Britannia Radio

You can begin to see here the whole rationale for Russia’s Caucasian
War. It is to bring under its control the oil and gas from Armenia
and Azerbaijan which presently bypasses Russia through Georgia.

Russia is behaving with naked aggression in line with its own years
of propaganda about wicked monopoly capitalists.

So Georgia’s dispute over its recalcitrant provinces are as complete
irrelevance. Control over Europe’s Oil is what it’s about!

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FINANCIAL TIMES 18.8.08
BP halts oil exports across Caucasus
By Isabel Gorst in Moscow

BP, the British energy group, said on Monday it had halted Caspian
oil exports across the Caucasus altogether after a railway line in
Georgia was damaged.
”The railway line between Baku and Batumi (oil port) is not usable at
the moment,” said Robert Wines, a BP spokesman.

Georgian Railways said a bridge on the main railway across Georgia to
the Black Sea was destroyed on Saturday, halting railway traffic
across the country, a key transit route between the Caspian and Europe.

Georgia accused Russian forces of attacking the railway, although
Russia denies this. A Georgian radio station reported on Monday that
Azerbaijan had rushed engineers to the Kaspi region of Georgia to
help mend the railway, its only oil export route across the Caucasus
since the closure of pipelines in the region this month.

BP closed its 150,000 barrels a day pipeline from Baku to Supsa on
the Georgian Black Sea last Tuesday because of fears of fallout from
Georgia’s conflict with Russia. BP also temporarily shut down a
second pipeline carrying Azerbaijani gas exports to Georgia and
Turkey. BP said the pipeline to Supsa had not been damaged during
hostilities in Georgia.

Even before the conflict erupted in Georgia, oil exports from
Azerbaijan had been drastically reduced by an explosion in early
August on the Turkish section of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline to
the Turkish Mediterranean, the main artery for Caspian exports across
the Caucasus.

Kurdish separatists claimed responsibility for the blast on the
pipeline which was carrying about 850,000 barrels a day of oil to
western markets at the time. BP said it had begun exporting small
volumes of Azeri oil through a pipeline from Baku to Novorossiysk on
the Russian Black Sea, a route it abandoned in 2005 when BTC began
working, freeing Azerbaijan of its dependence on Russian pipelines.

Russia invited Azerbaijan to increase oil exports through the
pipeline to Novorossiysk in the midst of the conflict last week.
Gazprom has urged Azerbaijan to export natural gas through Russian
pipelines, diverting supplies away from the route across the Caucasus.

Analysts said the conflict in Georgia had exposed the fragility of
trans-Caucasus pipelines and could spur the west to overcome its
opposition to alternative, Iranian, export routes. The US gave strong
political backing to the construction of the Caucasus pipelines in
the 1990’s as part of a policy to break Russia’s stranglehold of
Caspian oil export routes and isolate Iran.

Michael Carter, the head of research at Visor Capital, a Kazakh
investment bank, said, ”If the west loses Georgia it will have to
come to terms with Iran.” The alternative, he said, would be for ”the
west to settle for all Caspian and central Asian natural resources
going through Russian or Chinese pipelines.”