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INTERVIEW BY THE RUSSIAN AMBASSADOR TO SWEDEN,
ALEXANDER M. KADAKIN,
TO THE KNOWLEDGE CHANNEL (KUNSKAPSKANALEN), STOCKHOLM
(March 15, 2008)
(Mrs Chris Forsne, Editor-in-Chief, interviewed the Ambassador)
Forsne: What do you think about the documentary we just saw?
Kadakin: The documentary is quite objective and I liked the film. In fact, it shows very graphically the importance of Gazprom in today’s world economy and in Russia.
Question: Yes, because it is so enormous. Economically speaking, how important is it to Russia?
Answer: Economically speaking, in Russia everything is enormous, and it must be so. If we have something, we have it big. And our slogan, our logo is “Think big!”
Q: Isn’t it an American slogan?
A: No, it is not American, it is Russian. Territory-wise Russia is much larger than America. Then, Gazprom is not an international giant, it is a purely Russian company. Indeed the capitalization value, the price of shares of Gazprom last year alone jumped up 160 percent and the total value of the company is now more than USD 350 bn. We are proud to have such a giant. We have been endowed by God and nature with that precious gift and we are happy.
Q: When you see this giant you realize even more that it is economically important as well as politically. We have seen how you have been able to use it almost like a political weapon, when you want to.
A: Chris, lately there has been much talk about Gazprom and gas supplies used as a political weapon. We are strongly against such accusations. After the break up of the Soviet Union and as a result of all the democratic changes in our country, we have been taught by the West to learn and master the instruments and chemistry of free-market economy. Well, we have turned out to be very bright and diligent students, and we have learned it. When nowadays we apply purely economic categories to foreign trade, we are immediately criticized as if it were allegedly used as a political weapon. Where and when? One cannot give a single example of that. During the last forty years we have been supplying gas to Europe, and there has not been a single case, you cannot cite it, when we would have used it as a political weapon or when we would have violated or failed our obligations and commitments.
Q: Do you have a feeling that everyone is against you?
A: No, we do not have the psychology of an encircled fortress but we are very much against unjust, politically biased and ill-intentioned accusations.
Q: And why are we unjustly criticizing you?
A: I do not know. I am not talking specifically about Sweden but about the West as a whole. Maybe some people are jealous that we have such a giant as Gazprom and that we have so much gas and oil. Maybe double or triple standards are applied to Russia.
Q: Do you think we see kind of a cold war situation only now we are not talking about conventional weapons any longer but we are talking about who has oil and who has gas?
A: I do not think any cold war is being waged now. How can you call it ‘cold war’ in economic cooperation among nations when we are dutifully supplying natural gas to Europe that badly needs it.
Q: But you can also close it when you want to.
A: But we have never done it and will not do it.
Q: But you threatened.
A: If you talk about some former Soviet republics, again we return to purely free-market economy arithmetic. If a country wants to get the former Soviet Union’s prices from us for the gas we supply, and that country now is an independent nation, why at all should the Russians bear the burden of USD 5 to 6 bln a year just because we are immediate neighbours or even brothers? You will not just donate a billion dollars to, say, Volvo for supplying their trucks, buses or cars to Denmark, Finland or Norway at half-price. Would you?
Q: Who is orchestrating this anti-Russian feelings or attitudes?
A: I do not know, it is up to you to see.
Q: But you feel that you have it all the time.
A: Nowadays the situation is improving because you can say foolish things for a long time but they will not stick if they do not correspond to the truth. If the West as a whole is so much worried about their newly acquired brothers and sisters, then why would not the West pay the balance in the cost of oil and gas? If you are so much worried, please pay us additional USD 5 to 6 bln a year and let your brothers and the EU neophytes enjoy the virtues of oil and gas. However, you are not paying that money but, instead, you are criticizing Russia.
Q: As we saw in the documentary, Russia has a lot of pipelines across the Baltic Sea and the Caspian Sea, by land routes and other ways getting into Europe from the south side. Actually you will be more or less controlling a huge part of gas that is coming into Europe from different ways, right?
A: We are not trying to control the amount of gas supplied to West Europe. We only want to have just, equal, and politics-free mutually beneficial energy cooperation with West Europe and other countries that surround us. As regards the land route, we have been hearing voices from across the Baltic that instead of the North European Gas Pipeline – the Nord Stream – we should opt for the land route. Why these voices are heard from there? Maybe because those countries want to receive money for nothing, just for transiting our gas? That is exactly what we want to avoid. Then if we have a land route, the pressure in the land tube is much lower than in the sea tube and in that case we shall need pumping stations every 100-200 km before the gas reaches Germany and later the Netherlands, Belgium, Britain, France, etc., while when we have a sea route, we need only one platform. Moreover, the sea route is more economical, not only from the point of view of additional pumping stations but it is much cheaper being direct from Russia to Germany and from Germany to other countries.
Q: This is the way the Russian Ambassador to put it that we do everything nice to serve everybody. Then why you have a lot of criticism from the Swedish side, saying that it is a very dangerous project actually?
