BELARUS NEWS AND ANALYSIS

DATE:

04/01/2010

Oil Feud Reflects Growing Rift Between Russia and Belarus, Once Close Allies

By ANDREW E. KRAMER

MOSCOW - The oil price dispute that erupted over the weekend between Russia and Belarus has been depicted as a threat to European energy supplies - a development that has become something of an annual cold weather ritual. The greater threat, however, seems to be to relations between the two countries, often thought of as the closest of allies.

From left, the Russian leaders Vladimir V. Putin and Dmitri A. Medvedev with President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko of Belarus.

The quarrel involves a crude-oil subsidy that for years has helped prop up the government of the authoritarian leader of Belarus, President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko. The subsidy agreement, which yielded billions in profits annually to Belarus's national oil company, ended on New Year's Eve, and Russia's prime minister, Vladimir V. Putin, said he had no intention of restoring it.

As he did in past disputes with Ukraine over natural gas pricing, Mr. Putin appears to have picked a fight over prices to settle a political score. Even though the states remain nominally joined in a political union, relations between Russia and Belarus have been deteriorating for some time.

Firmly in Russia's orbit back in 2006, during a re-election vote condemned as fraudulent by Western observers, Mr. Lukashenko was subsequently shocked when Gazprom, the Russian natural gas company, asked to increase prices. After that power play, political experts say, he began maneuvering to make his foreign policy allegiance far more ambiguous, making overtures to the West as leverage for seeking concessions from Russia.

By the summer of 2008, relations had deteriorated so much that Mr. Lukashenko was clearly out of step with Russia's neighborhood agenda, refusing, for example, to recognize the separatist regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia as independent states.

Throughout the past year, Mr. Lukashenko has acquiesced to a number of Western demands, including the release of political prisoners and the pardon last summer of an American lawyer who had been imprisoned after a closed trial.

Last summer, Russia banned dairy exports from Belarus, supposedly because they fell short of new packaging requirements. That prompted Mr. Lukashenko to boycott a Russian-sponsored ceremony to introduce a joint military force.

In the spring, in a move that Mr. Lukashenko had to know was anathema to the Kremlin, Belarus agreed to join the European Union's Eastern Partnership program, which aims to strengthen ties between Europe and six post-Soviet countries. It was either a sign of a long-term tack toward the West or merely the latest in a long series of feints and dramatic gestures intended to manage his relations with Russia, said Andrew Wilson, senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, in a telephone interview.

In this context, Mr. Wilson said, the Russian threat to end the oil subsidy makes more sense, a matter of "turning the screw to try to guarantee it gets a better return on the money it gives."

Under the pressure of these moves and countermoves, the Belarus-Russia alliance - once intended to become a single "Union State" bound by loose notions of Slavic brotherhood - has regressed to a customs zone, but even that is now threatened.

The two countries remain committed, at least nominally, to an eventual political union, but they continued their bickering on Monday as the national electricity company in Minsk, the Belarussian capital, said it might halt transmission to Russia's Kaliningrad enclave, citing a lapsed contract.

A Belarussian official was later quoted by the Interfax news agency as saying that this was only a "warning" in response to the Russian threat on oil.

Source:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/05/world/europe/05belarus.html


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