Russian President Dmitry Medvedev will discuss the Nagorno-Karabakh
conflict and routes of transporting energy resources from Caspian
sources with his Azerbaijani counterpart Ilham Aliyev, RIA Novosti
reports, citing a Russian diplomatic source.
The Russian president will take part in the third Caspian Summit in
Baku on November 18. He will have bilateral meetings with the
Azerbaijani president and leaders of Kazakhstan and Iran.
Medvedev will have talks on determining the legal status of the
Caspian Sea, environment, Trans-Caspian pipelines, economic
cooperation, investments, trade, assistant of the Russian president
Sergei Prikhodko said.
The summit will start on the second half of the day and will last for
three hours. The sides will sign cooperation documents and comment on
the results.
The Russian side will be represented by the president, Minister of
Foreign Affairs Sergey Lavrov, presidential aide Sergey Prikhodko,
Minister of Natural Resources Yuri Trutnev, Energy Minister Sergey
Shmatko, head of the Russian fish economy Andrey Kraynin and the head
of the Russian border service of the Federal Security Service Vladimir
Pronichev.
Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan will be at the meeting to discuss
the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, Prikhodko said.
There have already been seven trilateral meetings of the leaders of
Russia, Armenia and Azerbaijan in the last two years. At the last
meeting on October 27 in Astrakhan the sides agreed to exchange
prisoners of war and return the bodies of the killed. Medvedev said
that principles of settling the conflict still need to be solved.
Fruitful work this month will allow the sides to come up with a
variant of principles to settle the conflict by the start of the OSCE
summit on December 1-2.
The second topic is the fuel and energy complex. Nabucco may be the
main energy topic of discussions. Nabucco project involves transport
of Russian gas from the Caspian region to European countries bypassing
Russia through Azerbaijan, Georgia, Turkey, Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania
and Austria. The pipeline will be 3 300 km long and will be part of
Baku-Tbilisi-Erzurum gas pipeline. It is expected to transport 20-30
billion cubic meters of gas daily. The project is worth 7.9 billion
euro.
The Russian authorities say that Nabucco is not a competitor to the
South Stream project.
Joschka Fischer, a political consultant of Nabucco and former head of
the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said that the consortium needs
to conclude deals with gas supplies in order to launch the pipeline in
2015. Head of the gas department of the RWE company Stepan Yudich said
that in late August they were about to conclude a deal with an Iraqi
investor when the Iraqi government interfered and claimed that the
deals signed earlier were nullified.
