MOSCOW, July 5. /TASS/. Iran formally joins Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO); Turkey doing utmost to rescue Black Sea grain deal; and no relief for NATO chief as Stoltenberg stays put. These stories topped Wednesday’s newspaper headlines across Russia.

 

Vedomosti: Iran formally joins SCO at recent summit

The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) virtual summit chaired by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi took place two weeks after his state visit to Washington on June 23, when US President Joe Biden named India "among the [US’] closest partners in the world." In addition to Modi, the summit was attended by Russian President Vladimir Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping, Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and the leaders of four Central Asian nations (the fifth, Turkmenistan, is not a member of the SCO). They were joined by Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi.

Under crisis conditions, the SCO is demonstrating the organization’s increased importance in international politics, says Timofey Bordachev, program director at the Valdai Discussion Club. "Countries are drawn to stable international constructs. There are no serious contradictions among the SCO participants (even though Modi hinted that some countries, likely meaning Pakistan, were becoming a haven for international terrorism - Vedomosti)," the expert said.

He added that, today, the SCO offers a political venue for maintaining trust-based relations within the framework of which the parties can openly discuss each other’s interests. For example, Putin thanked the summit participants for supporting Russian authorities during the attempted armed mutiny by the Wagner Private Military Company (PMC). During the mutiny and its immediate aftermath, several leaders of SCO countries, including China’s Xi, Kazakhstan President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, Uzbekistan President Shavkat Mirziyoyev and Iran’s Raisi, contacted their Russian counterpart. According to Vasily Kashin, director of the Center for Comprehensive European and International Studies at the Higher School of Economics (HSE University), it is precisely the fact that Iran formally joined the organization at the summit that is most indicative of the SCO’s growing clout. "Tehran is an important international player for all of the organization’s participants: it is a major supplier of oil to China and India as well as Russia’s main partner concerning regional security issues. Its membership will expand the organization’s significance and increase its opportunities for coordinating its policy on such tracks as Afghanistan," the expert noted.

Additionally, anti-Russian sanctions have boosted the SCO’s importance from the point of view of Russia’s economic interaction with other members, Kashin adds.

"The West’s policy, on the one hand, has created incentives for seeking alternative methods for executing financial settlements between countries. On the other hand, [it has given grounds] for activating ties with alternative economic centers. We saw this last year, when Turkey and Saudi Arabia displayed interest in the SCO," Kashin said.

 

Kommersant: Turkey doing utmost to rescue faltering grain deal

The Black Sea grain deal between Russia, Ukraine, Turkey and the UN is again at center stage of the global agenda. Moscow is threatening to pull the plug on efforts to further extend the agreements, which expire on July 17. For their part, the West and Kiev are making it clear that, in this case, the global food crisis would seriously worsen. Turkey, the main architect of the agreements enabling the export of Ukrainian grain, has alone maintained its poker face. Meanwhile, the fate of the grain deal carries enormous political significance for Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan because its failure would threaten the country’s status as the only successful mediator in the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

"Dialogue will continue. Turkey is the only country that is simultaneously conducting a dialogue with both Moscow and Kiev. It was possible to find solutions in the past, for instance after Russia suspended its participation in the deal on October 29 of last year, following an attack on its military facilities. There is a high probability that, after the relevant [diplomatic] structures [do preliminary] work on the issue, it will be discussed by the two countries’ leaders," an anonymous source told TASS on Monday. According to the source, talks are also being held (in particular, with representatives of the UN and Western countries) on unblocking the export of Russian food products and fertilizers.

In a conversation with Kommersant, Yury Mavashev, director of the Center for Modern Turkish Studies, explained: Turkey’s public silence is indeed related to Ankara’s attempts to find arguments, above all, for Russia, in favor of extending the Black Sea Initiative. According to him, the collapse of the grain deal would be a serious personal failure for the Turkish leadership. "Turkey has certain authority it has been working on developing for a long time. Among others, Africa looks up to it. Additionally, it is positioning itself as a middleman in the Islamic and Turkic worlds and so on, aspiring to the status of a supra-regional power center. While the conflict between Russia and Ukraine has already undermined Turkey’s opportunities to show the world that it was capable of influencing global processes in the immediate proximity of its borders, the deal’s collapse would finally signal that, even where Ankara is the main architect of agreements, it is not coping anymore," the expert pointed out. He thinks that, "Ankara is mindful of the fact that Turkey is, for Russia, one of the critical trade and economic windows to the outside world, and so Moscow cannot ignore [Ankara’s] opinion."

 

Vedomosti: Stoltenberg staying on at NATO as no compromise candidate found to replace him

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg will remain in office for another year, until October 1, 2024. "Honoured by #NATO Allies' decision to extend my term as Secretary General," he tweeted on July 4. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization has also issued a statement affirming that the heads of state and government of NATO countries will give final approval to his re-appointment at the Vilnius summit on July 11-12.

