Latest Eurasia Daily Monitor Articles
CHINA SECURES NEW ACCESS TO KAZAKH OIL
On December 11 Kazakh Prime Minister Karim Massimov and Ma Fu Tsai, deputy chairman of the Chinese State Council Committee on Energy, arrived at Kenkiyak, a small settlement in Aktobe region, to announce the start date for construction of the 750-kilometer long Kenkiyak-Kumkol oil pipeline.... MORE
BADRI PATARKATSISHVILI: FROM RUSSIAN BUSINESSMAN TO GEORGIAN PRESIDENTIAL CLAIMANT (part one)
Badri Patarkatsishvili is the most powerful, albeit not the most popular, among the opposition candidates in Georgia’s snap presidential election on January 5. The oft-used designation of Patarkatsishvili as an “oligarch” is a misnomer in the Georgian context. Oligarchy involves a group, but Georgia does... MORE
BADRI PATARKATSISHVILI: FROM RUSSIAN BUSINESSMAN TO GEORGIAN PRESIDENTIAL CLAIMANT (part two)
Patarkatsishvili had set up his fully owned Imedi media holding in 2002 and the Imedi television channel in 2003. Given Georgia’s meager advertising market, Imedi was a money-losing enterprise, heavily subsidized from Patarkatsishvili’s funds. It cost him some $20 million annually, according to Georgian financial... MORE
WHY DID PUTIN COME TO MINSK?
On December 13-15, Russian President Vladimir Putin made the first official visit to Belarus of his presidency, which is scheduled to end on March 2, 2008, when new presidential elections take place in Russia. Ostensibly, the visit concerned the next stage of development of the... MORE
TYMOSHENKO CABINET GETS DOWN TO WORK
The coalition of President Viktor Yushchenko’s Our Ukraine – People’s Self-Defense (NUNS) and the Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc (BYuT) succeeded in electing Tymoshenko as prime minister on Tuesday, December 18. The coalition appointed her cabinet on the same day. Tymoshenko promised to review gas accords with... MORE
RUSSIA WANTS TO SELL GREECE WEAPONS AS WELL AS GAS
Following the defeat of German General Erwin Rommel’s vaunted Afrika Corps in North Africa in 1943, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill pressed for a subsequent Allied invasion of either Italy, the Balkans, or Greece, arguing that the regions represented the “soft underbelly of Europe” to... MORE
SECURITY CONCERNS AND LOCAL INDUSTRIALIZATION BOOST TURKISH MILITARY BUDGET
Although Ankara reduced its defense budget in recent years due to economic restraints, on December 11 Turkey’s parliament approved a 1.7% increase for the Ministry of Defense (MD) budget for fiscal year 2008. The budget, which includes the land, air, and naval commands, as well... MORE
MEDVEDEV-PUTIN: DREAM TEAM OR UNWORKABLE DIARCHY?
With President Vladimir Putin having now accepted Dmitry Medvedev’s invitation to serve as prime minister if, as is virtually certain, Medvedev is elected president next March, observers are now focused on the question of how this “diarchy” will work in practice, particularly given that Putin,... MORE
BALUYEVSKY ESCALATES WAR OF WORDS OVER U.S. MISSILE DEFENSE
Last Saturday, December 15, at a press conference in Moscow, First Deputy Minister of Defense and Chief of the Russian General Staff General Yuri Baluyevsky, together with Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Kislyak, expressed frustration over U.S. plans to build missile-defense bases in the Czech Republic... MORE
HUNGARY’S MOL STAYS WITH NABUCCO, BUT PRIME MINISTER WEIGHS SOUTH STREAM ALSO
Gazprom-controlled Kommersant claimed on December 13 that Hungary's MOL energy company has invited Gazprom to join the New Europe Transmission System (NETS), a proposal just launched by MOL to interconnect the gas transmission networks of at least seven Central and South-East European countries within an... MORE