to LaRouche's recent interviews in Russian publications, and his March 2002 Open Reply to Ari Fleischer, "Peace Between Two Presidents."

Russia and Iran Promote 'North-South' Transport Corridor

Speaking April 16, during an official three-day visit to Iran, Russian Transport Minister Sergei Frank described a broad transportation project after meeting with his Iranian counterpart Ahmad Khorram. Frank said that Russia is ready to launch a trilateral transport project next month known as "North-South," which will link the Western states of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) with Central Asian countries via Russia, according to the April 16 report of RIA-Novosti.

The agreement on the transport corridor was signed last year by Russia, India, and Iran, and was approved by the Russian Parliament and President Putin this month. Frank added that Scandinavian and Baltic states, as well as Ukraine and Kazakhstan, have expressed interest in the project. According to the agreement, Russia will develop its Olya cargo terminal on the Caspian Sea in order to transit containers on to Iranian ports.

Science and Great Infrastructure Projects Key to Russian Development

Russia needs a number of great infrastructure programs, as an engine for the revival of national industry and science, said Vitali Tretyakov, former editor of Nezavisimaya Gazeta, on Russia's ORT-TV, on a new weekly program mostly focussed on the situation in the science-driven sector of Russia's economy.

"Especially after the Mir space station was closed, the Russians are feeling humiliated. The nation is tired of the evidence of being no more a leader in any sphere. The people are nostalgic for times when we had space science, and when we had an ideology. This ideology could be successfully replaced by a number of comprehensive development programs, especially space programs, as well as great transportation projects. This is what the state leadership should concentrate upon," Tretyakov said.

In the same context, Mikhail Leontyev, the editor of the program, claimed that the project of using the water of Siberian rivers for irrigation of Central Asia deserts, buried in the period of Mikhail Gorbachov's perestroika, should be revived, and this could become a basis for Russia's productive cooperation with the republics of Central Asia. He quoted the recent speech of one of the most powerful figures in Uzbekistan's establishemnt, Ismail Dzhurabekov, with a proposal to revive the project. In his comments, Leontyev denounced the claim of Gorbachovite environmentalists, that such an "intervention into nature" would cause the Siberian rivers to silt up, when actually only 6% of the water flow was going to be "reversed"--also helping to avoid terrible floods like those which recently destroyed two towns on the Lena and the Yenisei.

"These so-called specialists in ecology, for some reason, forgot that such projects have been implemented and successfully work, and they witness it any time while crossing the Volga-Moskva canal, which did not damage the Volga, but efficiently supplies their own Moscow city with water," Leontyev said, and gave the floor to a Kazakh scientist who had participated in a number of Western environmentalist projects in his country, some of them under the auspices of Soros Foundation, but had resigned as soon as he found out that his employers were directly financed from the Pentagon.

Leontyev recalled that the "river-turning" project was originaly proposed not by the "party apparatchiks," as the perestroika journalist flacks claimed, but by Russian scientist Yuri Demchenko in 1896. This project was approved in 1902 by Russia's Academy of Sciences, and its implementation was, on the contrary, impeded by World War I and the later collapse of the economy in the Russian civil war, in the early days of the Bolshevik government.

Leontyev also pointed to the example of the Spanish government, which ignored the environmentalist campaign against a canal project, thereby providing dry areas of the country with water and officially declaring that it "is not going to listen to this kind of argumentation."

Discussion of Reviving Siberia Rivers Project

The RosBalt news service reported March 21 that Russian Deputy Minister of Natural Resources Valeri Roshchupkin had spoken out about a possible revival of the Siberian water scheme. Roshchupkin referred to the interest expressed by officials from several of the drought-stricken Central Asian countries, in resurrecting the scheme to route water the Ob and Irtysh Rivers southward into Central Asia. Roshchupkin also pointed to the potential benefits for flood control, while noting that the project would require thorough environmental impact studies and huge investment.

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