The logic behind extending Stoltenberg’s tenure now is best summed up by the old proverb about not changing horses in midstream, says Russian International Affairs Council military expert Alexander Yermakov. The bloc also decided to leave Stoltenberg in place because NATO’s western and eastern members could not reach a compromise on a suitable candidate to succeed him. While Eastern European member states favored candidates with radical views, the bloc’s Western flank sought to promote a more moderate politician. As a result, Stoltenberg ended up being the compromise candidate, so it was decided to extend his term, the expert concluded.

Stoltenberg is remaining in office because, from Washington’s point of view, he is doing his job, said Lev Sokolshchik, researcher at the Center for Comprehensive European and International Studies at the Higher School of Economics (HSE University). Given the background of the North Atlantic Alliance’s clear confrontation with Russia, it was decided not to attempt any reforms at the height of the conflict or to do anything that might impair the dynamics of events in Ukraine by swapping Stoltenberg for another politician. The expert added that the West considers the current NATO secretary general as a tested, reliable individual who is carrying out his functions and can remain in office for another year.

 

Izvestia: Root causes of French riots; how they may affect neighboring countries

The mass protests and unrest in France triggered by the fatal police shooting of a teenager of Algerian descent are slowly ebbing. Nevertheless, the situation in the country remains complex because the country’s authorities cannot resolve the thorny issue of integrating residents of North African descent into society, experts say. Moreover, the protest mood among French youth may spread to neighboring countries, with Belgium, where recently over 60 people have been detained, being at particular risk.

Those who follow the political situation in France find nothing surprising in the current riots, recalling the Yellow Vests movement or the recent wave of strikes and demonstrations against the new retirement law. However, these protests were of a different nature, Pavel Timofeyev, sector director at the Department for European Political Studies at the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of World Economy and International Relations, told Izvestia.

"Those [previous] protests were aimed at protecting the social rights of various categories of residents and against attempts by President Macron and his team to change these rules. While the current riots are completely different; they are expressions of the hopelessness of disadvantaged districts and neighborhoods," the expert noted.

Many analysts note that unrest on the current scale has not been seen in France since 2005, when the death of two teens evading the police triggered several weeks of protests and disturbances. However, Timofeyev points out that those disturbances differed from the current riots.

"First of all, the current rioters have much more sophisticated technologies. They are using social networks, messaging services, geolocation marks, and this gives them greater freedom in being organized. […] The second difference: then, the protests engulfed the Paris region of Ile-de-France, while these have a much wider geographical footprint. The third difference is that, then, [then-French President] Jacques Chirac was in power, who had a solid majority in parliament and therefore could count on the support of the legislative branch. Macron does not have a constitutional majority in parliament. He is under pressure from both the left-wing and the right-wing opposition, which changes the context somewhat," the expert concluded.

In his opinion, despite the gradual settlement of the situation, the problem of integration in France remains unresolved. The second issue concerns relations between migrants and the French police, he added.

French public law professor Karine Bechet-Golovko, who is a visiting professor at Moscow State University, thinks that the French riots can be a harbinger of mass protests in neighboring European countries, where a lot of migrants live. "There are risks; the protests have already spilled across the border into Belgium and Switzerland. It is necessary to understand that they are purely of an ethnic nature. Yet, so far, it is hard to tell how massive they would be. I don’t think that it will be just like in France," she said.

 

Nezavisimaya Gazeta: Russian gas production decreases amid dropping exports

Oil production is decreasing in Russia with the drop in natural gas production particularly noticeable. So far, Russia has not managed to redirect export gas flows. And domestic gas consumption has, to date, not been able to compensate for those volumes of Russian gas that the EU rejected. Independent experts forecast that it will be possible to replace the missing volumes of deliveries to the EU no earlier than in 10 years, if then. They are also not optimistic about the government’s attempt to expand domestic consumption or set up gas processing.

Economists from the Stolypin Institute for the Economy of Growth said: "It is necessary to realize already that nobody will do the job for us, neither the global market nor a generous partner. This is the economy of supply and demand; it is necessary to generate demand and supply, like everyone is doing, setting aside over-thought, excessively elaborate big-think arguments by theorists from the ‘90s," the experts noted.

Lowered gas production is occurring amid dropping pipeline exports: this year, it may amount to 70-80 bln cubic meters versus 185 bln cubic meters in 2021, stresses Finam analyst Sergey Kaufman. He adds that this year’s prices cannot compensate anymore for decreased volumes. "The recovery of production volumes to the 2021 levels can be expected in five to six years amid the implementation of a number of projects in the LNG field and the growing volume of exports to China. One should not expect the recovery of pipeline exports earlier than the beginning of the next decade," the expert cautioned.

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