March 30, 2007	Friday	Rabi-ul-Awwal 10, 1428

ASTANA, March 29: Oil-rich Kazakhstan is interested in a planned oil pipeline route from Ukraine to northern Europe but wants Russia to be involved, President Nursultan Nazarbayev said on Thursday.

“I want to underline that we are interested and it is essential to invite the Russian side to participate in the negotiations,” Nazarbayev said at the close of a meeting with his Polish counterpart Lech Kaczynski.

“Around 2012-2014 Kazakhstan will become one of the main suppliers of oil to the world market.... That is why the Odessa-Brody-Gdansk project is a good option for us,” he said.

Kaczynski said Poland was keen to reduce its dependence on Russian energy and saw the troubled pipeline project, which has US backing, as a solution.

“We are not enemies of Russia, but Poland wants to diversify its fossil fuel suppliers,” the Polish president said on a tour that was to take him to Azerbaijan on Friday.

The pipeline plan is based on an existing pipeline from Odessa on Ukraine's Black Sea coast to Brody in Poland that was completed in 2001.

The pipeline was intended to bring oil from the Caspian region to European markets but proved uneconomic and is now used in the opposite direction for Russian shipments to southern markets.—AFP