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Disaster overshadows Russian war
games
By Sergei Blagov
MOSCOW - Ongoing war-game exercises
by Russia's Pacific Fleet, which include "emergency
situation" training, have been 
overshadowed by a real-life disaster: a helicopter
carrying the governor of the oil-rich Russian Far East
region of Sakhalin and 16 other people disappeared over
the Kamchatka Peninsula on Wednesday.
The actual
emergency happened, in fact, right in the middle of
faux emergency exercises, which were interrupted
by orders for a major search-and-rescue operation. At
this writing, the missing helicopter has not been found.
The Mi-8 helicopter carrying Sakhalin Governor
Igor Farkhutdinov and other officials had been flying
from Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, the capital of Kamchatka,
to the city of Severokurilsk to inspect the northern
Kuril Islands, which are part of the Sakhalin region. An
hour after takeoff, the helicopter failed to make radio
contact with air controllers at the appointed time, and
a search was launched.
Russian Defense Minister
Sergei Ivanov instructed the military in the region to
facilitate search efforts. "I ask you all promptly to
start search-and-rescue work with all the means
available to our military," he ordered navy commander
Admiral Vladimir Kuroyedov. Ivanov said rescuers should
focus on the mountainous Kamchatka area along the
projected path of the helicopter.
President
Vladimir Putin was following the search, as he received
updates over the telephone from Emergency Situations
Minister Sergei Shoigu and Sakhalin deputy governor Ivan
Malakhov. As 20 planes and helicopters explored a 200
kilometer swath, 40 naval vessels and civilian ships
combed the waters of the Pacific Ocean off the
peninsula. In all, some 2,000 people were employed to
conduct the search.
Officials indicated that
chances of finding survivors were becoming increasingly
slim.
This was not the first high-profile crash
in Russia. Former presidential hopeful and Krasnoyarsk
governor Alexander Lebed died in a crash in April 2002
when his helicopter's blades got caught on power lines.
Sakhalin, a 960 kilometer-long island with some
600,000 residents in Russia's Far East north of Japan,
has huge deposits of oil and natural gas off its east
coast. Under Farkhutdinov's governorship, Sakhalin has
been developing some of Asia's most ambitious petroleum
projects. International consortiums led by ExxonMobil
and Royal Dutch/Shell plan to spend tens of billions of
dollars to extract and market oil and natural gas from
Sakhalin's offshore deposits.
Farkhutdinov, who
has served as the regional governor since 1996, believed
that Sakhalin was a potential hydrocarbon bonanza, and
he was keen to attract the billions needed to tap the
island's offshore petroleum reserves. The 20,000 square
kilometers of the island's offshore shelf contain an
estimated 700 million tons of oil and condensate and 2.5
trillion cubic meters of natural gas.
Overseas
investors have so far committed some US$30 billion to
Sakhalin's hydrocarbon projects. The major projects are
Sakhalin 1, led by US oil company ExxonMobil ($10
billion), and Sakhalin Energy's Sakhalin 2, the largest
single FDI (foreign direct investment) project in
Russia.
The ExxonMobil consortium, which is
spending $1.2 billion in Sakhalin this year, hopes to
start gas production for export to Japan in 2008.
ExxonMobil has 30 percent of the consortium, which also
includes a Japanese group of 13 companies; two Russian
partners, RN-Astra and SMNG-Shelf; and ONGC Videsh Ltd
of India. ExxonMobil plans to build a 2,330km, $900
million gas pipeline all the way to Tokyo.
In
Sakhalin Energy, Shell's partners are Mitsui Corp with
25 percent and Mitsubishi Corp with 20 percent; Shell
has the remaining 55 percent. The Sakhalin Energy
consortium has recently reached its first major supply
agreement, selling up to a million tons of liquefied
natural gas (LNG) a year to Tokyo Gas for a period of 24
years, starting in 2007.
The project involves
building a 600 kilometer pipeline between the
northeastern oilfields and Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk in the
south. If this goes ahead, natural gas produced in the
Sakhalin region could be used to supply Japan. Some of
the Sakhalin gas may go to South Korea or Taiwan as well
as mainland China.
Farkhutdinov believed that
ongoing oil projects would make Sakhalin more integrated
with the Asia-Pacific region. In June, Farkhutdinov
traveled to Tokyo to attend the XXII World Gas Congress
and discuss prospective LNG sales with Japanese
companies Tokyo Gas and Tokyo Electric. Also in June,
Farkhutdinov discussed gas sales with China's Sinopec
Corp executives. It remains to be seen whether a
possible regime change in Sakhalin could affect
currently favorable investment climate there.
Meanwhile, Russia's naval exercises in the Sea
of Okhotsk, Bering Sea and Sea of Japan involve 75 naval
ships and support vessels of the Pacific Fleet, 69
planes and helicopters, as well as 70,000 military
servicemen and civilian specialists. The exercises test
the military's response to 45 scenarios ranging from
confrontations with terrorists to environmental
disasters.
Konstantin Pulikovsky, Putin's
special envoy to the Far East Federal District, has
stated that the exercises aimed to boost protection of
Russia's maritime borders, combat poachers, and improve
procedures to deal with "emergency situations". Apart
from the military, the exercises also involve border
guards, the Interior Ministry, the Transportation
Ministry, the Atomic Energy Ministry, and the
Emergencies Ministry.
The exercises were not
affected by the search operation, Russia's Pacific Fleet
said in a statement on Thursday. Dismissing media
speculation that the war games themselves might have
been responsible for the loss of Fakhrutdinov's
helicopter, Pulikovsky told journalists that "there were
no test missile launches ... I rule out any connection
between the beginning of the exercises and the
helicopter's disappearance," he was quoted as saying by
the Russian Information Agency (RIA).
However,
the speculation was not entirely groundless, as in the
past civilian aircraft have fallen victim to post-Soviet
war games. Notably, in October 2001 a Russian airliner
crashed into the Black Sea after it was shot down by a
Ukrainian surface-to-air missile fired during military
exercises. The Tu-154 with 77 people aboard was en route
from Israel to Siberia, and the plane was downed by an
SA-5 surface-to-air missile fired from a shore battery
during the Ukrainian military exercises.
As for
the current Russian Far East war games, they have been
influenced by the recent controversy over North Korean
nuclear program. The exercises involve training in
"emergency situations caused by radioactive
contamination".
"The Primorie region is ready to
accommodate up to 100,000 refugees from Northeast Asia
in the event of emergency," Oleg Melnikov, head of the
regional Emergency Department, was quoted as saying by
the RIA news agency. It is understood that only a
military conflict on the Korean Peninsula could spark
large-scale refugee inflows.
The exercises'
preparatory stage, which began on Monday, was due to end
on Friday, with the active phase of the exercises to
start on Saturday and continue until next Wednesday.
South Korean and Japanese ships and planes are also
taking part in the exercises, which are being monitored
by experts from the United States, Canada and China.
North Korea was also invited to observe the exercises,
but Pyongyang declined to send anyone; apparently it was
unhappy about the scenario of 100,000 North Korean
refugees being included in the exercises.
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All
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