It’s not the first year Lithuania has been arguing with Belarus over a nuclear power plant, which is being built near the town of Astraviec, near the Belarusian-Lithuanian border, with the help of Russia. The international community and experts refused to take the side of Vilnius and recognize the object as dangerous, but Lithuania managed – not without blackmail – to turn its neighbors against the disobedient Belarus, thus undermining the ambitious economic plans of Minsk.
But then the coronavirus intervened, changing the balance of power in the region. Why Lithuania is so angry about the Belarusian NPP, whether the station is really a threat to the Baltic states and how the pandemic has divided the recent allies – in the material “Lenta.ru”.
Eastern threat
In 2017, when the construction of the Belarusian nuclear power plant was already in full swing, the Lithuanian Parliament decided to consider this facility a security threat. Moreover, a special legislative act was adopted, prohibiting the purchase of energy from this plant. The attitude of Vilnius to the new power plant can be defined in two words: fear and envy.
Envy – because at one time the Republic of Lithuania inherited its own Ignalina NPP from the USSR, thanks to which the state did not know the problems with cheap electricity and even exported it to neighboring countries. But when Lithuania joined the European Union in 2004, Brussels demanded that the NPP be shut down as unsafe. Vilnius had to obey. Later on, Lithuanians tried to launch a project to build a new Visaginas NPP that would meet European requirements, but never found investors.
Fear is associated with the fact that the Belarusian town of Astraviec, near the NPP construction, is located near the border with Lithuania and only fifty miles from Vilnius. That is, in case of disaster, the consequences for the Baltic Republic will be catastrophic.
The fact that the facility is being built by the Russian “Rosatom” at the request of Minsk does not reassure the Lithuanians – they believe that the Russian corporation is unable to provide guarantees. For example, Vytautas Landsbergis, who led the republic during the period of withdrawal from the USSR and has an informal nickname “father of Lithuanian democracy,” calls Belarusian nuclear power plant not only “guillotine” and “death” for Lithuania.
Despite all these statements, the work continued. In April 2019, experts began testing and testing the equipment of the first power unit. It was announced that the first power unit would be put into operation at the end of 2019. As a result, the deadline has shifted – the launch was postponed to 2020, and the launch of the second unit was shifted to 2021.
Final verification of the readiness of the Belarusian NPP was completed on April 12, and nuclear fuel may soon begin to be delivered there. The works at the site continue even in spite of the coronavirus pandemic in the world. The station will not only allow Minsk to completely abandon electricity imports, but also create a surplus of electricity, providing profitable exports.
The irritation of the Lithuanian side is growing the closer the launch moment is, only now Vilnius cannot express its discontent as openly as it used to be. After the friction between Belarus and Russia increased last year, the EU countries, which also includes Lithuania, embarked on a course of rapprochement with President Lukashenko. Lithuania also has a vested interest not to quarrel with Minsk: the republic makes a lot of money on transit, thanks to which the port of Klaipeda has become the most successful in the Baltic States, and a significant part of this transit is provided by the Belarusian trade turnover.
“We don’t wash, we skate like this”
In Lithuania, realizing that it would be impossible to force Belarusians to abandon the NPP, they tried to find a compromise. In March 2019, Prime Minister Saulius Skvernialis offered Minsk, according to him, “a hooligan plan”: to reconstruct an almost ready NPP into a gas power plant and get liquefied natural gas from Klaipeda. The politician said that Minsk could thus reduce its dependence on Moscow.
But in the summer of 2019, Lithuania’s president was replaced, and the new head of state, Gitanas Nausa, decided to return the lost economic ties and strengthen existing ones. For example, when Belarus was unable to agree on energy prices in Russia last year, Lithuania helped to buy fuel from other suppliers.
Nausa boasts that Vilnius helped Alexander Lukashenko to conduct a dialogue on energy resources with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin “on equal terms. And now the U.S. Ambassador to Lithuania Robert Gilchrist suggests that in the future Belarusians should adjust the delivery of American gas through Klaipeda.
However, all these curtsies have no effect. The importance of having a nuclear power plant is undoubted for Belarus, especially against the backdrop of the recent conflict with Moscow over energy prices. In the cost of kilowatt-hour electricity at gas-fired thermal power plants, the fuel component is more than 75 percent, while at nuclear power plants it does not exceed 20 percent – the benefit is obvious.
This is why Lithuania is trying to involve international organizations in the fight. It comes out with mixed success. For example, the parties to the “Espoo Convention” (Convention on Environmental Impact Assessment in a Transboundary Context) in February 2019 concluded that “the environmental impact assessment documentation of Belarusian nuclear power plant mentions alternative nuclear power plant sites and criteria for the selection of these sites, but does not provide a rationale for the choice of Ostrovets site”.
Experts of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), visiting the NPP in Astravets in July 2019, concluded that Minsk is quite conscientious in its efforts to ensure the safety of the plant. In February 2020, they once again confirmed their verdict after the inspection of the plant and stressed that the world experience, gained after the disaster at Fukushima NPP, was taken into account during the construction.
However, the Lithuanians seem to ignore these conclusions. Last October, a civil defense exercise was held in the country, the scenario of which implied the disaster at the Belarusian nuclear power plant. People received “warning” on their mobile phones and saw it on television, special sirens went off, volunteers took part in evacuation of the population and processing of “infected” people.
Activists of the public movement against the Belarusian nuclear power plant began collecting signatures on a petition for the European Parliament and the official Minsk, calling not to give permission to operate the Belarusian nuclear power plant, not to launch the first unit and move the construction of the remaining units to another place.
