Poland-Russia relations slowly starting to thaw
Poland's relations with Russia are on the mend just when Russian gas giant Gazprom is grabbing headlines over everything from pipelines to fiber-optic lines to natural gas prices.
The visit last week of Russian foreign minister Igor Ivanov the first by Russia's top diplomat in four years was trumped as the beginning of a thaw in cold relations that have beset the two countries since communism collapsed in 1989 and especially since Poland joined NATO last year.
"Out of 19 NATO countries, Poland at the moment has the worst relations with Russia," said Longin Pastusiak, deputy chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the Sejm and chairman of the Subcommittee on Transatlantic and European Relations in NATO's parliamentary assembly. "Mutual accusations, suspicions and grievances" will hopefully subside, Pastusiak said, noting that Poland's accession to NATO no longer seems a thorn in Russia's side.
Poland, which shares a border with Russia, should be in a position to foster an improvement in relations between East and West, the Democratic Left Alliance (SLD) deputy said. With a trade deficit of more than $2.5 billion with its northern neighbor, it can't afford not to. "Look how the French and the Germans were able to reconcile their historical differences," Pastusiak noted. Though numerous issues still need resolution before energy can be applied to the diplomatic thaw, Gazprom, which provides about 70% of the natural gas in Poland, has indirectly managed to speed up that process through pipeline controversies and rate increases.
The Russian oil and gas monopoly, which looks set to see profit this year of $1.5 billion-$2 billion and which accounts for 25.4% of the world's natural gas production, received considerable media coverage lately when firms involved in the construction of a nascent pipeline project decided to bypass Ukraine. Poland defended the interests of its strategic and economic ally which Gazprom accuses of pilfering gas but was careful to avoid losing out on an estimated $500 million in transit fees. Bidzina Bejuashvili, an oil and gas analyst with Raiffeisenbank Austria in London, describes the money at stake for Poland as "just huge."
In addition to transit fees, Poland could conceivably receive allotments of gas in lieu of payments, a particularly attractive scenario at the moment as Gazprom is hiking its rates for natural gas in Poland by 30% to match market rates.
Now, with last week's revelations that Gazprom included high-capacity fiber-optic lines with its Poland-crossing Yamal pipeline, Polish officials after getting past the initial outrage are checking into possible financial gains from long-distance telephone deals as well.
The latest is that the infrastructure has a capacity of 2.4 terabytes, or 37 million simultaneous phone calls per minute. Although the Economy Ministry is looking into legal issues concerning the licenses Gazprom would need to use the infrastructure, Gazprom already signed deals with two companies to provide international calls over the lines.
Although Gazprom is not the Russian government, government-level talks between Russia and Poland often factor down to discussions of the oil and gas giant's activities. Central European countries have made efforts to diversify gas supplies, but about 95% of the region's supplies still come from Gazprom, according to a London analyst. Gazprom exported $11 billion in oil and gas to Europe in 2000, the analyst said.
