Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Policy Brief
No. 17
October 2014
Turkmenistans Neutrality
in Post-Crimea Eurasia
Luca Anceschi
Key points
After the leadership change completed in February 2007, Turkmen foreign policy has been operating along the same general guidelines that
were consolidated in the Niyazov era. The regime, to begin with, continued to focus on the
preservation of its international autonomy, with
the ultimate view to prevent the transformation
of its ties with Russia and China into clientpatron relationships. This end, nevertheless, was
not pursued with any significant success in the
economic realm. In late 2009, the governments
efforts to expand its energy partnerships beyond
Russia culminated in the entry into line of the
Central Asia-China pipeline. The opening of the
pipeline which, insofar as it terminated Gazproms hegemony over the export of Turkmen
natural gas, did definitely represent a key step
towards partnership diversification has not
however borne the fruit that Ashgabat had initially hoped for.
The consistent policy of multilateral disengagement that Ashgabat has followed since 1992, on
the one hand, shielded the regime from unduly
pressures originating in Moscow and related to
Turkmenistans participation in the Eurasian
Economic Union. The states nonchalant attitude
towards international isolation, on the other
hand, was offered as a most convenient rationale
for Turkmenistans conspicuous absence from
the vote on UN Resolution 68/262,1 which, on
March 27 2014, condemned Russias violation of
the Ukrainian territorial integrity. This analytical
reading seems to suggest that, in the post-Crimea
diplomatic landscape, Ashgabat was barely
touched by the dramatic change instigated by
Russias renewed assertiveness in the shared
Eurasian neighborhood.
This latter proposition captures in full the rationale underpinning Ashgabats recently renewed enthusiasm for the TurkmenistanAfghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) pipeline. This
ambitious project, which has been widely discussed at regional level since the mid-1990s, is
designed to connect Turkmenistans eastern gas
fields (and the giant Galkynysh field more in particular) to the emerging economies located on
the Indian sub-continent. In early July 2014, the
four state-partners announced the conclusion of
a major operational agreement that removed the
final obstacles to the full implementation of the
TAPI framework, setting the tentative date for
the pipelines entry into line for late 2017.6
This 1800-km pipeline is designed to carry annually 33 billion cubic meters (bcm) of natural
gas, which is going to be purchased, for the larger part, by India and Pakistan (42% each), with
Afghanistan picking up the remainder. As the
inclusion of a second provider in the consortium
(and Uzbekistan more in particular) continues to
represent an unlikely development in the
roadmap towards TAPI operationalization, the
totality of gas pumped through the pipeline is
therefore expected to be originating from the
large fields located in Turkmenistans Mary velayat (region). Building up on the preparatory
support offered by the Asian Development Bank,
the partners are known to have reached an
agreement on price and, most importantly, one
on payment procedures: considering Berdymukhamedovs relatively cooperative posture
throughout the negotiations, it might be suggested that the current Turkmen regime has come to
Recent developments in Turkmenistans gas relations with Iran and, most crucially, with Russia
have transformed TAPI into one of the few remaining avenues that the Turkmen regime needs
to explore if it is to avoid total dependence on
Chinese gas purchases. And it is precisely
through the crystallisation of this scenario that
the Ukrainian crisis has come to influence Turkmen positive neutrality more significantly. Seen
from Ashgabat, politico-economic dependency
on a single external partner has traditionally
been equated to regime instability: Berdymukhamedov and his associates are more than likely to bear this proposition in mind when crafting
Turkmenistans foreign policy for the forthcoming years.
Conclusions
Russias assertive foreign policy is unlikely to
pose a challenge to Turkmenistan in the aftermath of the Ukrainian crisis. Much of Turkmenistans future stability will be dictated by the
resolution of the Afghan conflict a process that,