俄罗斯与土耳其加强贸易合作
Release Date: 2010-05-13
ISTANBUL—Russia and Turkey signed several energy and trade agreements Wednesday, tying the knot in a relationship between historic rivals that has quietly grown into what Russia's President Dmitry Medvedev described as "a full-scale strategic partnership."
Met by a 21-gun salute and honor guard on his first visit to Turkey, Mr. Medvedev oversaw the signing of deals to ensure visa-free travel, build Turkey's first nuclear-power plant and boost construction of an oil pipeline from Turkey's Black Sea coast to the Mediterranean.
Wednesday also saw the first meeting of a high-level committee headed by Mr. Medvedev and Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan to strengthen relations between Russia and Turkey, a U.S. ally and North Atlantic Treaty Organization member. The two sides pledged to increase trade at least three-fold to $100 billion dollars within the next three years.
Agreements signed by Russia's state-controlled natural gas and oil companies, OAO Gazprom and OAO Rosneft, were among the most commercially significant of Wednesday's agreements, Russian officials said, though they declined to reveal details.
"Russian-Turkish ties are reaching the level of a full-scale strategic partnership," Mr. Medvedev said in an article published Wednesday in the Turkish daily Zaman, stressing that the "key" element of the relationship was in the field of energy. He repeated the idea at a press conference in Ankara.
Russia's state nuclear-energy company, Atomstroyexport, signed a deal to build, control and operate a $20 billion-dollar, 4,800-megawatt nuclear power plant at Akkuyu in southern Turkey. Sergei Kirienko, head of Russia's Federal Atomic Energy Agency, told reporters the agreement was a breakthrough, according to Russian news agency Interfax. For the first time, Russia would operate a plant in another country and sell its power, rather than just build it and walk away, Interfax quoted Mr. Kirienko as saying.
The two governments also agreed to "actively develop" an oil-pipeline project, already under construction, that would carry up to 1.5 million barrels of mainly Russian oil per day from Turkey's Black Sea coast to the port of Ceyhan, on the Mediterranean. Turkey wants the pipeline to reduce the number of oil tankers that pass through the Bosphorus. The narrow, winding strait has four blind corners and runs through the center of Istanbul, a city of around 15 million. It is the only way for ships to enter the Black Sea from the Mediterranean.
Moscow had been slow to commit oil to the $3 billion Turkish plan, which appeared to compete with a 51% Russian project to build a different Bosphorus bypass, from Burgas on the Bulgarian coast to Alexandroupolis in Greece. But a new Bulgarian government held up that project, and in October, Russian companies initialed an agreement that could give them a stake in the Turkish pipeline, too.
In Ankara on Wednesday, Russia's Energy minister Sergei Shmatko floated the idea that the two pipelines could be run jointly, banishing oil tankers from the Bosphorus altogether.
Tensions remain in the relationship, analysts say, dismissing the idea of a "strategic" partnership. Moscow, for example, has repeatedly expressed concern that Turkey's large Chechen community has become a safe harbor for militants. Turkey's plans to become a major energy hub for Europe remain in competition with Russian interests, while the potential for tension in the Causcasus also remains, analysts say.
Yet for two former empires that for centuries vied for influence around the Black Sea and were at the frontline of NATO-Soviet confrontation during the Cold War, Wednesday's array of deals mark the culmination of an extraordinary turnaround. Trade, particularly in Russian gas supplies to Turkey, has grown rapidly. Relations have been improving for years, said Iltan Turan, Professor of International Relations at Bilgi University in Istanbul, but the rapprochement accelerated after Russia's 2008 war with Georgia, which sharply cut U.S. and European Union influence in the region.
In an important shift last year, Turkey agreed to let Russia use its territorial waters for a planned pipeline to carry natural gas across the Black Sea to the EU, called South Stream. South Stream would compete with the EU's Nabucco pipeline project, which would carry gas to Europe across Turkey.
While Turkey remains committed to joining the EU, it shares with Russia a degree of frustration with the bloc, which has been cool toward Turkey's membership bid and appears at risk of economic stagnation, analysts say.
"When you examine how Turkey's relations are faring with other countries, including the EU, and the need to expand its economy in new directions, the rapprochement with Russia makes sense" for Ankara, said Mr. Turan.
The prize for Moscow, he said, appears to be the nuclear-plant deal.
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| Url: | ISTANBUL—Russia and Turkey signed several energy and trade agreements Wednesday, tying the knot in a relationship between historic rivals that has quietly grown into what Russia's President Dmitry Med |