Category Archives: Uncategorised

Crimea-Armenia air route opens

OCT. 21 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – A direct air route is opening up between Simferopol, the capital of Crimea, and Yerevan, making Armenia the only country other than Russia since the Kremlin annexed the Ukrainian region earlier this year to set up a connection.

Media reported that the airline, Grozny Avia would run the once-a-week flight from Simferopol from Nov. 16.

Perhaps this is the price that Armenia has to pay for Russian economic and military support. The West has levied sanctions on Russia for its annexation of Crimea. Russia has said that Crimea voted to join Russia in an independence referendum and that its actions were legitimate.

And what it craves is international recognition. Russia has had the same problem with South Ossetia and Abkhazia, rebel Georgian states whose independence it has recognised to the chagrin of most the international community.

The only countries which have followed Russia’s lead are small countries from Central America to the Pacific Ocean looking for economic support.

Armenia may be falling into that category over Crimea. It will join the Russia-led Eurasian Economic Union in 2015 and looks to Russian forces in Armenia to act as a counterbalance for any Azerbaijani aggression over the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh.

Grozny Avia likely to be linked to Ramzan Kadyrov, the Kremlin-supported leader of Chechnya, provides another link between Russia and its semi-vassal states.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 205, published on Oct. 22 2014)

Court row over oil field sale in Azerbaijan

OCT. 20 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – Zaur Leshkasheli, a Russian oligarch, is suing investment bank Credit Suisse for not selling his 51 percent stake in the Kyurovdag oil field in Azerbaijan in 2008 for a high enough value, media reported. The court case should expose some of the murkier deal-making around the Caspian Sea.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 205, published on Oct. 22 2014)

Chinese company to sell pipes for Azerbaijan-Turkey-Greece link

OCT. 20 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – Chinese steelmaker Baoshan Iron & Steel Co ltd (Baosteel) said it had won a contract to supply pipes for the TANAP gas pipeline running to Turkey from Azerbaijan. The contract is significant because it means Chinese companies are competing for contracts along the South Caucasus energy transit route.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 205, published on Oct. 22 2014)

Kazakh budget to be reviewed

OCT. 17 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – With the price of a barrel of oil falling to a four-year low, the Kazakh government has said it will review its national budget. Kazakhstan’s economy is propped up mainly by oil revenues. With oil revenues falling and with sanctions hitting Russia, Kazakhstan’s disposable income has shrunk.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 205, published on Oct. 22 2014)

Azerbaijan needs a transparency compliance check

OCT. 15 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – The Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), a sort of best-practise benchmark for countries heavily involved in mining or oil production, told Azerbaijan that it needs to undergo a compliance check five months earlier than planned.

EITI chief Clare Short, a former British minister, said that concerns over Azerbaijan’s recent crackdown on civil society had triggered the compliance check.

“The situation facing civil society in Azerbaijan is clearly problematic,” Ms Short wrote in a statement.

“The Board discussed the findings of the fact finding mission and expressed deep concern. The Board hopes that Azerbaijan will open up more space for civil society to make its essential contribution to the EITI as laid down in our Standard.”

International pressure has been increasing on Azerbaijan over its treatment of opposition activists and human rights defenders. The EITI’s statement will be particularly irritating to Azerbaijan, though, as it has previously touted its links to EITI as evidence of its good intentions.

Being ordered to undergo a compliance check before 2015 will be publicly humiliating.

And there is some evidence that the pressure on Azerbaijan is beginning to tell. On Oct. 17, President Ilham Aliyev released four opposition activists as part of a wider amnesty.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 205, published on Oct. 22 2014)

Uzbek security chief comes out of the shadows

OCT. 15 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – A visit by Uzbek security chief Rustam Inoyatov caused a stir. Not because a senior Uzbek official visited Beijing, such trips have become fairly commonplace over the past five years or so as China extends its influence in the region, but because of a photo from the meeting.

At the meeting on Oct. 14, Mr Inoyatov is pictured shaking the hand of Meng Jianzhu, head of political and legal affairs of the Central Committee. This is effectively a ministerial position.

The photo showed a thick-set 70-year-old Mr Inoyatov with barely a fleck of grey in his hear.

It’s also the first publicly available picture of Mr Inoyatov for some years. Searches across the internet only yielded grainy or blurred shots.

The picture is symbolic. Mr Inoyatov has been accused of being behind the campaign to purge Gulnara Karimova, the eldest daughter of President Islam Karimov, of power. This picture may represent him, literally, coming out of the shadows.

Another theory about the picture is that it shows that Mr Inoyatov and Mr Karimov are putting on a show of force to Russia and a warning that it should not try to destabilise elections planned for 2015.

The photo suggests that Uzbekistan and China have grown increasingly close and that Russia risks being left behind as a bystander.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 205, published on Oct. 22 2014)

Russia army exercises in Armenia

OCT. 15 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – Around 3,000 Russian soldiers stationed in Armenia staged a week- long military exercise. The exercise is a reminder of Russia’s presence in the region and the fragile peace in the South Caucasus. Azerbaijan has made it clear that it still wants to re-take the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh currently run by pro-Armenia forces.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 205, published on Oct. 22 2014)

Georgian President to visit Japan

OCT. 21 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – Looking to secure more foreign direct investment (FDI), Georgian president Giorgi Margvelashvili travelled to Japan on a state visit. During his five day trip Mr Margvelashvili will meet with Japanese Emperor Akihito and PM Shinzo Abe, Georgia is heavily reliant on FDI.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 205, published on Oct. 22 2014)

Kazakhstan might not be able to afford 2022 Games

OCT. 19 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – Kazakhstan’s ministry of sport said that if it was to win the right to host the Winter Olympic Games in 2022 it would expect advertisers and investors to fund around 66% of the costs. Kazakhstan is desperate to host the Winter Olympics but observers have said that it might not be able to afford it.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 205, published on Oct. 22 2014)

Driving along the Europe-Asia divide in Kazakhstan

URALSK/Kazakhstan, OCT. 22 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) — Finding a taxi in Atyrau, a city of around 200,000 people in western Kazakhstan near its Caspian Sea coast, for the 500-kilometre journey to Uralsk is easy.

During the late morning, drivers gather at the car park in front of the city’s bus station. It costs 5,500 tenge per person (around $30).

Atyrau is a dusty boomtown, relatively charmless. Good then that it is quickly left behind. North of it is the steppe, interminable and yellow-brown.

The horizon stretches in every direction and very little gets in its way.

Small villages hide down secondary roads. Entrepreneurs sell melons at a few crossroads. There are roadside burial tombs, some standing alone and others in circular formations.

For more or less the entirety of the drive there is a curved line of trees to the east. Sometimes this line of trees is directly adjacent to the road and other times it hovers far in the distance. These trees hug the banks of the Ural River, which snakes down from the Ural mountain range before emptying into the Caspian Sea.

The river is the dividing line between Europe and Asia. Just over halfway to Uralsk the landscape, though still mainly scrub, begins to liven up a bit. Previously, the only trees to be seen were grouped together in unhealthy-looking planned groves.

Very slowly, these spindly man-made groves yield to more natural looking clusters. Slopes give some shape to the terrain over the final 50km of the journey. And then, 10km, outside Uralsk there is a big hill, the first the flat horizon has been broken, after which the city makes itself known to its new arrivals.

Settled by Cossacks and full of ornate cathedrals and brightly-painted wooden houses, Uralsk is a world away from Astana’s contemporary triumphalism.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 205, published on Oct. 22 2014)