MOSCOW. March 19 (Interfax) - In response to Tajikistan's latest demands Russia has demanded that Dushanbe ratify the agreement on the Russian military base in the shortest possible time, Kommersant daily reported on Tuesday.
Moscow "insists on the speedy ratification of the agreement" and expects Dushanbe to complete the job in a month's time, the newspaper reports quoting a source at the Russian Defense Ministry.
The source said that Chief of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces Gen. Valery Gerasimov made this clear to his Tajik colleagues during a visit to Dushanbe last week.
The source added that initially the visit was scheduled for mid-February and was supposed to be purely working (issues of military-technical cooperation, a routine inspection of military facilities etc), however, the delay in the ratification of the agreement on the terms of the presence of the Russian military base in Tajikistan topped its agenda.
Moscow has fulfilled two key conditions put forward by Dushanbe - offered privileges to immigrants from Tajikistan and cancelled export duties on oil product deliveries to Tajikistan, the daily says.
A Kommersant source close to the bilateral intergovernmental commission said that Dushanbe came up with two additional conditions.
The Tajik side insists that verbal understandings reached last October be documented as official agreements - that is Russia's allocations on the upgrade of the Tajikistan's armed forces and investments in the advancement of its hydro power engineering. Moreover, it wants Russia to allocate more than the promised $200 million on the rearmament of the Tajik army noting that Russia promised about $1 billion to Kyrgyzstan for similar purposes, the daily says.
"Moscow did not agree to these new terms. We are ready to work on the wishes of Tajikistan but that will take time. And we will definitely not agree to link these demands to those concerning the lease of our base," the source said.
The 201st Russian military base in Tajikistan has about 6,000 personnel stationed there and is Russia's largest land base aboard. During his visit to Dushanbe on October 5, 2012 Russian President Vladimir Putin signed an agreement pursuant to which the base will remain in Tajikistan until 2042. However, the ratification of the agreement by the Tajik parliament has not been completed.