Regional geopolitics

[Azad]

Some weird things are going on fast.
First Merkel shows up wasting everyone time and disappoints Georgia and azerbaijan.
Next Russia steps all over BP’s territory in the Caspian, most likely due to slow progress of oil and gas transports to EU.
Brits being in panic mode send minister to Iran.

[Azad]

Surprising no one is posting or talking of this???? Not even the Armenian Media????

[Vrej1915]

Վրաստանն արգելում է. ՌԴ-ից ցորենը կներկրվի միայն ծովային ճանապարհով. «Ժամանակ»

Lragir.am

28.08.2018



«Ժամանակ» թերթը գրում է. «Վրաստանի կառավարության որոշմամբ՝ սեպտեմբերի 1-ից արգելվելու է ցամաքային վերգետնյա տրանսպորտով դեպի Հայաստան ցորենի ներկրումը։ Ներկրող ընկերություններն արդեն զգուշացվել են, որ այլևս չեն կարող Ռուսաստանից ցորենը ներկրել Վրաստանի տարածքով։ Փոխադրումները պետք է իրականացվեն միայն Փոթիի նավահանգստով։

Բեռնափոխադրող ընկերություններն արդեն բարձրաձայնում են հնարավոր ռիսկերի մասին և նամակով տեղյակ են պահել նաև վարչապետ Նիկոլ Փաշինյանին՝ ակնկալելով հրատապ արձագանք, քանի որ խնդիրն ունի ստրատեգիական նշանակություն։

Ըստ ներկրողների՝ ցորենի ներկրումը ՌԴ-ից ՀՀ կունենա միայն մեկ ճանապարհ, այն է՝ ծովային ճանապարհը, որը մեծապես կախված է եղանակային պայմաններից։ Բացի դրանից՝ նման իրավիճակում գնաճն անխուսափելի է լինելու՝ մոտավոր հաշվարկով 50 ԱՄՆ դոլարին համարժեք ՀՀ դրամ մեկ տոննայի համար։ Բազմաթիվ մանր ձեռնարկատերեր (բեռնափոխադրումով զբաղվող, վարորդներ և այլն) գործազուրկ են դառնալու։

Կառավարությունը դեռ չի արձագանքել բեռնափոխադրողների նամակին»:

[Azad]

My conclusion from Merkel's weird visit.
She literally told Russia this is your backyard, we will not irritate you in giving any hopes to the Georgian territory or any NATO admission hopes.
Let me just look through the binoculars where you are stationed in South Ossetia.
azerbaijan get real with Democracy and do not harass Armenia. We can help you find a peaceful solution. No thank you I am not interested in taking a retarded naftalan bath.
Armenia you are just perfect!

[Azad]

Armenians are smart!

They did not have any expectations form Merkel. They visited sites, showed her how to be happy and enjoy life. She left very happy!

[Azad]

Azeris are retarded! "Angela Merkel in Azerbaijan: unfulfilled expectations

Merkel’s visit was wrapped up in high expectations. The government in particular hoped for a principled agreement on the export of Azerbaijani gas to Germany and further to other EU countries. This topic, along with the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, were the main ones on the agenda.

The agreement was not signed, though, according to Deutsche Welle, Merkel made it clear that Europe would like to diversify its energy market in order to reduce its dependence on Russian gas.

The German Chancellor did not publicly speak about the territorial integrity of the country."

https://jam-news.net/?p=119205

[Azad]

Georgians are retarded!

"Merkel's visit to Tbilisi leaves Georgians disappointed

“I don’t see Georgia becoming a NATO member any time soon,” the chancellor told an audience of students at Tbilisi State University on August 24. “Given the situation with [breakaway] Abkhazia and South Ossetia, we can’t talk about the swift integration of Georgia into NATO,” she said. “At least this is Germany’s position and it will remain as such.”

https://eurasianet.org/s/merkels-visit-to-tbilisi-leaves-georgians-disappointed

[Vrej1915]

Crackdown widens in Azerbaijan’s second city as police kill assassination suspects

Some have accused Baku of using the crackdown to sow fear about Islamist radicalism and to target the political opposition.
Bradley Jardine Aug 1, 2018

In the wake of the attempted assassination of the mayor of Ganja, Azerbaijan’s second-largest city, four suspects have been killed and dozens of others have been detained in what human rights activists have said is an attempt to stoke fear of Islamic terror and stifle dissent in the country.

The crackdown follows a series of still-murky events in Ganja. On July 3, there was an assassination attempt on Ganja mayor Elmar Valiyev. A week later, theauthorities reported that two senior police officers were killed in demonstrations in support of the assassination suspect.

