Paul
Goble
Staunton, January 2 – Businesses and
governments in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan are angry at the failure of some Russian
firms to pay their bills and at the decision of the Russian authorities to
suspend long-planned investment projects, including some likely to have
important environmental consequences, in those two Central Asian countries.
The situation in Kazakhstan appears
particularly serious, according to media reports, given that many of the
projects had been agreed to long ago and confirmed only a few months back and
given that some of them involve suspension of plans to work together to save the
Ural River (rus.azattyk.kg/content/rossia-priostanovlennye-proekty-v-kazakhstane/27458866.html and regnum.ru/news/economy/2047912.html).
Reports that Russian firms were
leaving Kazakhstan began to spread last summer, RFE/RL’s Kazakh Service says,
when it was announced that Russia’s Lukoil had sold a major portion of its
share in Caspian Investment Resources, Ltd, to Beijing’s Sinoec. That firm has
five projects in Kazakhstan.
More critically, on December 8,
Moscow announced it wasn’t going to participate in a project it had agreed to
with Astana in 2009 to save the Ural River.
While Kazakhstan officials have been worried about that river, Russian
ones now say that “no one in Russia is beating concern about the status of the
Ural since there is no threat.”
And five days ago, a Russian
construction firm that had been building an airport in Uralsk stopped paying
its Kazakhstan partners. The latter have appealed to the Kazakhstan government
to take measures to force the Russian firms to pay what they owe, “Uralskaya
nedelya” reported on December 28.
Officials in Kyrgyzstan are also
angry at Russia’s decision not to go forward with investment projects it had
earlier agreed to. On December 25, President Almazbek Atambayev said that
Moscow was now refusing to invest in a project that Vladimir Putin had recently
told him would continue.
“It is obvious,” the Kyrgyzstan
leader said, that “in a situation when the Russian economy isn’t growing, these
agreements will not be fulfilled.” Putin’s spokesman confirmed that “commercial
difficulties and others of a conjunction nature” now require the bilateral discussion
of “various” other possibilities.
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