Cold war shadow disrupts Russia talks

Summit in Helsinki opens in disarray as Poland blocks talks on new pact taking in energy and human rights.

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Poland's rulers are neocons. Go figure.

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Staff and agencies
Friday November 24, 2006
Guardian Unlimited

An EU-Russia summit in Helsinki opened in disarray today after Poland blocked the start of talks on a new wide-ranging pact, taking in energy and human rights.
Russia and the EU were supposed to begin talks on a Partnership and Cooperation Agreement (PCA), the fundamental text on trade and other issues to replace an existing agreement that ends next year.

The start of the talks was to have been the centrepiece of the summit, but Poland, in a dispute with Moscow over meat imports, wielded its veto.

The European commission can only start negotiations when all 25 EU member states have given it a mandate to do so. Poland - to the exasperation of other EU governments - became the first new member state to use its veto to block talks with a third country.
Poland's veto came in response to a Russian ban on its meat products. Russian authorities accuse Polish producers of violating hygiene laws and smuggling, although Moscow says there is no problem with the quality of Polish produce itself.

Warsaw retorts that the import ban was punishment for its embrace of the west and turning its back on its former imperial master.

The Polish veto was an embarrassing setback for the EU as it seeks agreement with Russia - its biggest energy supplier - over the security of future oil and gas supplies, and on democracy and human rights.

"Of course it would be better not to have it (the Polish veto) but we are going to keep on working," the EU foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, said as he arrived at the summit. "The situation will be overcome."

Energy is the thorniest issue between the EU and Russia. With the EU increasingly dependent on oil and gas from Russia, European governments want to ensure security of access and open up Russian oil and gas deposits and export pipelines to European companies.

"Energy is the key and the most difficult issue in EU-Russia relations, and there can be no immediate breakthrough at the summit. Talks may drag on for years," Fyodor Lukyanov, editor of Russia in Global Affairs magazine, told the Associated Press.

Russia and 50 other countries have signed the so-called Energy Charter, a treaty that took effect in 1998, setting out terms for trading and transporting energy across the Eurasian landmass. Moscow will not ratify it nor conclude a transit protocol with the EU that would force Gazprom, the Russian energy giant, to surrender its monopoly on transporting gas from Turkmenistan.

"It's out of the question that Russia will submit to EU pressure to ratify the charter," Konstantin Kosachev, the head of the Russian parliament's international affairs committee, told The Associated Press.

The EU sees the PCA as a way of getting the charter's language into a treaty, without requiring Russian ratification of the original Energy Charter.

Apart from energy, negotiations for a new partnership accord promise to be lengthy. The two sides have identified four key sectors - economic, justice, external security and research matters - as areas for closer cooperation.

On human rights, Russian officials said if EU chiefs challenged Mr Putin over his record he would counter by pointing to the treatment of ethnic Russians in new EU members Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. Moscow says they suffer discrimination.

The death of Alexander Litvinenko in London - three weeks after the former KGB agent and fierce Putin critic apparently ingested a mysterious poison - also hung over the Helsinki summit.

The Finnish prime minister, Matti Vanhanen, whose country holds the EU presidency, expressed sympathy to Mr Litvinenko's family but declined to say whether he would press Mr Putin about the death.

Russia has rejected claims from Mr Litvinenko's friends it had a hand in the poisoning. A Kremlin spokesman said Mr Litvinenko's death was "a tragedy."

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