IN FOCUS OF THE RUSSIAN PRESS
Vzglyad: Foreign leaders celebrate VE Day in Moscow, Kremlin hands over Katyn documents to Poland; Gazeta.ru: Poland stalls new gas agreement with Russia; Rossiiskaya Gazeta: Russia adjusting WTO accession policy; Vedomosti: How to spend public funds.
Vzglyad: Foreign leaders celebrate VE Day in Moscow, Kremlin hands over Katyn documents to Poland
The presidents of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus opened the 65th celebrations of Victory in the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945 in Moscow.
Memories of the joint struggle against Nazism will promote unity among the people of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, said Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych and Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, during the Victory Day celebrations.
After holding talks with his colleagues from neighboring states, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev made a crucial step in mending relations with Poland. He turned over dozens of volumes of documents from the Katyn archive to Poland.
The Belarusian and Ukrainian presidents and Bronislaw Komorowski, the acting president of Poland, who arrived in Moscow on Saturday, May 8, attended a ceremony for the opening of a monument commemorating new hero cities in the Kremlin's Alexander Gardens.
Medvedev said the unity of the people of Russia, Belarus and Ukraine should preclude attempts to dispute facts about the Great Patriotic War. Evidence of that is their leaders' attendance at the celebrations of the 65th Victory Day in Moscow.
Later in the day, Medvedev met with Komorowski and handed over 67 volumes of Case No. 159 about the Polish officers who were executed at Katyn in 1940.
The Katyn case has been a big obstacle in improving relations between Russia and Poland. Warsaw has demanded that Moscow tell the truth about that tragedy more than once.
This year the Kremlin decided to meet part of Poland's demands. In April, the Russian Archive Agency made public documents from secret File No. 1, which shows that the decision to execute nearly 20,000 Polish officers held at the NKVD camps and prisons was taken in early 1940 by the country's leadership, including Josef Stalin.
Komorowski said he appreciated the move, which could provide the basis for improving bilateral relations.
Gazeta.ru: Poland stalls new gas agreement with Russia
Poland is unwilling to sign a new gas supply agreement with Russia so far. The European Commission said Poland wants to alter its conditions to the EU legislation, but in fact Poland, which is conducting exploration for shale gas, does not need to buy more natural gas from Russia.
Poland has said that it should first discuss the terms and conditions of the agreement with the European Commission to ensure that they comply with Europe's interests.
Maciej Kaliski, Director of the Oil and Gas Department at Poland's Ministry of the Economy, said Poland wants its policies to be transparent and wants to lift the European Commission's concerns regarding its gas agreement with Russia.
An agreement to increase the volume of Russian natural gas shipped to Poland and to change the share of Russian energy giant Gazprom in the Russian-Polish pipeline operator Europol Gaz was reached late last year.
Under this agreement, Russia is to increase the volume of gas sold to Poland from 8 billion cubic meters to 11 billion cu m (388.3 billion cu f). Poland's annual gas consumption is about 14 billion cu m (494.2 billion cu f); Polish producers satisfy one-third of domestic demand. So, if Gazprom increases gas deliveries to Poland, it would in fact become Poland's only foreign supplier.
Gazprom hopes to increase its stake in Europol Gaz from 48% to 98% to strengthen its foothold in the Polish market.
The plan calls for Russia's Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin and Deputy Prime Minister Waldemar Pawlak, Poland's Minister of the Economy, to sign the agreements in late May.
Rossiiskaya Gazeta: Russia adjusting WTO accession policy
Russia's effort to join the World Trade Organization is being adjusted to reflect its membership in a new economic alliance, the Customs Union of Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan.
Having recently visited the United States, a group of Russian negotiators will go to Geneva later this month for consultations at the WTO Headquarters.
This time the group will include negotiators from Belarus and Kazakhstan, Russia's partners in the Customs Union. They will participate in multilateral consultations of the working group on Russia's WTO entry. There are many important issues still unresolved, including farming support levels, export duties and meat export regulations. The working group will also look at the memorandum on the Customs Union of Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan. The consultations will be informal.
The resulting statement of the working group on Russia's WTO entry will have to be revised to reflect the new reality, the Customs Union. The Russian WTO group will be responsible for making the relevant changes and will be allocated about two months for this work.
In late April, a group of Russian officials led by First Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov discussed Russia's WTO accession prospects with American partners in Washington. The meeting was a success. The participants agreed to revive the stalling negotiations and compile as soon as possible a detailed schedule for handling the remaining disputed issues.
Experts will hold videoconferences to speed up the process.
American negotiators were also presented with a full package of the Customs Union documents translated into English.
As for the plans to join WTO in a tow with its Customs Union partners announced last summer, the leaders of Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan must make a final decision in July, Shuvalov said after the trip.
Vedomosti: How to spend public funds
The Russian government cannot decide how to increase the efficiency of budgetary spending. Instead of disbursing allocations among various departments, the Ministry of Finance wants to invest them in large-scale state programs.
In February 2010, the Ministry of Finance proposed a budgetary reform, which was subsequently supported at meetings chaired by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and his deputy Sergei Sobyanin.
However, the reform is still being hotly debated. The Finance Ministry's main opponent, the Ministry of Economic Development, is voicing a number of objections and hopes that most of them will be taken into account.
State programs, expected to become the budget's main element under the reform, will stipulate state policy goals, objectives, guidelines and instruments in any given sector. The budget will say nothing about the funding to be received by each department. The Ministry of Finance is ready to introduce the new principles already in 2012.
The Ministry of Economic Development has its own vision of budgetary policies. State programs cannot encompass all areas of state agencies' activities. Transparency will inevitably be impaired due to the lack of information about budgetary funding for each department.
Consequently, the Ministry of Economic Development prioritizes projects stipulated by the Guidelines of Government Activity Until 2012, including Support for the Family, Expanding the Labor Market and Space Exploration, rather than state programs. The Ministry estimates it will take three to five years to introduce state programs.
The government will have to decide by late May which ministry knows better how to make the budget cost-effective.
May 11, 2010
RIA Novosti
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