President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov is expected to take part in an informal summit of members of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) in honor of the organization's actual 20th anniversary date on December 8, the Russian daily Nezavisimaya gazeta reported (ng.ru). (A formal anniversary summit was already held on September 3 in Dushanbe.)
Citing a source in the Turkmen Foreign Ministry, Viktoriya Panfilova writes for ng.ru that Ashgabat may sign an agreement on a free-trade zone which was signed by other CIS members already on October 18 at a meeting in St. Petersburg. "Experts believe that earlier [a Turkmen official] had been prevented from doing so by energy disputes with Moscow," says Panfilova.
But those disputes haven't gone away, and it's not clear Turkmenistan will sign the free trade agreement or ever join the Customs Union. On October 18, as we know, the Turkmen Foreign Ministry in fact issued a sharp rebuttal to Russia's comments lately objecting to Ashgabat's new energy cooperation with the EU.
The source told Panfilova that Nazarguly Shagulyyev, the Turkmen vice premier for transportation and communications, was not authorized to sign international agreements -- and that only the president has that prerogative. He believes it is likely Berdymukhamedov will sign the pact when Berdymukhamedov comes to Moscow next month but said that Russia itself is to blame for the chilly relations now. Ashgabat repeatedly asked Russia to develop the Eastern sector of the Caspian and when it didn't hear back from Moscow, was forced to turn to Asian and Western partners, the official explained.
There are at least two sides to that story. Of course, there are all sorts of things like Ashgabat pulling the plug on 2.4 million Turkmens who were customers of Russia's mobile company MTS; taking away the Caspian Sea sector it had once promised to Russia's Lukoil, and then offering it to US companies -- which didn't get it yet in any event. And there are real disputes with Gazprom about gas prices and compensation for the April 2009 explosion -- and the overall umbrage Ashgabat is feeling over what they see as a Kremlin-orchestrated media campaign to undermine their claims of large gas reserves and portray the extraction of Turkmen gas as too expensive a proposition.
There's a lot more that has to be seen from the Customs Union for it to be believable. As Robert M. Cutler pointed out at the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute web site, when Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has talked about it, he has never mentioned how it will relate to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, where the Central Asian states are already members. Putin's plans are ambitious -- a body that will become the interlocutor with the European Union, and a supranational economic court. Uzbekistan has rejected variations of this scheme for years.
"Belarus is important because it gives a veneer of multilateralism to the project," says Cutler, "but according to Russian press reports, Putin did not even discuss the idea of enlargement with his Belarusian and Kazakhstani counterparts."
A decision was made to admit Kyrgyzstan in the CIS Customs Union, and Tajikistan has expressed interest, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reported October 19.
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