MOSCOW, May 21 (RIA Novosti) Tehran seeks new nuclear partners /Dissenters' march a flop/Oil in Russia is no longer an accelerator of growth /Scandal overshadows Putin visit to Vienna
Vremya Novostei
Tehran seeks new nuclear partners
Iran is drifting away from Russia and heading out on an independent nuclear cruise. On May 24, the UN Security Council will start discussing a new package of sanctions against Tehran for refusal to suspend its uranium enrichment.
The Iranian government refused to meet the international community halfway, and therefore cannot expect Moscow to support it the way it did six months ago. With that in mind, official Tehran has decided to seek new and more compliant partners in the nuclear sector.
As of now, Tehran sees three countries as potential partners to replace Russia - Venezuela, Syria and Belarus. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is setting out on an official two-day visit to the Belarusian capital Minsk today.
Minsk is just as interested as Tehran is in closer bilateral contacts. While Iran seeks Belarus' political support, the latter expects broader economic cooperation, primarily in the energy sector.
The Belarus-Iran contacts intensified last year, when Minsk faced price hikes on Russian fuels as of 2007.
What Belarus wants is to participate in Iranian oil fields development.
"Our projects in Venezuela, Iran and Azerbaijan involve oil production from local fields," said Mikhail Osipenko, head of Belarusian state-owned petroleum holding, Belneftekhim.
President of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko, on a visit to Tehran in 2006, said Belarusian commodities must account for at least 10% of Iranian imports, to the sum of $4 billion.
VN has information that a bank with fully Iranian-owned capital will be set up in Belarus in order to facilitate business contacts between the two countries.
Iran's Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini said yesterday that Tehran would press on with its "peaceful nuclear program and build nuclear power plants," which is an "irreversible process."
Iran's Nuclear Agency also said that local nuclear engineers have already begun construction of a 360MW power plant on their own, without waiting until Russia completes the Bushehr project (its 1,000MW generator is to be commissioned in late 2007 or early 2008).
The Tehran Times daily confirmed that Iran has plans to build a series of nuclear power plants with a total capacity of 20,000MW by 2020.
As regards the Bushehr plant, the newspaper mentioned it in the last paragraph of the long article, saying that the "ceremonial" opening of the plant was slated for 2008, and tactfully explained the delay as the result of a "payments dispute."
Nezavisimaya Gazeta
Dissenters' march a flop
The so-called "dissenters' march" near Samara on the Volga, which paraded openly anti-Putin slogans, proceeded along the route agreed to with the authorities and without any major incidents, according to a political analyst.
Dmitry Orlov, director general of the Russian Agency of Political and Economic Communications, told the popular daily Nezavisimaya Gazeta that the march was timed for the Russia-EU summit in Samara and organized by the Other Russia organization, which includes the People's Patriotic Union, led by former Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov, the banned National Bolshevik Party, the United Civil Front, led by former world chess champion Garry Kasparov, and the Republican Party.
He said the march, apparently designed to demonstrate to the West the atrocities of Putin's regime, fell through because its organizers had been warned against provoking the police into using force against the marchers. The reason is that Europeans do not accept formal violations of the law by either side.
So, the march was rather feeble and not very representative, without martyrs and "sacrificial lambs."
According to Orlov, Other Russia is doing its best to position itself as an opponent of the regime and as its victim, because it has nothing better to offer the electorate.
Another goal of such marches, which are staged periodically to keep the conflict with the authorities burning, is to settle internal differences.
Former Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov was the first to take a stand as the common candidate of the radical opposition.
His move was soon emulated by Viktor Gerashchenko, the chairman of the Yukos board of directors, supported by Yukos co-owner Leonid Nevzlin and political analyst Stanislav Belkovsky.
The supporters of Garry Kasparov are talking about candidates' primaries, and Kasparov believes that the West supports him, Orlov writes.
Ultranationalist writer Eduard Limonov, leader of the banned National Bolshevik Party, initially stood behind Kasparov, but has shifted his support to Kasyanov.
Irina Khakamada, a right-wing leader, has not made her position public yet.
In the analyst's opinion, Vladimir Ryzhkov, an independent MP, is playing his own game, whereas the ideologists of the opposition, above all Georgy Satarov and Stanislav Belkovsky, cannot agree on the election strategy.
It is clear that the Communist Party, Just Russia, SPS and Yabloko will win the overwhelming majority of the protest electorate in the parliamentary elections in December 2007.
