Welcome to the Caspian Daily, where you will find the 10 most important things you need to know on Caspian Sea Region. We appreciate ideas, reports, news and interesting articles. Send along to Caspian[at]moderndiplomacy.eu or on Twitter: @DGiannakopoulos
1Many states — including Britain, France and North Korea — have used nuclear weapons to permit greater independence from their senior allies. Indeed, fear of that independence has frequently driven the United States’ surprisingly vigorous efforts to prevent even its allies from acquiring nuclear weapons, as several scholars have documented. To the extent that Iran’s senior allies — Russia and China — now constrain Iranian behavior, we might expect Iran to behave more independently upon acquiring nuclear weapons. But Russia and China are (at best) loose allies of Iran, so this effect is likely to be limited. Mark S. Bell for The Washington Post
2Former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger has urged the United States to treat Russia as a “great power” and stop making efforts to break it.“Breaking Russia has become an objective [for US officials] the long-range purpose should be to integrate it,” the 92-year-old said during an interview with The National Interest published on Wednesday.“If we treat Russia seriously as a great power, we need at an early stage to determine whether their concerns can be reconciled with our necessities,” he told the policy magazine.In his interview, Kissinger accused the American and European governments for failing to recognize the historical context in which the confrontation between Russia and Ukraine started.”The relationship between Ukraine and Russia will always have a special character in the Russian mind,” he said.“It can never be limited to a relationship of two traditional sovereign states, not from the Russian point of view, maybe not even from Ukraine’s. So, what happens in Ukraine cannot be put into a simple formula of applying principles that worked in Western Europe,” the veteran diplomat added.
3The Asian Development Bank (ADB) has approved a $1 billion loan to help Kazakhstan continue government programs to strengthen the economy in the face of recent challenges.”This loan from ADB’s Countercyclical Support Facility will give the country the fiscal leeway it needs to mitigate the unanticipated and significant negative impacts of the steep decline in world oil prices and the economic slowdown of the neighboring countries,” said Lotte Schou-Zibell, Principal Economist in the Central and West Asia Department.
4Iran will cooperate with Azerbaijan on gas transportation to Europe through the Southern Gas Corridor, Mahmoud Vaezi told Trend on August 20.The Iranian Information and Communications Technology Minister, said that his country plans to export gas not only to Asian markets, but to Europe as well.“Transportation through Azerbaijan is one of the routes of bringing Iranian gas to Europe,” Vaezi noted. The Southern Gas Corridor is a priority energy project for the EU. It envisages the transit of gas from the Caspian Sea region to European countries through Georgia and Turkey.
5Azerbaijan: Back in the USSR? The conviction of two prominent dissidents conjures up the Soviet past. Political prisoners are nothing new in today’s Azerbaijan, run by Ilham Aliev, its authoritarian president. But the Yunuses’ case is especially egregious. They are veterans of the Soviet dissident movement and still the country’s most prominent civil-rights activists. In the early 1980s they worked for a samizdat newspaper, Express Chronicle. In the late 1980s Mrs Yunus was at the forefront of Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika reforms, which held out the promise of a free and dignified life. When Soviet tanks rolled into Baku in 1990 in a desperate attempt to stop the crumbling of the empire, she led a national independence movement. [The Economist]
6The Delegation of Azerbaijan to the OSCE rejects the allegations made by the US, EU, Canada and Norway with respect to the situation with human rights in Azerbaijan and find such statement as undermining bilateral relations with these countries, said the statement of the Delegation of Azerbaijan at the 1064th Special meeting of the OSCE Permanent Council on August 19. “Azerbaijan condemns the attempts to deliberately politicize and misinterpret ongoing legal cases against some individuals in our country,” said the statement. “Azerbaijan calls on US, EU, its member states, EU officials and institutions concerned, Canada and Norway to respect the decisions of justice system in Azerbaijan and to refrain from interfering into ongoing legal cases. We consider the references made in the statements to some anonymous international monitor’s observations in courts as seriously flawed and designed with a view to exert pressure on administration of justice.”Every person in Azerbaijan is equal before the law and bears equal responsibility for his or her deeds, according to the statement.
7U.N. human rights experts have criticized a court in Azerbaijan for what they say were “politically motivated” convictions of a prominent rights defender and her husband.A court in Baku on Aug. 13 sentenced Leyla Yunus to 8½ years in prison on charges of fraud, tax evasion and illegal business activities. Her husband Arif Yunus was given a 7-year sentence for fraud.Six experts linked to the U.N.’s Human Rights Council in Geneva said in a statement Thursday that the convictions were a sign of “the continuing repression of independent civil society in Azerbaijan.”The Yunuses both pleaded not guilty during the trial. They have suffered serious health problems in custody since their arrest a year ago, and the experts urged Azerbaijan authorities to provide proper medical care. [The Associated Press]
8China Petroleum & Chemical Corp. completed the purchase of a 50 percent stake in a Kazakh oil producer from Lukoil PJSC for $1.09 billion, gaining full control of a venture with stakes in five oil and gas fields.The sale of Caspian Investments Resources Ltd. received the required permits from the state authorities of the Kazakhstan in late July, Lukoil said in a statement Thursday. The deal concluded after more than a year of talks and the price is less than the $1.2 billion agreed on in April 2014.
9Is A Slow Putsch Against Putin Under Way? A quarter century after the fall of the USSR, Kremlinologists sense a putsch in the air, despite Vladimir Putin’s overwhelming approval ratings. The tea leaves say that the Kremlin elite, dubbed by some as Politburo 2.0, is currently deciding whether Putin should go before he makes a bad situation worse. The founder of the respected daily Kommersant predicts that a dramatic change is about to take place and advises Russians who have the means to leave the country for a month or so and take their children with them. Paul Roderick Gregory for Forbes.
10Is Turkmenistan Opening Up?Turkmenistan remains the only Central Asian country that requires citizens of all neighboring countries to obtain a visa before visiting–with tiny exceptions (visits lasting five days or less) for people living in select bordering communities in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Though many statements have been made in the past, both by Berdimuhamedov and other regional leaders, about the need to ease travel over borders, there is little overall progress on that front. [The Diplomat]
