Russia-Belarus Oil Agreement

A little bit of news on an oil-supply agreement and some pipleline news. Not necessarily transit related, but infrastructure none the less.

Russia and Belarus reached an oil supply agreement in Moscow on Wednesday, ending the threat of disruptions in European deliveries that arose when a previous deal lapsed at the end of last year. Russia announced that the two sides had signed documents that covered the sale of Russian oil to Belarus and the piping of Russian oil through Belarus for other European customers.

Source

Russian Federation Projects

These are the current active projects:



These are the projects in the proposal stage:



Very little in terms of infrastructure, but the Monthly Operation Report for the Federation has a little more. Most of them are exterior to the CIS or in rail transportation though. The waterway projects do stand out at me though. Maybe I'm missing the point with roads?

News: Gaidar dies.

"He began his career in a branch of the Soviet planning bureaucracy examining ways to revitalize the country’s creaking command economy.

But as finance minister he abandoned the idea of instituting gradual reforms of the type he had been studying. Instead, in charge of one of the great blank slates of economic history after the collapse of the Soviet Union, he decided to move quickly to liberalize prices and begin privatizing state industry."

Full article here

News: New Gas Pipeline

More infrastructure news, just not about roads out of the NY Times. New Gas Pipeling From Central Asia Feeds China. Looks like a new alignment brings gas into China without going through Russia.

This is more important for the development news community.

News: Corruption/Graft still Issue in Russia and China

The New York Times ran an article a few days ago about the corruption in Russia and China. Russia ranked 146th most corrupt out of 180 countries. China was in the 70's.

Less corruption is usually due to more oversight and government openness, but not always. More information and full article here.

NEWS: Russia Looking at China?

An excerpt from the New York Times article below talks about how Russia is looking to China as a political and economic model. This really doesn't make much sense in terms of promoting economic growth because the two nations are drastically different in policy and historical experience. Russia is more politically open then China, but more corrupt. Economically, their investment and manufacturing are very different because of resources and education levels. On infrastructure policy alone, China never had much of a rail based system, whereas Russia used rail primarily for industrial purposes. Maybe for size and political party they are similar, but the communism in China was vastly different than the communism in Russia.

Russia and the CIS as a whole need to be looking west, not east. Here's part of the article:

"Whatever the motivation, Russia in recent years has started moving toward the Chinese model politically and economically. After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russia plunged into capitalism haphazardly, selling off many industries and loosening regulation. Under Mr. Putin, the government has reversed course, seizing more control over many sectors.

Today, both countries govern with a potent centralized authority, overseeing economies with a mix of private and state industries, although the Russians have long seemed less disciplined in doing so.

Corruption is worse in Russia than China, according to global indexes, and foreign companies generally consider Russia’s investment climate less hospitable as well, in part because of less respect for property rights.

Russia has also been unable to match China in modernizing roads, airports, power plants and other infrastructure. And Russia is grappling with myriad health and social problems that have reduced the average life expectancy for men to 60. One consequence is a demographic crisis that is expected to drag down growth."
Rest of the NYT Article

News: Corruption in Russia, not really news

With the World Bank reform talks centering around the issues of corruption, this piece in the LA times about bribing traffic cops is relevant. If passengers are having these issues, it can only be imagined the problems commercial truckers and other road-based commercial transactions are having.

Article is by by Megan K. Stack and was originally published in August of this year.

"Before we start to look for trash in the eye of the traffic policeman, we should look into our own eyes," he says. "When I am asked, 'When will the corruption stop?' I always say that it will only stop when we stop paying bribes."

And, of course, he's right. But here's what I say, nevertheless: Pay the bribe! Because once I fumbled naively onto the path of the righteous and, my friends, it is a trail of sorrows.

If you pay the bribe, it may cost you $40, $60, maybe $100, plus 15 minutes and a few curses muttered under the breath.

If you don't pay the bribe, you have to go to traffic court. And it takes months to get a court date, and meanwhile you don't have a license, even if it's your American license.

And if you need to, for example, get that license back because you are leaving for a vacation in the United States and you want to drive while you're there, then you may (let's pretend this is hypothetical) have to hunt down the man in the bowels of the traffic bureaucracy who is powerful enough to get that license back. And that bribe will be plenty steep; lots more than you'd have paid on the side of the road. Hypothetically.

You travel to some sad sagging building where stray dogs howl at the doors and pay what you have to pay. At least that's over, you think."

Full Article is here

News: NYT: Siemens Fills Russia's Need for High-Speed Train

Below is part of a NY Times Article by Andrew E. Kramer about the highspeed rail project in Russia. My main concern with this sort of project is that while passenger rail is great, it doesn't really do much for transporting goods which may not be the best way to foster development. Anyway to the article:

Siemens’s new train — the Sapsan, Russian for peregrine falcon — is a candidate for the high-speed link planned between San Francisco and Los Angeles that may open in 2020. Alstom, the maker of the French TGV trains, and Bombardier are also contenders. Japanese bullet train designs by Hitachi, which are lighter but less secure in a low-speed crash, the only type of collisions survivable, are another option.

The technological breakthrough of the Sapsan is that the train has no locomotive. Instead, electric motors are attached to wheels all along the train cars, as on some subway trains. (Passengers sit in the first car too.) Its top operating speed is 217 miles an hour, though in tests this model has reached 255 miles an hour, or about half the cruising speed of some jet airplanes.

In Russia, it took a decade of on-again, off-again talks before Siemens signed a deal with the state railways in 2006 amid a general thaw in relations between Germany and Russia.

Here as elsewhere, high-speed trains will compete with airlines. The 401-mile trip from downtown Moscow to downtown St. Petersburg will be 3 hours and 45 minutes. The average flying travel time is five hours, including the trips to and from the airport, check-in and security clearance.

The four-times-a-day service will trim 45 minutes from the fastest train service now. To achieve this, the Russian state railway spent $485 million upgrading the track and $926 million for eight Sapsan trains and a 30-year service agreement, at today’s exchange rates.
In other countries, high-speed trains have roundly beaten planes on price, overall travel time and convenience at ranges up to 600 miles between major cities. After high-speed trains between Paris and Lyons became well established, for example, commercial flights all but disappeared. And in the first year of operation, a Madrid-to-Barcelona high-speed link cut the air travel market about 50 percent.

Full Article Here