“As long as we are, we will resist. Silence of the lambs would be a capitulation,” said “father of Lithuanian democracy”, – said Landsbergis.
As the next parliamentary elections approached, the topic of the “unsafe” Belarusian NPP was saddled by the opposition bloc “Fatherland Union – Christian Democrats of Lithuania,” headed by the grandson of Landsbergis – Gabrielus. However, the opponents rightly point out to them the evidence of such manipulation.
“If they had done it at the beginning of construction of the nuclear power plant – in 2009-2010, this could still be understood”, – said the spokesman for the Social Democratic Party of Lithuania Justinas Argustas.
Friends rush to the aid
At the same time, Vilnius is trying to attract other countries to its side and persuade them not to buy the islanders’ electricity. Poland was the first to support the boycott of Belarusian NPP. The Poles have found a reinforced concrete reason for this: Warsaw intends to develop its own nuclear power industry. As for Latvia and Estonia, they hesitated at first.
In August 2019, Vice Chancellor for Energy of the Estonian Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications Timo Tatar said that he did not rule out the possibility of buying electricity from Belarus. The authorities in Tallinn are forced to shut down the oil shale energy sector, which has traditionally heated the country, because they have undertaken to radically reduce greenhouse gas emissions under the Paris Climate Agreement.
Moreover, in Estonia, on the initiative and with the support of business, they are working on the project of their own nuclear power plant, though much more modest than in Belarus. We are now looking for the best site for it.
Latvia is also in a difficult situation, where high energy prices have long been a problem. A few years ago, one of the largest national enterprises – Liepaja Metallurgical Plant – closed down, which at some point was unable to pay the rising electricity bills. So last summer some members of the Latvian government said that as soon as Lithuania imposes a blockade on energy imports from Belarus after the launch of the nuclear power plant, Latvia will start buying electricity from this country through its own border.
The speaker of the Lithuanian parliament Viktoras Pranzketis immediately went to Riga and there he received an assurance from Latvian Prime Minister Krisjanis Karins that there was a misunderstanding and in fact Latvia will not buy energy from Belarus. The head of the Lithuanian electricity network operator Litgrid, Davis Virbitskas, threatened that if Riga showed fickleness in this matter, Vilnius would file a complaint against it with the European Commission. By February 2020, the disobedient Baltic States had surrendered: at a meeting in Tallinn, the prime ministers of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia agreed to sign a declaration on the refusal to purchase electricity, which would be produced at the Belarusian NPP.
Lithuania was also trying to find support from its main ally. In October 2019, Lithuanian Prime Minister Skvernalis during a meeting with U.S. Energy Minister Rick Perry expressed the wish that Washington would press on Minsk because of the NPP. “Minister Perry promised support”, Skvernalis told the press at t
he end of the conversation. However, it seems that the head of the government misunderstood his interlocutor.
Later Perry told the press the exact opposite. “There is an IAEA, whose role is to ensure that nuclear facilities comply with international standards. So I would recommend the Lithuanian leaders to pay attention to that”, – he said during the conference of transatlantic energy cooperation in Vilnius and advised the host side to interact directly with Minsk on Belarusian NPP.
Virus factor
The coronavirus SARS Cov-2, which suddenly and decisively broke the plans of the whole world, did not stop the construction of the nuclear power plant in Astraviec, but it seems to be changing the balance of forces in the region. Cheap Belarusian electricity now has a different value in the eyes of the Baltic governments. All three states are closed under strict quarantine, business and economic activity is fading in them, experts are already calculating losses of hundreds of millions of euros. Unemployment may increase by 12-20 percent, wages will be reduced due to overwork by 10-12 percent, the flow of bankruptcies of small and medium-sized enterprises will be like a tsunami.
Former Prime Minister of Lithuania Andrius Kubilius believes that the drop in GDP in Lithuania will be more serious than predicted by analysts of the Ministry of Finance.
“For example, in the first week of quarantine such a powerful economy as the German one has already lost 56 billion euros. Its annual losses are forecasted in the corridor from 255 to 729 billion euros. It should be remembered that during the financial and economic crisis of 2008 Germany lost 5 percent of GDP, while Lithuania lost more than 15 percent”, – Kubilius hints at fatal losses.
Lithuania has to pay a lot of money for gas, and this money goes not only for the purchase of blue fuel but also for logistics: for example, to pay Norway to rent a floating liquefied natural gas terminal. It has recently become known that Klaipedos Nafta will take 272.5 million euros on credit for the purchase of the LNG terminal and the redistribution of its maintenance costs until 2044.
In Estonia, the damage caused by the coronavirus pandemic crisis is already estimated at 1.2 billion euros due to reduced tax revenue and unexpected infection control costs. Latvia is not yet ready to give specific figures, but it is also admitted that the losses in the tourism, hotel and passenger transport sectors are expected to be enormous, and the overall loss will be a burden on the entire economy.
President of the Russian Association of Baltic Studies, Professor of St. Petersburg State University Nikolai Mezhevich told “Lenta.ru” that Latvia does not have the ability to balance its energy consumption based on its own resources. In the coming years, Riga will have to look for benefits decisively in everything, especially taking into account the fact that revenues from Russian transit will fall, while Latvians have nothing against cooperation with Belarus.
In these conditions, the hard-won “Baltic solidarity” on BelAES may go ashes, especially since in the past, the Baltic countries have not been bent on giving each other a boost in the economy. For example, in 2017 Riga complained to the European Commission in Vilnius that Lithuanians had dismantled the rails on a section of the common railway that was strategically important for Latvians in order to earn money on transit through their port. And even if Lithuania is rebuked and follows the principle, its Baltic neighbours may not be so principled. It is better to survive separately than to die together.