Also, the Ukraine trip was "almost" a complete success. It's going to be a real challenge to get a news story I can sell out of it. This is mostly because my story was going to be a speculation piece on whether Ukraine would take an active role in the global flight of energy transit paths away from Russia, and it looks like that issue was decided at the highest levels before I even left Ukraine.
The huge new BTC pipeline will bring Caspian Sea oil from Baku in Azerbaijan, through Georgia to Turkey, where it will offload onto tankers at the Mediterranean port of Ceyhan. The route very purposely avoids Russian territory, as well as the territory of Armenia and the Armenian enclave inside Azerbaijan called Nagorno-Karabach. In the early 90s, Armenia fought a short but vicious war with Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabach, with Russia supporting Armenia and a number of countries, including some in the Middle East, supporting Azerbaijan.
The point is that the companies building this USD 4 billion pipeline are willing to run it through Georgia (a country that is now a US client state but which is also an occasional base for some very dodgy elements including Chechen rebels and reportedly Al Qaeda cells) rather than take a chance on the existing Russian pipelines from Baku (which do run through Chechnya and so are not completely secure either).
So if the Western investors that financed BTC are willing to put that kind of cash on the line to have an energy transit route free of Russian control, how about a country like Ukraine, which is critically dependent on oil and gas piped in from Russia? I wanted to look into rumors that they would be interested in getting oil from BTC shipped up through the Bosphorus in tankers, and then reinserted into Ukrainian pipelines at Odessa--or at least take some active steps to secure energy independence from Russia.
Well, I don't know if they're going to use tankers to get Caspian oil up "the wrong way" through the Bosphorus (the Bosphorus is pretty much at max shipping capacity already anyway), but the day I left Ukraine I found out Yushchenko visited Turkey and signed some energy deals while he was there.
So now I wonder what little I can add to the story now that it's gone international.
It's not like I regret the trip at all. It was a great experience. I saw things there I didn't expect and couldn't believe, probably because I didn't have time beforehand to prepare any preconceptions about the place. On Friday night I wandered down to Sevastopol harbor and sat by the waterfront, drinking a bottle of pivo, watching the waves break against the rocks, watching the running lights of tankers moving far outside the harbor, watching the crescent moon redden as it sank into the Black Sea, and wondering who I was.
It was definitely worth it.
Posted by case at June 15, 2005 09:40 PMgoddam...sounds amazing man. I'd love to have the opportunity someday for an experience like that. looking forward to whatever it is that you mold out of it.
Posted by: jeremy at June 16, 2005 08:22 PM