01-02-09 As talks continue over Nabucco, a planned pipeline to bring natural gas from Central Asia to Western Europe, Russia has declared that it will not participate in the project.
Speaking at a meeting held by the Turkish Centre for International and Strategic Analysis (TURKSAM) in Ankara, Russian Ambassador to Turkey Vladimir Ivanovsky said his country would not be participating in the project, stressing that Russia believes it will be impossible for Europe to meet its natural gas demand without the supply from Iran and Iraq. He said Turkey could have been on the winners' side and the gas problems of the Balkan countries would be solved had the construction of a second Blue Stream line, which Russia proposed in 2004, been realized.
"Turkey would have become the main bridge for natural gas delivery to Europe," he said.

Ivanovsky said Russia was not against the Nabucco project and that it would be successful if a healthy and durable infrastructure was established. He stated that Europe was currently having serious natural gas problems, but warned that Nabucco would not be a permanent solution for such problems.
He explained that they had calculated that Europe's total gas need would reach 700 bn cm per year by 2015 and that Nabucco is only expected to supply Europe with a total of 30 bn cm of gas annually. He noted that Russia would be able to meet only one-third of this demand, reiterating that gas from Iran and Iraq was the key.

He said some ambassadors from the European Union in Russia told him recently that it would be hard for Nabucco to operate effectively without Russia; however, Ivanovsky noted that the primary aim of the project is to minimize Europe's dependence on Russian natural gas sources as much as possible and that it would contradict such a goal if Moscow took part in the project.
He stated that Russia itself needed to use natural gas and that it also sells gas to China.