© AP Photo/Valeria Mongelli/TASS
Top stories from the Russian press on Tuesday, October 18th, prepared by TASS
Kommersant: EU may punish Iran over drone supplies to Russia
On Monday, the EU Foreign Affairs Council decided to impose additional sanctions against those responsible for violations of human rights in Iran. The latest blacklist includes 11 individuals and four legal entities accused of using violence in quashing the protests that erupted in Iran over the death of a young woman, Mahsa Amini, in mid-September. However, the EU top diplomats who gathered in Luxembourg also discussed Iranian drone supplies to Russia. "We will look for concrete evidence about the participation [of Iran in the Ukraine conflict]," the EU’s diplomacy chief Josep Borrell said, adding that Iran categorically denied that.
The first reports alleging that Iran may be selling its UAVs to Moscow emerged ahead of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s visit to Tehran in July, and in late August the Washington Post reported that 10 days earlier, Russian cargo planes carrying the drones in question had taken off from Iran. On September 13, Ukrainian accounts on social media said that the country’s armed forces had for the first time downed an Iranian UAV. Since then, reports about Iranian drones in Ukrainian skies have been regular. Moreover, on Sunday, the WaPo revealed, citing intelligence data, that the Iranian defense industry was getting ready to ship the first batch of its Fateh-110 and Zolfaghar missiles to Russia on top of more supplies of Mohajer-6 and Shahed-136 drones.
"Zolfaghar is a ballistic missile capable of striking targets at distances of 700 kilometers. When launched from Russian frontline regions, such missiles can potentially hit targets in vast areas of Ukraine. The treaty with the US on the elimination of intermediate-and shorter-range missiles which was in force in 1988-2019 forbid Russia to produce or test ground-based missiles with a range of 500 to 5,500 kilometers," military expert Yury Lyamin told Kommersant. "As for Fateh-110, these are missiles with a range of up to 300 kilometers, and Iran manufactures various versions of such missiles. Some of them are additionally equipped with guidance heads for high-precision engagement of various targets," he added.
Neither Moscow, nor Tehran has confirmed these drone supplies or any potential purchases of missiles. "Unfortunately, there has been politically motivated news, and that is mostly fed by Western sources of information," Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokesman Nasser Kanaani said on Monday, commenting on the latest report by the Washington Post. The Russian Defense Ministry said that on Monday, Russian forces "delivered more high-precision strikes on Ukrainian military command facilities and energy systems," but it did not specify which weapons were used for that.
Izvestia: Brussels to deliberate over EU price cap for natural gas
This week, the EU will explore a range of options for setting a gas price cap, the European Parliament told Izvestia, while adding that the proposal to temporarily introduce a "dynamic price corridor" would be adopted on Tuesday. Also, the EU foreign ministers agreed on Monday to provide €500 million more in military assistance to Kiev, and several countries also supported a military aid mission to train Ukrainian personnel. Meanwhile, another package of anti-Russian sanctions is in the works.
The European Commission assumes that the TTF natural gas price index no longer reflects the cost of imported gas which was previously dominated by cheap Russian pipeline gas imports.
Instead, the EU gas market should allegedly switch to LNG supplies from the United States or Qatar, for which a separate price index will be developed, Gunnar Beck, a German member of the European Parliament told Izvestia. According to him, US-supplied LNG is almost seven times as expensive as Russian natural gas, therefore such a move would mean a major revision of Europe’s energy policy. "This replacement with a more expensive commodity would lead to an increase in the cost of production for European industries and, as a result, a loss of competitiveness," Beck insisted. He also noted that Germany was still opposed to the idea of capping gas prices.
Director of the Center for Sanctions Policy Expertise at Moscow State Institute of International Relations’ Institute for International Studies Yekaterina Arapova told Izvestia that the EU would not be able to introduce a gas price cap until it agreed on a mechanism for the implementation of an oil price ceiling. "We can say that the EU wants to get ahead of itself when discussing a ninth package of sanctions. In essence, they have not yet hammered out any effective mechanisms that would ensure the efficiency of their eighth package," she said.
Arapova also said that in the EU there had so far been no serious potential to put more pressure on their Russian partners. "If the US legal practice envisages secondary sanctions, Europe has been guided by the 1996 regulation condemning any extraterritorial sanctions. However, Brussels has been seeking to catch up with the Americans here," the expert believes. It’s worth recalling that the eighth package of EU sanctions targets companies and individuals from third countries who have been helping Russia circumvent the restrictions.
Nezavisimaya Gazeta: Ukraine, NATO set sights on ‘retaking Crimea’
Amid the continued strikes by Russian forces on critical Ukrainian infrastructure, discussions have intensified in the media in Kiev about the inadmissibility of any ceasefire or negotiations with Moscow. In turn, analysts from the US-based Institute for the Study of War (ISW) warned in a recent report that authorities in Russia had so far resorted to the suspension of combat to freeze the frontline in a position that would suit them better in order to resume the military operation with fresh forces. According to ISW analysts, Ukraine should retake certain areas to ensure its long-term security and economic viability.
