Russia’s First Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev (R) got drawn into the four-sided summit against his own will, but by the will of Serbia’s Prime Minister Vojislav Koštunica (L).
Photo: Dmitry Azarov
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Putin Shares Serbia with Medvedev
// at the meeting with its president and its prime minister
Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and First Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev met on Friday with Serbia’s President Boris Tadić and Prime Minister Vojislav Koštunica. Kommersant’s special correspondent Andrei Kolesnikov closely watched the Serbs and the Russians split in pairs and support each other in the presidential campaign race.
Serbia’s president and prime minister arrived to Moscow in different time and by different flights. To win in the presidential election’s second round, Boris Tadić needs Vojislav Koštunica’s support. Yet, it was obvious the relations between them are complicated, to say the least.
I witnessed one part of the Serbian delegation ask the Russian delegation’s members, before signing an agreement, to put a microphone for Koštunica, so that he could say a few words, while another part strongly objected to that. Moreover, these two torrents from the Serbian delegation’s depths did not interflow. While some people would leave Russians, who were a priori willing to accept any scenario (if only Serbs do not change their mind), others would immediately come up and begin admonishing them against taking precipitate steps which could darken the so-wonderfully-going negotiations.
Eventually, they installed a microphone for Koštunica. Indeed, it was not in Russia’s interests to darken that special day. After all, Russians got almost everything they wanted: 51 percent of shares of Serbia’s oil monopoly NIS were nearly in their pocket. The protocol was ready to be signed. Yet, it was just a protocol, and not a full-value agreement (which is to be signed in late 2008). Sources in the Russian delegation for some reasons refused to comment on the chief question: what was the eventual price for which Serbia surrendered its NIS to Gazprom?
Back in November 2007, Gazprom offered ˆ400 million for NIS, and promised to invest ˆ500 million more in modernizing the company’s assets. Serbs did not like the offered sums, and the intrigue around the matter remained till yesterday.
Anyway, the protocol, which Serbs do not think necessary to hide from their journalists, contains the initial sums: ˆ400 million and ˆ500 million. So, I realized why Russia’s negotiators refused to disclose them: Russians were simply embarrassed for their treating Serbs this way.
There were no restricted negotiations between the presidents. The talks opened with an extended session. It was interesting to watch the participants prepare for the talks. They lined up to greet the presidents of Serbia and Russia. Among the delegation’s members, there was Gazprom’s chairman of board Dmitry Medvedev. Suddenly, just a few minutes before the talks started, he was summoned outside the door. He was absent for a while.
It turned out that Vladimir Putin shortly introduced him to Serbian colleagues. Apparently, he also warned Medvedev that since Serbs prefer going in pairs in Moscow, Russians will have to conform.
Lately, Putin and Medvedev have kept together for campaign purposes. However, that was a different pair of shoes. The Bolshoi Kremlin Palace has a strict protocol. So, the presence of Medvedev, say, at the table where agreements are signed and where normally just a country’s president stands behind signatories’ backs, would look very strange.
However, it turned out here that while Putin does not need to support Medvedev, Koštunica simply considers it his duty to publicly support Tadić. Meanwhile, precisely yesterday and exactly in that form, Tadić did not need Koštunica’s support at all. That support put Serbia’s president in equivocal position. And not only him: if Putin had known that it would come out this way, he would have probably invited Russia’s Prime Minister Viktor Zubkov to attend the negotiations. Yet, Putin did not know it. No one could suppose that Koštunica would be glued to Tadić, who found himself in a stalemate. Tadić has complicated relations with his PM, especially after the latter ultimatively demanded that Serbia’s president express protest against deploying EU mission in Kosovo (the ultimatum was not accepted, however). Yet, Tadić cannot decline his PM’s escort and support, because he needs to win the upcoming election, and Koštunica’s votes count greatly.
Consequently, Medvedev was used to balance Serbs’ outnumbering at the table while signing the documents.
Meanwhile, anyone who would see all four of them at the table, and who would be unaware of the four-sided relations’ prehistory, would have a full right to heavily, or even hopelessly, sigh. The process of presenting Putin’s successor to dear Russians looked simply importunate and vividly demonstrated that Putin is no longer doing anything in the country alone.
So, after the agreements were signed, all four politicians delivered their statements. However, no one surprised anyone. Putin said that Russia is categorically against the unilateral recognition of Kosovo’s independence, and was very glad that some EU countries “did not succumb to the political pressure of bloc regime, and displayed political courage” by speaking against dismembering Serbia.
Tadić was calling Kosovo exclusively by the name of Metohija, and repeatedly said that Serbia would never agree to its independence. Meanwhile, Koštunica used his minute of fame here as well, and spoke against the EU mission in Kosovo (after all, he had been scheming for too long to get that minute in his disposal).
It was only Medvedev who said the signed agreements were a brilliant breakthrough, and did not say a word about Kosovo.
Simply because it isn’t his time yet to touch upon these issues.
However, it’s coming.
Andrei Kolesnikov
All the Article in Russian as of Jan. 26, 2008
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