A: It is not a dangerous project because the Baltic Sea is not very deep and the maximum depth of it is a little over 400 meters and the average is less than 50 meters. It is not a sea in the real sense of the word, though we love it. Russia is also situated on the Baltic Sea. The Nord Stream is much simpler technologically than, say, the Blue Stream project between Russia and Turkey in the Black Sea that is functioning successfully. It lies at the depth not of 50 but of 2000 meters!
Q: That is the one we saw in the film, right?
A: Yes. The Blue Stream functions very well. Not a single accident has ever been recorded in the sea routes, while numerous, dozens of examples of accidents with gas and oil pipelines on the land routes were reported. Then there is another aspect to this: while gas is not a threatening substance or chemical for water, for the sea because it does not react with water, it can be extremely dangerous when it is on land (explosions, etc.). Even if there is a leak, it will never spoil the sea. That is why all that criticism, I believe, has political background and, evidently, is politically motivated. While criticizing the pipeline your people forget that it is a project of EU priority importance, which was announced in 2000 and confirmed in 2006, very recently, as a priority European project. Then, while the criticism is heard: “Russians, Russians! Gazprom, Gazprom!”, you should remember that it is not a Russian project, it is a consortium. First it was a Russian-German enterprise and now it is a Russian-German-Dutch project. Three countries are now participating in this project, and I do not think that the EU neophytes will be able to block economic interests of so many other influential countries, like Britain, France, the Netherlands and Germany, just because they want the pipeline to pass only through their territories.
Q: Actually there should be probably political reasons behind it. It is a political question, why are we so afraid of you? Why are the Swedes afraid of Russia?
A: These are the leftovers of the old, outdated thinking. The most difficult thing these days is to change mentality. We have not violated any single contract in gas or oil supplies and there has been no accident on undersea routes. In Russia alone we have 157 thousand km of pipelines, the Baltic Sea has about 80 thousand km of underwater communications. Just this morning I read in the Internet that Sweden and Lithuania have signed a contract on underwater high voltage cable to supply power. No ecological expertise has been done so far, nothing! It was reported rather matter-of-factly. Then we know about the proposed gas pipeline from Norway to Gothenburg. Again no controversy is raging over that project. I think that some forces think the old way. They have those clicheed and old-fashioned thinking that the Russian bears are looking greedily at Europe…
Q: We are a small country, to the west of Europe on the other side of the Baltic, we are neighbors, we have historical reasons to be afraid of you. How should we know that the old times have passed?
A: You do not have any historical reasons to be afraid of us today. Next year, in 2009, we shall observe the bicentenary of the last Swedish-Russian war. Since then, Sweden never participated in any wars, and we are happy that you have become such a prosperous nation because of not having had wars, while we had wars every decade. These are the old fears, they belong to the distant past, of 200-300 years ago. Or take the Poltava battle of 300 years ago, that we will also mark next year – all those events are now lying on the shelves of history and we have to treat them as history, maybe at times painful, traumatic or tragic. Nevertheless, today it unites rather than disunites us because it is our common history.
Q: There is a big group in Sweden that has an interest in, for example, thinking about Poltava or a Russian threat in the context of the Swedish military complex.
A: We have very good cooperation with the military. Actually one month ago there was a second military exercise between the Russian and Swedish soldiers near St. Petersburg. Before we held the first exercise “Snowflake–2006”. I think, the Swedish army and the Swedish military do not consider Russia as a threat, neither we consider Sweden as a threat or a target of our aspirations or operations.
I will recall a very good example about Gothenburg. People in Gothenburg are very often wondering: why do the Russians have such a spacious Consulate-General? They call it ‘bunker’. The economic and other interests of Russia in Gothenburg are not so strong these days. I will open you a secret – our Consulate building was constructed during the cold war era. At that time, when we thought that the cold war could one day become a “hot” war we built that Consulate with extra flats (about 20 flats are empty now) so that if a “hot” war broke out, our diplomats from the affected countries, hypothetically, Britain, Germany, France, could seek refuge in Sweden. Never did we consider Sweden as an enemy or as a target for aggression, we considered it rather as a safe haven, a shelter for our people, like Sweden has always been a refuge for all the poor and daunted.
Q: And everybody thought that it was full of spies.
A: No, it was not and is not. I remember the same story when people in the parliament were talking everywhere that the ugly iron thing, the platform near Gotland, would be spying against entire Sweden!
Q: That is what they are still saying.
A: But we do not need to do it. We were inviting Swedish technicians to service this platform. We need the platform because pressure should be maintained in the underwater pipeline, it will not be located in the Swedish territorial waters but in the Swedish economic zone and according to the law of the sea. No provision is violated.
Q: But if you wanted to spy, there are more efficient ways of doing it?
A: We can read any car plate number in Gothenburg or in Stockholm live but we do not need your car plate numbers, that is why we are not doing it.
Q: What would you think we need in order for the Swedish to start considering Russia as a friendly nation, in a way we look upon the United States, for example?
