Interesting Developments

I don't know if this means anything yet, but I think it's worth watching ...

Kazakhstan Seeks New Oil Route

ALMATY -- Land-locked Kazakhstan, emerging as an important oil producer but short of export outlets, said on Thursday that it was interested in bringing Caspian oil to the Baltic Sea via a Polish-Ukrainian pipeline.

Ukraine, seeking closer ties with the European Union and keen to cut its heavy dependence on Russian energy supplies, built the pipeline between the Black Sea port of Odessa to Brody on the Polish border.

The Odessa-Brody pipeline had originally been planned to run further, to Poland's Baltic port of Gdansk, but under Russian pressure Ukraine reversed the planned oil flow.

What stands out is that Ukraine wanted to build an oil pipeline through to the Polish port of Gdansk - but was pressured by Russia not to.

The link between Poland and the Ukraine is something to watch for. Ukraine means "Borderlands", and has traditionally been Poland's borderlands to the east. Last month Poland, Ukraine and Lithuania signed an Interparliamentary Assembly Agreement:

The forum's ambit is that of the historic Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which included most of present-day Ukraine, and was a constitutional monarchy with deeply rooted parliamentary traditions from the 15th through the 18th centuries. Symbolically, the newly founded Inter-Parliamentary Assembly may be viewed as a distant successor to the Commonwealth's Diet, which ceased to exist when autocratic Russia annexed most of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth's territory in the late 18th century. Beyond symbolism, however, in the real world of politics the recent revival of parliamentary democracy in Poland, Lithuania, and Ukraine signifies the success of European constitutionalism in the historic contest against Russian autocracy in this region.