Russia has closed its border passing point with Georgia for over a week now. Russian vehicles have turned back to drive to Novorossiysk, and the Georgian and Armenian ones to Poti in order to be able to transport their cargo by a ship to their destination points in Armenia and Russia.
Currently Russia is creating problems with those cars in Novorossiysk too. The local customs service didn’t allow 15 Armenian trucks that had driven there from the border to load their cargo on the ship. One of those trucks contained metallic materials for cannery production. During our conversation with head of the mentioned cannery factory said that if the cargo was late for two more weeks they wouldn’t need it any more. Now the cargo has to wait for one week until the arrival of the ship, and if after that, the customs services let them load their cargo, it will reach Armenia in 1-2 days. Imagine what will happen to the huge capacity of fruit and other cannery products that the mentioned factory has bought.
The ship had enough place on it to load the cargo. The reason that the customs services of Novorossiysk didn’t allow the trucks to load on the ship was the fact that in their documents it was written that the cargo had to be transported through Lars border passing point and not Novorossiysk. Besides that, people saw that the captain of the ship asked the head of the customs services to let the trucks load their cargo because the ship had a lot of space in it and there might be long lines of cargo trucks waiting for them during the next arrival. In spite of that, the customs services didn’t allow the Armenian trucks to load on the ship and told them to revise the information in their documents. On the basis of these facts we may assume that the reason that Russia closed the border was neither connected with reconstruction nor with its intention to punish Georgia, but to make Armenia understand “something”. Russia has done the same thing before too: in 2004, when Armenia decided to send a military troop to Iraq, Russia closed the Lars border passing point. That time there were long lines of cargo trucks waiting near the border too and the border officials didn’t inform when the border would be reopened. As they announced that the reconstruction works would last one month, people didn’t wait near the border any more.
Cargo carriers say that the information in the above mentioned documents is not that important, furthermore, when the border was closed by Russia and not by another country. Cargo carriers say that in such cases Russians should solve those problems themselves, but not to demand it from carriers. It would be better if the customs officials of the Lars border could contact their colleagues in Novorossiysk and solve those problems together. They would do that if those trucks didn’t belong to their outpost Armenia, but to Iran or another important state. It would be better of Russia to inform about its intention to close the border beforehand, as well as handle the last vehicles arriving at the border. As the Russian government has closed the border to punish Armenia, we understand why they failed to inform us beforehand. Recently Russian transportation minister Igor Levetin was in Armenia and said without any formalities that the border would be closed until September, i.e. the reconstruction would last that long.
It is not so difficult to understand what Russians want from us. For that purpose we may only remember what issues Igor Levetin and Segej Sargsyan discussed three days ago. They discussed two issues: The Armenian A320 plane crash and Iran-Armenia gas pipeline. It was expected that the sides would discuss only issues concerning the accident because the decoding of the black boxes is over. The head of ICAO, Tatyana Adonina was planning to visit Armenia too. In spite of that, that didn’t meet our expectations because there are outstanding issues that need to be discussed. On the basis of these facts we may assume that the outstanding issues don’t concern the reasons of the accident, but the agreement on the reasons to be signed between the three sides. This means that they had agreed on everything before visiting Armenia and had expectations that Armenia would agree with them too, but Armenia didn’t agree with them because they postponed the date of announcing what they had found till the end of July. Maybe they want to make Armenia sign under the agreement they have prepared and expected that. The next potential issue is the fact that Russian “Gazprom” company is interested in buying the Armenian share of Iran-Armenia gas pipeline. Russia closed the border just after Robert Kocharyan’s visit to Iran. It is evident that Russian “Gazprom” wants to buy the Armenian share of the pipeline and Iran does not like that idea. One of the main purposes of Kocharyan’s visit to Iran was to discuss that issue as well. It doesn’t matter what officials say concerning Russia’s will to buy the Armenian share of the pipeline, we see that they want to buy it. It is difficult to say how our authorities will resist the Russian pressure. Time will show. But it has been proven that Russians do whatever they want. In other words, the Armenian government gives them whatever they want from us. We may say the same thing concerning the agreement about the A320 plane accident. On the one hand, they usually reach their goal, on the other hand, each time they demonstrate their power by doing something; this time they closed the border. It means, that the sides have time to negotiate till September.