The visit of the President of Turkmenistan Gurbanguly Berdymuhamedov to the Russian capital will take place on the first of November, the Turkmen Foreign Ministry said.
Turkmenistan’s Foreign Ministry does not inform about the purpose of the sudden visit of the Turkmen leader to Moscow.
Note that Berdymuhamedov and the Russian President Putin have never met in the Kremlin. The Turkmen leader paid an official visit to Moscow, but then Medvedev was the Russian President.
However, as Presidents Berdymuhamedov and Putin met back in 2007. On May 10-11, Vladimir Putin visited Ashgabat, where they held talks with the President of Turkmenistan, and on May 12 he went to the Turkmenbashi city to participate in the trilateral Russian-Turkmen-Kazakh summit. The sides also signed a joint declaration on construction of the Caspian coastal gas pipeline. Later, the project was shelved.
In 2015 Russian Gazprom reduced the import of Turkmen gas to a minimum of 4 bcm, and this year in general it has stopped its purchase.
Over the past two years Turkmenistan’s economy, after hydrocarbon prices fell sharply, began to deteriorate. The government canceled a number of social benefits, the local currency is devalued, in the “black market” the value of the dollar is 2.5 times higher than the rate announced by the National Bank. According to Radio Liberty, in October, state employees receive their salaries for August.
In all likelihood, Berdymuhamedov’s visit to Moscow is connected with political and economic issues. According to the portal Turkmenistan Chronicle (http://www.chrono-tm.org/), for the first 9 months of 2016, China bought 23 bcm of natural gas from Turkmenistan. Last year, the overall supply of Turkmen gas to China amounted to 28 billion bcm. However, the Turkmen government does not receive the full funds for the gas supply as the money is used to repay billions of dollars of Chinese loans. Therefore, the export of gas to China still does not bring Turkmenistan tangible income, and the size of it is not reported.
