Russian President Dmitry Medvedev will participate in the third summit
of the Caspian states in Baku to discuss the legal status of the
Caspian Sea, ecology, construction of Trans-Caspian pipelines, water
transport on the Caspian, Azov and Black Seas and economic
cooperation, the president's assistant Sergey Prikhodko said, RIA
Novosti reports.
The first summit was held in April 2002 in Ashkhabad, the second - in
October 2007 in Tehran.
Medvedev will meet Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev. Then he will
have a meeting with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He also has
scheduled talks with Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev. The summit
will start in the second half of the day and will last for three
hours. The Russian side will be represented by the president, Minister
of Foreign Affairs Sergey Lavrov, Minister of Natural Resources Yuri
Trutnev, Energy Minister Sergey Shmatko, head of the Russian fishing
agency Andrey Krayniy and the head of the Russian border service of
the Federal Security Service Vladimir Pronichev.
The Kremlin is devoted to establishing the Organization of the Caspian
Economic Cooperation.
The current regime of the Caspian was established according to an
agreement between the RSFSR and Persia of February 26, 1921, and an
agreement on trade and navy between the USSR and Iran of March 25,
1940. The agreements do not regulate use of resources, military
activities, transit, and ecology. Since 1996 a special working group
of deputy ministers of foreign affairs is holding talks on developing
the new legal status of the sea.
According to Prikhodko, Russia already has agreement with Azerbaijan
and Kazakhstan on determining the sea borders.
Prikhodko said that environmental protection is one of the topic
issues of the summit. The convention on ecology is about to be
completed. Transit pipelines on the sea bed are a risk for the
Caspian. An accident may have bigger repercussions than the accident
in the Gulf of Mexico, Prikhodko noted.
Iran urges the countries to avoid construction of any pipelines in
beneath the Caspian.
Russian Deputy Energy Minister Anatoly Yanovsky had said earlier that
Caspian countries will have hard standards for the Trans-Caspian gas
pipeline which involves gas transport from Turkmenistan to Azerbaijan.
The project development started in the 1990s. In 2000 it was halted
because the sides failed to come up to an agreement on the
construction conditions. In 2007 a potential supplier of the fuel,
Kazakhstan, said that the project is non-efficient. Legal status of
the Caspian and the lack of gas to fill the pipe are the main problems
of the project.
At the end of the summit Russia, Azerbaijan, Iran, Kazakhstan and
Turkmenistan will make a joint declaration and sign an agreement on
cooperation in security.