The next day, two people were placed on a wanted list, Azerbaijani law enforcement announced. One of them, Farrukh Gasimov, was immediately detained and the second, Rashad Boyukkishiyev, was killed in detention,according to Azerbaijan’s Interior Ministry. Fifteen more alleged participants were detained on July 17.

On July 21, another suspect, Anar Bagirov, was killed and another eight people were detained, according to a statement by the Interior Ministry. Then, on July 25, the alleged mastermind of the attack, Agha Sarhani, was killed by police, law enforcement agencies said. The last suspect pronounced dead was Fuad Samedov, who police say was hiding in a neighboring town, security forces toldTrend News.

In total, 61 people have been arrested so far and a further 13 have been placed on a wanted list.

“The July terrorist attack against the mayor of Ganja and the killing of two police officers created a need for the state to intervene to maintain political stability,” said Azerbaijan’s Prosecutor General Zakir Garalov, the regional news website Caucasian Knot reported.

According to Garalov, the case is being investigated by working groups formed under the Prosecutor General’s Office, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the State Security Service.

But activists in Azerbaijan say the government is using the unrest as a pretext to clamp down on political opposition. Members of Muslim Unity, a religious movement that been pushed underground since 2015, told Caucasian Knot that Agha Sarhani was innocent and that his murder was an attempt to smear the group.

Muslim Unity says Sarhani was an active member and participated in numerous peaceful protests with the group.

“The murder of suspects in the ‘Ganja case,’ including Sarhani, are a consequence of the government’s desire to foment fear in society,” the group said in a statement. The group drew parallels with the events of 2015, when members of Muslim Unity were arrested and convicted of organizing riots that began in Nardaran. Seven people died during the unrest, including two policemen.

Authorities say the group’s leader is connected with Yunis Safarov, the prime suspect in the Ganja assassination attempt and an accused Islamist radical.

On July 6, the government issued a statement claiming that “Safarov’s main purpose in committing a terrorist act was to establish an Islamic state governed by Sharia law in Azerbaijan, killing a number of well-known civil servants in the country, creating scandal, chaos, panic and, ultimately, the forced seizure of power.”

But the official account leaves many questions unanswered, some analysts note.

“In the official narrative, contradictory [pieces of information] were threaded together, [saying Safarov] studied in Qom in Iran [a Shia city] and then joined ISIS [a Sunni terrorist outfit that is hostile to Shia Muslims],” Leyla Aliyeva, a political analyst, told Ekho Kavkaza, RFE/RL’s Caucasus news service. “In other words, these were completely contradictory versions.”

Other activists have noted the opaque nature of the investigation and potential for human rights abuse.

“We cannot say whether [those detained] committed crimes or not, but the fact that their relatives are not provided with information about the place of their detention, and many are not allowed lawyers, is very alarming,” Ogtay Gulaliyev, a representative of the Center for the Protection of Political Prisoners (CPPP) toldCaucasian Knot. “Their relatives are so scared they do not want to make official statements.”

According to CPPP’s January 2018 data, Azerbaijan has over 161 political prisoners. Activists from Muslim Unity constitute the largest group.

Bradley Jardine is a freelance journalist who covers the Caucasus.

[Vrej1915]

Caspian agreement may trigger cascade of energy projects

After decades of wrangling, the five Caspian states appear ready to cooperate.
Peter Leonard Aug 8, 2018

The Caspian littoral states have been waiting a long time for this deal. (David Trilling)

A convention on the Caspian Sea to be signed at an upcoming summit in Kazakhstan may serve as the starting pistol for a long-mulled natural gas pipeline joining Turkmenistan to Azerbaijan.

This route would, if completed, finally give Turkmenistan a direct entry point into European-bound gas transportation infrastructure through what is known as the Southern Gas Corridor. At a strategic level, there are even greater stakes in play. Success in making this pipeline a reality could trigger a cascade of undertakings to further bridge Central Asia and Western Europe.

“The Trans-Caspian Pipeline will be … a demonstration project for trans-Caspian energy transmission,” Robert M. Cutler, a senior researcher at Carleton University’s Institute of European, Russian and Eurasian Studies, told Eurasianet.

Much of Kazakhstan’s westward oil exports are now funneled either overland through Russia or in tankers across the Caspian, but the appearance of the Trans-Caspian Pipeline, or TCP, could be succeeded by oil pipelines along the same seabed. That route would circumvent Russia.

Advance indications about the new draft convention on the legal status of the Caspian Sea, which the five littoral nations are expected to sign at a summit in the coastal Kazakhstan city of Aktau on August 12, are positive.

