The people in charge of divvying up the sea’s oil resources in Russia’s favor may not be doing their job – and they know it.

The fight over Caspian oil reserves keeps getting sleazier by the day. Viktor Kalyuzhny, the Russian government’s special negotiator for Caspian Sea problems, has now attacked Turkmenistan and Iran for creating obstacles to the signing of commercial-shipping agreements in ways that run counter to the policies of the state he claims to be serving.

Ever since he was dropped from the post of Fuel and Energy Minister and given the Caspian job instead, Kalyuzhny has behaved as if he still regards at least one, possibly more, of the Russian oil companies and their Kazakh and Azeri business friends as his prime constituents. The Caspian Sea, according to Kalyuzhny and these constituents, is simply an oil reservoir waiting to be tapped, and the sooner it can be converted into cash, the better. More than a year ago, when Kalyuzhny delivered a personal insult to the Iranian president ahead of his meeting in Moscow with President Vladimir Putin, the effect was seriously embarrassing. But, since then, Kalyuzhny has neither been rebuked nor replaced.

Now Kalyuzhny has blamed Turkmenistan for insisting that an agreement on multilateral division of the sea and seabed is the precondition for all other negotiations. Kalyuzhny has already negotiated bilateral agreements with Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan, which propose a median-line division of the seabed – allowing oil drilling to proceed in the demarcated zones – but, so far, Turkmenistan and Iran have rejected this approach and blocked with threats and shows of military force any incursion onto the seabeds they claim as their own. Consequently, Kalyuzhny has taken a much tougher line with Turkmenistan and Iran than other Russian government officials or the Kremlin. According to Kalyuzhny, Iran "insists that all negotiations and agreements related to the Caspian Sea should be multilateral and include all five [littoral] countries and that bilateral and trilateral agreements and negotiations should not be pursued." According to Kalyuzhny, "those countries that do not agree do not have the right to veto such agreements between other countries of the Caspian region."

At the same time, Kalyuzhny signaled that Moscow is not prepared to grant the other Caspian states the unrestricted access they want for their shipping to the Russian river system linking the Caspian to the Black Sea. In the current draft convention on the legal status of the Caspian Sea, which has been circulating for more than 12 months, the non-Russian states demand free transit through Russian waterways. Kalyuzhny admitted that Russia is a minority of one on this issue, but added "there is no doubt that regulation of access to its internal waterways is the sovereign right of Russia, which should be regulated entirely by Russian national legislation."

But Kalyuzhny has gone further than anyone else in the Russian government, endorsing a proposal from Azerbaijan that would lift the strictly regulated system now in operation. According to Kalyuzhny, Azerbaijan has proposed "privileged" rather than free or unrestricted access to the Russian waterways. Kalyuzhny said he personally favors this compromise, but Transport Ministry sources have told The Russia Journal that they do not. Russia’s Caspian shipping companies are even more scathing about what they say is Kalyuzhny’s giveaway to Azerbaijan’s state shipping company, Caspar. If there are to be any concessions allowing more Azeri vessels to move between the Caspian and the Black Sea through the Volga-Don Channel, the Russian shippers told The Russia Journal, then Azerbaijan must drop the virtual exclusion of Russian tankers and other vessels from the port of Baku.