In the report, Crimea was recognized as a strategically important region for both NATO and Ukraine. As long as Moscow maintains its control of the peninsula, it can deploy anti-air and anti-ship missiles on the peninsula 325 km to the west, as well as aviation in Sevastopol, which is about 300 km west of the airbases on the Russian mainland. And this matters much for the scale of air and missile threats Russia could pose to NATO’s southeastern flank, ISW warned.
Alexey Mukhin, who heads the Center for Political Information, told Nezavisimaya Gazeta, that Western countries have absolutely no idea what to do with Russia today. The West has continued to impose endless sanctions, and is now facing uncomfortable questions from the public which demands that the sanctions be lifted and interaction with Russia restored. "But Western leaders cannot return to negotiations themselves without losing face, this is why they have been encouraging bogus information attacks, on behalf of US intelligence, too. This is not necessary though, for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov earlier made it clear that they were ready for talks amid the continued conflict," Mukhin explained. Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky banned himself from any negotiations with Russia, he recalled.
Under certain conditions, resuming negotiations with Moscow could become relevant for Kiev, Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Studies of Caucasus at MGIMO University Nikolay Silayev said. However, Zelensky will be in a worse position then than he was in March. "In such a situation, the Ukrainian leadership has been forced to press on with hostilities in an attempt to escalate military threats against Russia. And if they choose to start deescalating things, they would find themselves trapped... This may be why Zelensky signed that paper declaring any talks with Putin an impossibility. This is a bid to assure the West and the even more radical opposition at home that his position is firm," Silayev concluded.
Izvestia: EU banks stop processing Russian SWIFT payments
Given the tightening of sanctions against Russia, some European banks have completely stopped accepting SWIFT transfers from Russian lenders. PostFinance, one of the largest Swiss banks, Estonian’s LHV Pank, France’s Banque Populaire and Finland’s S-BANK confirmed to Izvestia that they had blocked such transactions. Izvestia has sent inquiries to the press services of the above-mentioned banks, while the Central Bank refused to comment on whether the risks of a mass refusal by foreign banks to accept Russian payments are significant.
Since February, European lenders have been unable to accept deposits in excess of €10,000 from Russians. And while no other formal restrictions have been activated across Europe, the existing EU regulatory norms require extra reviews of any funds originating from Russia, the founder of Anderida Financial Group, Alexey Tarapovsky, told Izvestia. Therefore, numerous financial companies have refused to accept SWIFT transfers from Russia at their own initiative, while being reluctant to spend any extra sums on reviews or fearing that a payment accepted by them could come from a sanctioned individual.
This situation is filled with risks because it is currently impossible to know for sure which bank has so far decided to toughen its rules, while there have been increasingly more such lenders recently, the expert warned. He added that Russian funds were still flowing to Europe, and Raiffeisenbank has been a leader in that. According to Tarapovsky, the blocking of transactions could be bypassed by opening an account in Kazakhstan or any other "friendly" country.
Yelena Peterson, forensics director at Kept, said the new technology of digital financial assets currently being developed in Russia could be an alternative to SWIFT for the time being, and separate independent mechanisms for settlements with Iran, India, China and Turkey are also being set up.
Vedomosti: Rosatom, Chinese firms in race to tap Bolivia’s lithium
Four Chinese companies and a Russian group are dominating the race for lithium supplies from Bolivia, the Financial Times reported. A source familiar with this fierce competition confirmed to Vedomosti that four Chinese companies and Russia’s Uranium One Group, a subsidiary of Rosatom’s TENEX, would compete at the next stage. Lilac Solutions, a US company with the backing of Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Ventures, is the only western rival.
According to an estimate by the US Geological Survey, Bolivia has the world’s largest resources of lithium, a metal that is strategically important for the production of batteries. The potential winner would sign a contract with Bolivia’s state-run company Yacimientos de Litio Bolivianos (YLB).
Daniil Karimov, Managing Director of the metallurgy sector at Otkritie Research, said in recent years lithium had been playing an increasingly important role amid the rise in the production of electric vehicles. Today, demand for the metal is almost equal to supply, but in the mid-term the former would exceed production volumes, provided sales of electric vehicles remain high. And lithium prices have soared more than 10-fold since late 2020 and could remain high in the mid-term to keep up the supply, Karimov concluded.
If YLB chooses the Russian company, Moscow would secure itself uninterrupted supplies of lithium, head of the Center for Ibero-American Studies at St. Petersburg State University Viktor Kheifets pointed out. There are not many lithium deposits in the world, while Argentina and Chile have almost stopped their exports to Russia. Though neither Chilean nor Argentinian suppliers have officially joined the anti-Russian sanctions, they have to take into account the interests of their Western shareholders, therefore both nations have nixed lithium shipments to Russia, the expert explained. Vedomosti has turned to Rosatom for a comment.