Any kind of consensus would set aside a tussle that has been raging ever since the Cossacks serving the Russian Tsar set across the sea in the second half of the 17th century to lay waste to towns in northern Persia. After hundreds of years of conflict, Soviet-Persian treaties signed in 1921 and 1940, respectively, restored a semblance of accord that was again disrupted when the Soviet collapse led to the appearance of three new sovereign nations on the map.

This lack of clarity has held up initiatives like the TCP, which has faced stiff resistance from the likes of Russia and Iran. There appears to have been a change of mood in Moscow, however.

The upcoming convention will “solve many contentious and unclear issues about what the Caspian is and how Caspian states will in future address the exploitation of resources, the delimitation of marine space and so on,” Russia’s deputy foreign minister, Grigory Karasin told the State Duma in Moscow in June.

While the diplomatic deadlock has been overcome, the financial logic underpinning the TCP is less certain.

“In my view, [demand for Turkmen gas] is not strong enough because of two main reasons,” Yusin Lee, a professor at South Korea’s Yeungnam University’s political science department, told Eurasianet in an email. “In the first place, the European gas demand is not likely to increase much in the near future. Moreover, Turkmenistan’s competitors such as Mediterranean countries (e.g. Egypt) and Romania have recently emerged.”

One back-of-a-napkin projection volunteered by Lee envisions a gas pipeline able to carry 10 billion cubic meters annually in its early stages. If the price of gas sold in those amounts roughly approximates what Russia’s Gazprom on average now charges Europe – some $231.5 per 1,000 cubic meters – this could earn Turkmenistan around $2 billion per year, he said.

That is a tidy sum, but who is actually going to build and pay for the pipeline? Lee said he believes the project is unlikely to begin taking shape until large international companies, such as Italy’s Eni, sit up and take an interest.

“Unfortunately, however, I don’t think that these companies will appear soon,” he said.

Cutler is more upbeat, arguing that the cost of constructing the TCP in the first place will be far lower than is sometimes suggested.

“The pipeline is going to cost max $2 billion, closer to $1.5 billion. That’s cheap,” he said. “Any figure larger than that is out of date.”

And the infrastructure already in place means that the volumes Turkmenistan can export will be substantial.

“Turkmenistan will be able to export considerably more than 10 billion cubic meters annually as soon as the TCP is ready,” Cutler said.

When a firmer project budget is established, everything else should flow from that.

“Once the cost of construction is known, the price of the transit tariffs can be fixed. Once the price of the transit tariffs are fixed, then the shippers can reach agreement with Turkmenistan for sales-purchase agreements for volumes at known costs,” Cutler said. “On the basis of that, the pipeline will be built.”

One strand of objections to Caspian subsea pipelines, however, has been advanced by people concerned by what impact they could have on the environment. Although assessments commissioned by the European Union and the World Bank have ostensibly minimized those anxieties, green activists warn that the cost of something going wrong would be grave.

“Environmental risks associated with laying a pipeline across the Caspian are numerous, ranging from risks in the event of a spill to flora and fauna, including numerous endemic species such as sturgeon and Caspian seals, and to migrating birds who stop along the way in their flyover migration routes,” said Kate Watters, head of Crude Accountability, a nongovernmental group that monitorsecological issues in the region.

Champions of the TCP insist that recent advances in pipeline technology make such dangers a vanishingly small improbability.

The bear in the room

The conundrum behind all this is why Russia – long an opponent of trans-Caspian energy routes – is backing down.

One theory advanced by analysts positing a geopolitical angle is that Moscow may be trying to mollify the EU, which has thrown obstacles in the way of the Nord Stream-2 pipeline, an in-development Baltic Sea route that is integral to Gazprom’s European ambitions.

And Azer Ahmadbayli, an energy expert who writes for Baku-based Trend news agency, has argued in a recent article that Russia is interested in diverting some of Turkmenistan’s gas away from the Chinese market, where almost all of it currently flows.

“Russia has found that the transformation of Turkmenistan – the world's 4th natural gas reserves holder – into China's raw material base could negatively affect the volume and price of future Russian gas supplies to China via the ‘Power of Siberia’ pipeline,” Ahmadbayli wrote on July 17.

Cutler pointed out that the “people who make things happen don’t have the luxury of thinking in that way.”

“The people who have to negotiate on Nord Stream are concentrated on Nord Stream. People who have to negotiate Turkmenistan are attending to Turkmenistan,” he said.

