Turkmenistan, Ashgabat, May 31 / Trend, H. Hasanov /
President of Turkmenistan Gurbanguly Berdimuhammadov and Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, who met meeting in Ashgabat yesterday, discussed global security of energy supplies, the Neutral Turkmenistan newspaper reported on Thursday.
The report says that attention was paid to important aspects of cooperation in ensuring global security of energy supplies and formation of its legal framework, optimization of traffic flow in the Eurasian space, and addressing ecological challenges.
The Turkmen leader said that he considers appropriate to create a new mechanism - interregional energy dialogue under UN auspices. In this case, according to Berdimuhammadov, "all CIS member countries will actively promote the establishment of such a format of cooperation - transparent and open for all".
Russia and Turkmenistan are major exporters of natural gas in the CIS space. A dynamic and progressive character of trade and economic relations between the two countries was mentioned at the meeting in Ashgabat, the report says. In total, Russia ranked third in total turnover of Turkmenistan for three months of 2012, and the trade turnover amounted to $1.235 billion.
In turn, Medvedev said that "growing trade turnover between the two countries is diverse in nature and has a good tendency to expand range of export and import goods in its structure," the Neutral Turkmenistan newspaper reported.
The parties expressed their "firm confidence that this will give new impetus to further efficient development of the Turkmen-Russian relations, and reaffirmed the reciprocal willingness of the parties to intensify mutually beneficial intergovernmental partnership," the article says.
Strategic direction in the relationship between the two countries is cooperation in fuel and energy complex. Russia received Turkmen gas via the Central Asia - Center (CAC) pipeline through the territory of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. Customer is JSC "Gazprom" (Russia), which signed an agreement with Turkmenistan on gas supplies for 25 years in 2003.
At present, the CAC does not operate at full capacity. Russia has reduced gas procurement up to 10 billion cubic meters under the influence of global recession since 2010, which is 4 times less than in 2008. Russian companies are involved in the development of hydrocarbon resources of Turkmenistan. Russian Itera and "Zarubezhneft" work on one of the blocks in the Caspian Sea shelf under the production sharing agreement.
About 180 joint ventures are represented on the local market, Russian companies, including Power Machines, Itera and others are involved in the construction of numerous industrial and social facilities, roads and communications.