Business Watch
By John Bonar
The days when NATO could expand here, there and everywhere around the borders of Russia; break the promises Bill Clinton made to Gorbachev and generally follow an adventurist path confident that Russia, after the collapse of communism was a busted flush are no more.
The turning point was the neo-con backed Georgian invasion of South Ossetia two summers ago which met such a robust Russian response. The US trained Georgian forces were trounced and Russia briefly invaded Georgia proper destroying arms stockpiles. NATO protested loudly from the rooftops of Brussels to no effect.
Russian developer, Renaissance Capital, has launched a multi billion dollar property development on the northern outskirts of Kenya’s capital Nairobi to cash in on a booming real estate market in east Africa ’s biggest economy. The Renaissance Group is targeting local and foreign investors as interest in Kenya’s real estate market grows due to strong market growth where the property sector has outperformed stocks in the past 10 years.
Dmitry Medvedev visited Kunashir, the southernmost of the Kuril Islands on Monday November 1. He is the first Russian leader to visit the Russian Far-Eastern islands. Japan protested against this visit and claims that the Russian President’s arrival on the islands hurts the feelings of the people of Japan.
Russia and Ukraine have signed a raft of agreements including in shale gas exploration and nuclear cooperation while Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin visited Russia’s southern neighbour amid concerns by Ukrainian opposition over increasingly closer ties with Moscow.
While western historians and commentators such as Niall Fergusson and Noriel Roubini are warning of the shift of economic power from the west to the east, Russia is already ahead of the game making inroads into the fast growing Asian economies. Russian President Dmitry Medvedev met in Hanoi this weekend with leaders of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) member states: Brunei, Vietnam, Indonesia, Cambodia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Singapore, Thailand and the Philippines.
PRESIDENT OF RUSSIA DMITRY MEDVEDEV: Mr President, colleagues,
First of all I would like to thank our Vietnamese friends for their hospitality and excellent job organising the summit. Everything is in place to carry out productive work. We have to take stock of what has been done recently, and identify priority directions for the development of relations between Russia and ASEAN.
Before going on to our discussion of substantive issues, I would like to express my sincere condolences to the Indonesian nation in connection with the recent natural disasters affecting their country, and to Thailand where similar problems have occurred.