Then again, there are those who believe Moscow stands a good chance of killing off the TCP at birth by simply resuming purchases of Turkmen gas — something itstopped doing in January 2016. Russian Deputy Energy Minister Anatoly Yanovsky hinted in late July that his government may resume negotiations in the fall on buying gas from Ashgabat.

“Gazprom could offer either to buy the gas at the Turkmen border at a premium, or to transit it on terms favorable in comparison to the southern corridor,” Simon Pirani, a senior visiting research fellow, wrote in a survey paper in July. “While Gazprom would prefer not to encourage a direct competitor, it might prefer to profit from offering that competitor limited access to a route to Europe that it controls, rather than allowing a new route to be opened up.”

Peter Leonard is Eurasianet’s Central Asia editor.

[Vrej1915]

Is Turkey heading for an economic crisis?

By Andrew WalkerBBC World Service economics correspondent

• 9 August 2018

Image copyrightREUTERS Image captionFinancial markets are uneasy about President Erdogan's views on economic policy
Is Turkey heading for an economic and financial crisis?

Recent developments in the country's financial markets have certainly been alarming.

The Turkish currency, the lira, has lost about 30% of its value against the US dollar since the New Year.

The stock market has fallen 17%, or if you measure it in dollars as some foreign investors would do, the decline is 40%

Another measure often watched in the markets is government borrowing costs.

Borrowing for 10 years in its own currency now costs 18% a year. Even borrowing in dollars is expensive for Turkey at a cost of around 7%.

So what is going on? Debt dangers

Turkey has a deficit in its international trade. It imports more than it exports. Or to put it another way, it spends more than it earns. That deficit has to be financed, either by foreign investment or by borrowing.

In itself that is neither unusual nor dangerous. But Turkey's deficit is quite large at 5.5% of national income, or GDP, last year.

There are two features of Turkey's foreign debt that also increase its vulnerability.

First, it has a high level of debt due for repayment in the near future - loans that have to be repaid and the money borrowed anew. To use the language of the financial markets, the debt has to be refinanced. Credit rating agency Fitch estimates that Turkey's total financing needs this year will be almost $230bn.

Second, many Turkish companies have borrowed in foreign currency. Those loans become more expensive to repay if the value of the national currency declines - which it has.

The currency weakness also aggravates Turkey's persistent inflation problem. The weaker lira makes imports more expensive.
The central bank has an inflation target of 5%. A year ago, inflation was well above that, at about 10%. Since then the situation has deteriorated further with prices now rising at an annual rate of about 15%.

Financial market investors are also very uneasy about President Erdogan's views on economic policy and the pressure he is seen as exerting on the country's central bank.

There is an obvious policy option open to a central bank that wants to bear down on inflation - raising interest rates.

That can curb inflation in two ways. It can weaken demand at home, and by increasing financial returns in Turkey encourage investors to buy lira - which strengthens the currency and reduces the cost of imports.

Turkey's central bank has taken several such moves, but without any lasting impact on the problem. US relations

What bothers the markets is the president's well known - and most economists would say, ill-informed - opposition to higher rates. He has described himself as the enemy of interest rates.

The result is that investors are not convinced that the central bank will do what is needed to stabilise the currency and bring inflation under control. In turn, that makes them more wary about the outlook for Turkish financial assets.

Confidence has been further undermined by Turkey's strained relations with the United States.

Turkey has detained an American evangelical pastor and there are differences over the approach to Syria. In addition, the US is reviewing Turkey's eligibility for a programme that gives many exports from developing countries duty-free access to the US market.

Turkey is also at risk from developments in the US. The Federal Reserve continues to raise interest rates, which encourages investors to pull money out of emerging markets. The impact has been moderate, but it is potential aggravating factor for countries such as Turkey with other vulnerabilities. Image copyrightEPA
In some respects the recent performance of the Turkish economy looks reasonable. It has grown every year this century apart from 2001 (the country's last economic crisis when it received an IMF bailout) and 2009 (in the aftermath of the global financial crisis). In some years growth has been very strong.

Unemployment is on the high side - the most recent figure is 9.9% - but it has been relatively stable.

One important difference compared with the country's crisis at the beginning of the century is that there is now no exchange rate target, unlike in 2001.

Back then, the pressure in the currency markets forced Turkey to abandon the targets. This time there is no currency peg so the lira has simply been allowed to depreciate.

That said, credit rating agency Moody's says that economic growth has been boosted to unsustainable levels by spending and tax policies. Policies for long-term growth have been sidelined, the agency says, given the focus on election cycles.

Fitch warns that the risk of a hard landing for the economy, meaning a sharp slowdown or even a recession, has increased.