6 Annual Big Press Conference Part 14
February 1,2007
President of Russia V.Putin
Round Hall,the Kremlin,Moscow
For that reason I expect that the negativity we receive in connection with the transition to market relations is, more or less, already in the past. We agreed on everything with the fundamental transit countries and signed the necessary documents. I hope that both the Russian party I am referring to the cabinet and the companies concerned and our interested partners will respect these agreements. I would like to emphasise this. I draw your attention to the fact that our oil and gas companies should not turn up their noses, rather they should work as partners and according to the signed documents.
But do you know what I would like to say in connection with this? This is a good occasion to say another couple of words on this theme. Why did these problems never arise earlier? We are all well aware of where the transport routes for oil and gas were. They went either through the territory of our united state, the Soviet Union, or through the territory of the so-called Eastern Block. Of course there were no problems. And now they have arisen because the transit countries have realized their importance and want to receive the corresponding financial means for transport. But we already pay 4,2 billion dollars to transit countries. And for that reason if that figure increases even more and in our opinion it has already increased too much then of course we are going to search for ways to carry out direct deliveries. It is for this reason that we are building a gas pipeline under the Baltic Sea. For this reason we will expand our possibilities to ship, shall we say, oil in the northwest. I already gave an order to the government of the Russian Federation and Transneft has, in practice, already started working on expanding terminals in the Primorye region for an additional 50 million tones of oil. And I would like to emphasise that this will significantly lower our dependence on transport countries.
We are going to accelerate the construction of pipeline systems to the Pacific Ocean with a view to directly entering the developing markets in Asia. And I see nothing bad in the fact that our main consumers in Europe talk about or engage in diversifying their energy policy. This does not frighten us, because in turn we are also diversifying our delivery routes to various consumers and to various markets. Of course they try to scare us a little bit with this. Because when we hear that they are going to diversify their sources then this implies that we must think about where we are going to market our goods. That is why I say that we are constructing in the Far East, we intend to construct in China, and we are going to do that independently of what happens. And in the Far East and in the Altai region; and as you know, we continued the Blue Stream gas pipeline under the Black Sea. We are now thinking of constructing a second one that would possibly go to southern Europe or to central Europe perhaps to Hungary, or another central European country such as Austria, or to Italy or Israel. For that reason we have no worries with regards to the plans of our European partners. But if we consider that we are already developing cooperation with Europeans by joining assets then we have such examples BASF and Gazprom, Gazprom and ENI and we are doing this in a long-term perspective, until 2030, 2035. Our cooperation is taking on an increasingly steady character.
ALEKSEI GROMOV: Gudok newspaper, please go ahead.
OLGA SOLOMONOVA (Gudok): Vladimir Vladimirovich, please tell us how you see Sochis chances to host the 2014 winter Olympics? And considering the latest information, especially this mornings, it will probably be difficult and do we really need this?
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9:32В.Путин.Интервью телеканалу ОРТ 07.02.00 Part 5by niknikolay17,638 views
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