The shifting world system

Here is a very interesting piece by World Systems Theory guru Immanuel Wallerstein on Putin’s politics in a multi-polar world.

Some links on Ukraine

 

Ukraine oil pipelines

China/Russia pipelines: Reuters on the fossil fuel geopolitics behind the Ukraine conflict

MOSCOW/BEIJING, April 23 (Reuters) – Europe’s plans to reduce its dependence on Russian energy as the Ukraine crisis threatens supplies are spurring efforts by Russia’s top producer, Gazprom, to sign a deal next month to pump gas to China, industry sources say.

The elusive deal, slated to be signed next month when Russian President Vladimir Putin is expected to visit China and seen as vital if Russia is to be a big player in Asian gas markets, would wrap up a decade of talks in which price has been the main obstacle.

“Judging by the speed of work which is under way in Gazprom, I would say that the possibility that the deal would be signed is 98 percent,” a Gazprom source said, adding agreement on what China would pay for the gas was close. [READ THE REST.]

Cutting off Ukraine: The FT on Russia’s risk of killing its golden goose

Arseniy Yatseniuk, Ukraine’s beleaguered premier, claims his country is facing not just military aggression from neighbouring Russia, but “another kind of aggression – aggression through its gas supplies”.

Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine is all too real. President Vladimir Putin admitted last week that gunmen who helped Moscow annex Ukraine’s Black Sea peninsula of Crimea last month were Russian. Few western leaders doubt that pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine also include Russian soldiers.

Yet while it is difficult to disentangle the gas dispute from the geopolitical crisis, the accusation of “energy aggression” by Russia and its natural gas monopoly, Gazprom, is less clear cut.

By cutting off gas to Ukraine in 2006 and 2009 amid pricing disputes, Gazprom has hardly endeared itself to Kiev, or to European customers further west – which experienced disruptions to Russian supplies through the massive transit pipelines that run across Ukraine.

Now, paradoxically, Russia seems to be putting maximum pressure on its neighbour’s struggling government, while doing its best to avoid cutting off supplies. [READ THE REST]

Send a message to Putin: WSJ on why a trans-Atlantic energy partnership makes geostrategic sense

Energy has always been central to creating a trade and investment bloc through the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. If a TTIP agreement can reduce wide differences in energy prices between Europe and the U.S., Europeans will pay less for energy, while American energy producers will finally be able to profit from the recent energy boom by selling at competitive market prices. Trying to artificially hold down prices has heavy costs for domestic producers, encourages consumption, and dampens energy production over…  [READ THE REST]

Sheffield families vs the super rich: who flies more often?

From David Osler:

MILLIONAIRE Tory Oliver Letwin has come out against building new airports because he doesn’t want ‘morepeople from Sheffield flying away on cheap holidays’. However, I suspect that he has missed the primary sources of additional demand for aviation services.

One of the many interesting findings of the 2011 Wealth Report, produced by property consultant Knight Frank in conjunction with Citi Private Bank, is that all Russians worth $100m or more have increased spending on private jets and yachts over the last five years. The same can be said of 93% of super rich Indians, and 70% of high net worth individuals in the Middle East.

Indeed, the private jet market probably has further to rise, according to Tara Loader Wilkinson in Financial News, who quotes the opinions of a leading jet broker:

[T]he Russian & CIS private jet fleet is forecast to triple by 2019, with 650 deliveries scheduled from 2010 – 2019. Similar high demand is also identified in China where deliveries are expected to grow six fold, from 110 to 700 by 2019.

Nor are these people willing to fly on crap aeroplanes, it seems:

But the newly-monied do not want just any old private jets and yachts. Private bankers say the wave of emerging markets consumers have a competitive streak and when it comes to executive transport, big is beautiful.

“The (emerging markets buyers) are buying the newer, bigger, better jets. These, of course, have a higher ticket price.” said Mary Schwartz, head of Aircraft Finance at Citi Private Bank.

Related Articles

Who sold Libya its supermissiles?

From Wired.com:

The U.S. government calls it the “one of the most lethal” weapons of its kind — an advanced, portable missile, designed to knock planes out of the sky. A variant of it just showed up in Moammar Gadhafi’s army and nobody seems to know how exactly it got there. But diplomatic cables, unearthed by WikiLeaks, suggest one potential culprit: the Chavez regime in Venezuela.

Aviation Week’s eagle-eyed reporter David Fulghum spotted a Russian SA-24 Grinchsurface-to-air missile mounted on a Libyan army truck in recent cable news footage. And that’s a cause for concern: The SA-24 is more accurate, longer-flying, and more lethal than than earlier models of surface-to-air missiles. It also has a dual-band infrared seeker and is more difficult to jam than older systems.

The missiles “reportedly have counter-countermeasures that may be difficult for planes with just flares to counter,” Matthew Schroeder, director of the Federation of American Scientists’ Arms Sales Monitoring Project, tells Danger Room. ”Overall it’s just a much more capable system.”[…]

So how did the missile get there and where did it come from? Thanks to a shaky system of international arms-sale monitoring, its hard to say.

Russia has shown a willingness to sell Libya other sophisticated air defense systems in the recent past. In 2010, Moscow announced a deal to sell Tripoli a $1.8 billion package of arms that included two batteries of its big, bleeding-edge S-300 air defense missiles, in addition to Sukhoi fighter jets and T-90 tanks. But the deal was never finalized.

Schroeder says he can’t find any other Russian missile sales in the last seven years. But countries aren’t always keen to be candid about their arms deals.

[…]Russia has sold Venezuela a shoulder-fired version of the SA-24, which is a bit different from the truck-mounted model found by Aviation Week. In classified cables released by WikiLeaks, American diplomats expressed alarm at Russia’s deal with Venezuela, writing that the missile, “considered one of the most lethal portable air defense systems ever made,” was at risk of falling into other hands.[…] Gadhafi is reportedly close to Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, who has blasted the coalition attacks on Libya.[…]

So, did Chavez sell Gadafi the SA-24?

Notes: