BELARUS NEWS AND ANALYSIS
DATE:
16/06/2009
Conflict between Moscow, Belarus climbs to record high levels
By Itar-Tass World Service writer Lyudmila Alexandrova
Monday morning, a brisk announcer's voice in the Moscow metro invited Muscovites and guests of this city to visit a fair and exhibition of best products from Belarus and Russia, which is due to open Tuesday.
In the meantime, the political conflict between the two countries that have been allies pretty recently has reached a rate unseen heretofore.
The row over the ban on imports of dairy products from Belarus, which Minsk sized up as 'milk war' and Moscow described as a 'hysteria over milk' has prompted Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko to cancel a trip to Moscow where he was expected to take part in the ceremony of signing an agreement on setting up the Collective Rapid Deployment Forces of the CIS Collective Security Treaty Organization /CSTO/, which NATO believes to be an analogue of its own rapid deployment forces.
Russian mass media say the Kremlin feels reluctant to resort to compromises in contacts with Belarussian leaders and, on the contrary, is getting ready for a new attack on Minsk - with the aid of natural gas this time.
This, in turn, makes Minsk think over a possibility of installing customs control on the border with Russia.
The Belarussian authorities dismissed as illegitimate all the decisions of the summit that leaders of the other member-states of the CSTO held in Moscow Sunday. Thus President Lukashenko has called into question the legitimacy of fact that the Presidents of Armenia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajkistan, and Russia signed the document.
For fairness's sake, it is worthwhile saying that President Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan, who also took part in the CSTO summit, formulated a separate opinion on a number of common positions.
The Collective Rapid Deployment Forces /KSOR under the Russian acronym/ will consist of a military contingent augmented with units of special assignment troops /like Russia's Spetsnaz/. Its combat task is to repel military aggressions, to hold special operations against international terrorists and extremists, and to curb organized crime and drugs trafficking.
June 6, Moscow imposed a ban on imports of more than 1,500 brands of dairy produce from Belarus. Russia's Chief Sanitary Doctor, Gennady Onishchenko said in an explanation for the move that Belarussian producers had failed to obtain new authorizing documents standing in line with the new technical regulations as regards the composition of milk.
The Kremlin would not believe until the very last moment that Lukashenko would not come, especially considering the scheduled transition of powers of the CSTO's rotating chairmanship that was to go over to him from Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan at this summit.
According to Kommersant Daily, a group of the Belarussian protocol service and Security Service stayed in Moscow until the very last moment and it even looked for an appropriate restaurant where a gala dinner for the CSTO member-states' presidents could be held. But the Belarussian experts' sudden departure for Minsk Sunday morning gave the Kremlin to understand that a scandal was impending.
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev dismissed the Belarussian demarche as a 'milk hysteria', saying that the generally 'technical issue' of Belarussian dairy exports to Russia could have been settled, had Lukashenko given him a telephone call. He also made it clear he was discontent with the Belarussian president's desire "to exert influence on the CSTO decisions with the aid of bilateral problems."
One way or another, Sunday's events showed that the CSTO, which Russia positions as the principal tool for ensuring security on a vast space from Belarus to Central Asia is quite vulnerable per se and that the threats to its activity come from its own member-nations, first and foremost.
The Kremlin does not feel like pardoning Belarus for the public exposure of this vulnerability. "We're not particularly upset with Belarus' s conduct," a high-rank official on the Medvedev Administration's staff told Kommersant. "Very simply, it looks like someone's grown tired of being president in that country."
Dmitry Medvedev and Alexander Lukashenko discussed the problem of a price of natural gas for Belarus back in December 2008. The formula they agreed on then looked like this: the averaged European price per 1,000 cubic meters multiplied by a 0.8 reduction factor minus transportation costs and export duties. However, Minsk overlooked somehow an increase of the price to 210 U.S. dollars from 128 U.S. dollars per thousand cu m in the first quarter of the year. It continued paying under the previous schedule and its debt to Gazprom rose by 70 million U.S. dollars over the winter.
A solution to this problem was found at the end of March when Medvedev and Lukashenko had talks in the countryside presidential residence in Zavidovo. Moscow gave permission then to pay the averaged annual price of 150 U.S. dollars per 1,000 cu m, while the deadline for final settlements was shifted to the yearend.
The problem is this arrangement was an oral one and the sides did not report any documentary formalization of it.
On the background of these events, Lukashenko has issued an instruction to scrutinize a possible imposition of customs and document formalities on the Belarussian-Russian border. At this moment, control over cargoes arriving by transit via Belarussian territory from third countries is exercised only on the Russian side of the border, while Belarus does not have any customs units on its side.
Experts say the new restrictions will unlikely do any major damage to the Russian companies' interests but tangible economic consequences may emerge should Minsk choose to renounce the agreement on a customs union that spells out a duty-free mode of bilateral trade.
Alexei Arbatov, the director of the international security center at the Moscow-based Institute of World Economy and International Relations, says with confidence that Lukashenko is bluffing. "He's a well known man in this respect," Arbatov told Nezavissimaya Gazeta. "Unfortunately, he has a middling level of political education. He's using crude levers of political blackmail in this situation."
"Belarus is making ploy of Russia's need for a visibility of emergence of a new military organization amid NATO's ongoing expansion eastwards, and this is why he engages in bargaining and demands that Moscow make concessions on loans, the single monetary unit /of the Belarus-Russia Union State - Itar-Tass/, the imports of Belarussian produce, and so on," Arbatov said.
He believes that Moscow should not tie itself to Minsk's chariot.
"Were I the Foreign Ministry, I would tell them, well, don't let the door hit you on the way out," Arbatov said. "Lukashenko won't get anywhere. You don't want to be with the CSTO? OK, go seek other alliances then. They are not particularly disposed to opening their doors to Belarus."
Nikolai Petrov, a research fellow at Moscow Carnegie Center told Nezavissimaya Gazeta the events unfolding now are but a logical result of endless bargaining.
"Belarus is located between Russia and the West and it doesn't have resources of its own and it's simply compelled to act this way," he said. "That's an intricate political game even though stinging political statements are made."
Moscow scarcely has any need in Belarus from the angle of money or soldiers, yet it is important in the geopolitical sense as a crucial springboard - the only one Russia still has to the West of its borders, Petrov believes.
But is Belarus a really serious loss for the Collective Rapid Deployment Forces? Not very much, says Vitaly Shlykov, a member of the Council for Foreign and Defense Policies.
"There can be no strategic advance from the West because NATO is not an organization to conduct offensives," he told Gazeta publication. "If Belarus plans to continue blackmailing Russia - for instance, by withdrawing from the Union State agreement on antimissile defense, this won't mean any threat to our nuclear field."
He admitted however that KSOR is a much-needed force as such, since it is an anti-insurgent force in character and local conflicts are more realistic and dangerous for Russia than nuclear strikes.
Novye Izvestia says that Belarus received a painful blow from the other corner of the world Saturday, as Washington prolonged effectuation of a decree on the arrests of property of a number of high-rank Belarussian officials, including President Lukashenko and his son Viktor.
The decree went into effect after the presidential election in Belarus in March 2006,
The newspaper admits along with it that the Barack Obama Administration, which notified the Congress of prolonging the decree for another twelve months, underlined some hopeful changes that had occurred in Belarus, including a release of all the attested political prisoners from jail.
Source:
http://www.itar-tass.com/eng/level2.html?NewsID=14052758
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