Home » Posts tagged 'gas pipeline' (Page 2)
Tag Archives: gas pipeline
Secret Cable Reveals US Plan To Overthrow Assad By Exploiting “Extremist Groups”
Secret Cable Reveals US Plan To Overthrow Assad By Exploiting “Extremist Groups”
Now that Europe’s worsening refugee crisis and Russia’s stepped up support for the regime of Bashar al-Assad have (finally) focused the world’s attention on Syria’s four-year, bloody civil war, inquiring minds want to know: how did it happen that the country, which is now at risk of becoming a failed state, descend into chaos?
Of course when we speak of “inquiring minds” we mean those of the general public which, to this point, has remained largely ignorant of the fact that hundreds of thousands of people are dying in a place that shares a border with the country the US supposedly just got done “liberating.”
Generally speaking, the line you’ll get from the mainstream media is that Syria is just one more example of a Mid-East country where the populace finally reached its breaking point with the injustices created by the brutal regime of an evil autocrat. The resultant chaos, the narrative continues, created a breeding ground for terror which explains why Raqqa has become the de facto capital for ISIS, the Western media’s boogeyman par excellence.
Not to put too fine a point on it – and this won’t surprise anyone who frequents these pages – but that narrative is pure, unadulterated garbage. The real story (again, generally speaking), is that Syria is pivotal for the existing balance of power – and not only the regional balance of power, but the global balance of power as well. The alliance between Bashar al-Assad’s Syria and Moscow, Tehran, and Hezbollah serves as a kind of counterbalance to cooperation among the US, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey (among others). Should the Assad regime be allowed to fall and the West allowed to influence the post-regime political outcome, the scales would tip, Russia would lose its naval base at Tartus, and Iran’s access to Hezbollah, not to mention the scope of its regional influence would be severely constrained. Assad’s move to support the Islamic Pipeline while rejecting the Qatar-Turkey pipeline was a manifestation of the situation described above.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Russia Is Not Bluffing With Turkish Stream Project
Russia Is Not Bluffing With Turkish Stream Project
During his visit to Ankara in December 2014, Vladimir Putin announced that South Stream—a large pipeline that would have carried Europe-bound Russian gas under the Black Sea and across Southeastern Europe—had been terminated. A major reason for South Stream’s cancellation was attributed to the exit from the project of Bulgaria, one of the key countries through which this pipeline would pass. Instead, Russia and its regional partners, including Turkey, are now discussing a new pipeline project—Turkish Stream, sometimes referred to as Turk Stream.
It is becoming increasingly evident that Russia and Turkey want to ensure that the Turkish Stream project has a solid economic foundation. During his most recent visit to Ankara, Aleksei Miller, the CEO of Russia’s Gazprom, met with Turkish Energy Minister Taner Yildiz. In the course of their meeting, further technical details of Turkish Stream were revealed: the pipeline will have a capacity of 63 billion cubic meters (bcm) of gas, 15.75 bcm of which will be marketed in Turkey and the other 47.25 bcm is to be marketed to Europe through Greece. This gas pipeline is scheduled to be incorporated into an inter-governmental agreement during the second quarter of this year, and the first transmission of gas is planned to take place in December 2016. According to Miller, this is a fairly realistic timeline.
The speed at which Turkish Stream is being brought to life and the way in which it appears to be taking priority in Ankara over the Azerbaijani-sponsored Trans-Anatolian Gas Pipeline (TANAP) project have both been received negatively by Baku-based media channels. TANAP is a key link in the planned Southern Gas Corridor, which aims to export non-Russian, Caspian-basin natural gas to European markets while bypassing Russian pipelines.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