Orlov writes that the proclaimed goal of Other Russia, which will not run in the parliamentary elections, is to win the March 2008 presidential race.
But will it overcome the differences gnawing at it to collect at least 2 million signatures necessary to nominate one candidate, let alone the 6 million signatures needed to nominate three candidates?
The leaders of Other Russia are genuine "surplus people." Their tragedy is not that they are being forcibly pushed out of the political process, but that they have nothing to offer the people.
And so, they must become martyrs in order to survive politically, or else be sentenced to oblivion.
Vedomosti
Oil in Russia is no longer an accelerator of growth
Russia's government officials have started talking about new trends in the Russian economy. The importance of oil is receding into the past and the rudiments of diversification are already being seen instead of the expected crisis.
Over the weekend (May 19-20), Russia's Economic Development and Trade Minister German Gref said that the structure of economic growth had already changed.
Oil as a vehicle for growth has given way to investment and consumer demand. In the next several years, the government will focus on economic modernization and diversification, Gref said.
The results of the last quarter of 2006 and the first quarter of 2007 lend credence to Gref's words.
In the fourth quarter of last year, Russia's GDP grew by 7.8%, and in the first quarter of this year (according to preliminary data) it accelerated to 7.9% (against 4.6% in the first quarter of last year).
It is interesting that the processing industry, not mineral mining, was the growth leader in the first quarter of this year, while the economy in the fourth quarter of last year was growing against the backdrop of falling world oil prices and the consequent reduction in Russian oil companies' profitability rates.
True, the accelerated growth in investment and domestic consumption is nothing new. Analysts explained the accelerated economic growth rates in the fourth quarter of 2005 the same way.
However, if consumer demand is sustained by rising incomes, and increasing investment proves to be a tendency which is not caused by this year's specific developments (Russian gas giant Gazprom's joining the Sakhalin-II oil and gas project, the sale of assets of the Yukos oil company declared bankrupt last summer, and an IPO conducted by state-run Savings Bank, or Sberbank), real prerequisites will emerge for accelerating economic growth, even with a fall in oil prices.
In its May report on the Russian economy, the integrated global bank Credit Suisse stated that Russia depends on oil prices less than other oil exporters. Other analysts also say that the country's dependence on oil is gradually diminishing.
It is easy to see that the state has all the necessary instruments for sustaining current growth and its further diversification. The state should either create conditions for diversifying the market - that is, work to improve the rules of the game and the investment climate - or clearly proclaim a course for authoritarian modernization.
Judging by all the signs, it will choose the latter option. In that situation, the efficiency in using state funds and running the state as a whole will be a key factor for Russia's economic growth.
If the government officially proclaims that policy, it will have to assume responsibility for its implementation.
Kommersant
Scandal overshadows Putin visit to Vienna
The official visit of Russian President Vladimir Putin to Austria, scheduled for May 23-24, is under a cloud over a couple of recent scandals, the first stemming from the Kremlin's refusal to grant an interview to Austrian television channel ORF, and later postponing it.
The Austrian Embassy in Moscow, which prepared the interview as an obligatory part of the visit, received notification from the Kremlin administration saying that the planned interview with ORF was cancelled owing to "the channel's unfriendly reports ahead of the state visit."
When announcing the forthcoming visit by Putin, ORF said the interview would be complemented with reporting about the situation of Chechens in Russia.
Trying to mitigate the negative impression, the Kremlin later announced that none of the planned interviews (with ORF, Germany's RTL channel and two Austrian newspapers) would be held that day.
"The [ORF] announcement was not, and could not be, the reason for postponing the interview with the Austrian media," the Kremlin press service said.
Over the weekend, the Austrian Foreign Ministry said it regretted that the interview with ORF was cancelled. "It was a good opportunity to explain Russia's stance," it said.
Another scandal was created by the Austrian division of the human rights group Amnesty International, which appealed to Chancellor Alfred Gusenbauer to discuss with Putin human rights and the freedom of the press in Russia.
The Russian authorities have different priorities. They believe that one of the top issues on Putin's agenda in Vienna should be the proposed American ballistic missile shield in Europe.
Austria has initiated debates on the U.S. ABM systems in the Council of Europe. A neutral state that is not a NATO member, Austria is located on the border of Eastern Europe, and therefore has always been a reliable intermediary between Russia and Western Europe.
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