A: We have been doing a lot in the last years and the first thing is, of course, to speed up and increase our economic cooperation. During the last four years the trade turnover between the two countries has doubled. That is the best way. Then we welcome Swedish investment in Russia, and IKEA is the largest single foreign investor in Russia – USD 2,5 bn. Portfolio investments are rising. Volvo trucks and buses will be assembled 500 km south of Moscow. There is a Scania plant in St. Petersburg. We want close, closer and even closest, economic cooperation. When we learn more about each other, we cooperate better and, these old fears will fade away. Your people, especially those who often visit Russia, can see that there does not exist any feeling of animosity towards Sweden in Russia. You cannot register it anywhere. The attitude of the Russians is that of high respect for Swedish technological achievements. Our people remember the Poltava battle only in its historical retrospective.
Q: It is the question of who won it and who lost it.
A: We lost the Crimean war, for example, in the middle of the 19th century but we do not remember about it that much.
Q: In Sweden we are talking about Russia as it is developing into a more Western way of being but we are still very often criticizing your lack of, what we call, democratic way of behaving. When it comes to the elections the Swedes criticize the Russian kind of democracy, what will you answer?
A: We have the kind of democracy that we built ourselves. There is no power on earth which can say that what kind of democracy is exemplary, even with my highest respect for the Swedish democratic system. I am not saying that it is perfect or that it is exemplary – that is what I hear from my Swedish friends. We cannot say that the American system of democracy is of the highest quality. Any country chooses its own democracy, we have the democracy which satisfies our needs, which meets our aspirations. There is a very vivid proof of it – 75 percent of our population support course of the President Vladimir Putin.
On March 2 we will have the presidential election. Last December we had the parliamentary election but some people in the West started criticizing us even before we held the elections, like those observers. I am very much angry with those observers. We wanted to let them come and let them see every hook and corner, everything and everywhere. But they should not impose on us the numbers, the dates of arrival and why at all are they dictating such a country as Russia?
Q: You see, we are coming back to it all the time...
A: They are imposing themselves on Russia even before the voting process starts to shout to every Tom and Harry that it was not just, it was not good, it was not correct – that we do not like and it is not so!
Q: Why do you think we still have this attitude towards Russia?
A: Maybe they are angry that Russia is developing too fast and too well but we are not presenting a threat to anyone. Again, take the observers. When Sweden had its elections in Autumn 2006, how many observers did you have? Zero! But why should we have them at all? If Sweden had no observers, if Britain had no observers, if the United States does not allow any observers by law. Are we the country to be granted somebody’s certificate or license to our democracy? We do not need such certificates from anyone. We live according to our own democratic rules and we think that they are of exceptionally high standards.
Q: Do you think that you are actually too nice and you should be even more arrogant than you are today?
A: We are not arrogant at all.
Q: Maybe you should be more arrogant?
A: Then we will immediately be blamed as aggressors. You know that.
Q: It is a tough life.
A: It is a tough life of a big country, which is rapidly progressing. Nobody likes a strong neighbor, I think.
Q: When do you think the Swedes will start looking at Russia as they look upon the United States?
A: They have already started but we do not want the Swedes to look at us as they look at the United States because the United States is very far away but Russia is next door. We must be very good neighbors, respecting each other and cooperating productively. Russian and Swedish peoples have so many things in common. They are of the same stock after all.
Q: If you send gas to us will it be at a market price, right?
A: Of course, no doubt, it will be at an international market price. We hear that there has been some interest in natural gas on the part of private businesses in Sweden. However, the current government is not showing interest. If private companies want gas, let them buy it but the government would not pay anything.
Q: Actually we could make a detour of the Nord Stream.
A: You could make a detour, you could make a branch towards Sweden. We understand your predicament because as a whole, Sweden does not have an infrastructure for consuming gas, only 2 percent of energy requirements are met by gas in Gothenburg and down south on the border with Denmark. If you build an infrastructure, we are ready to supply as much gas as Sweden would need.
Q: Maybe that will be the end of this Gazprom pipeline story?
A: Your government has not yet said its last word. As a matter of fact there has been no official reaction to the gas pipeline project. Now ecological reports, ecological surveys are being studied by your ministries. We hope that the gas pipeline will not kill the poor fishes in the Baltic, like there existed suspicions when the famous bridge was built from Sweden to Denmark that poor fishes would die. We see that no fishes are dying.
We are also equally concerned with ecological standards. Gazprom has increased its spending on ecological aspects of all its projects by 30 percent in the last year, and you can imagine how big is this figure. Please do not think that we are indifferent to the Baltic Sea flora and fauna and its ecosystem. Many Russians live on that sea like you, it is equally our sea as it is Swedish, Finnish, Polish, Lithuanian, Latvian, German or Estonian sea. Russia is equally interested in having a very good ecosystem of the Baltic. As a matter of fact, sometimes we are criticized for contaminating the Baltic but we are not the worst polluters – mind you! - we are number six. Some countries stand before us but this fact is not advertised. It is very conveniently hidden somewhere.
We want to cooperate with Sweden, we want to expand our cooperation further and then all other things will come. |
