Russia’s diplomatic overtures to Turkmenistan will continue on Wednesday with the visit to Ashgabat of Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.
Lavrov’s trip to Turkmenistan comes after a brief stopover in Armenia, a route that takes him on a circumlocutory itinerary around neighbours and through countries whose relations with the West range from fraught to pragmatic all the way to downright hostile.
As the Moscow Times reports, the agenda in Turkmenistan will be primarily defined by economic affairs:

“During his visit, Lavrov will meet with Turkmen President Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov and Turkmen Foreign Minister Rashid Meredov, Interfax said, citing a Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman.
‘The aim is to discuss our current and prospective economic relations. Russia believes it is important to take steps in order to give our bilateral economic relations a more stable character,’ the spokesmen said.”

However, this is a misleading précis of Lavrov’s intentions, as the significance of dispatching a political figure to talk business is fundamentally incoherent. That notwithstanding, it stands to reason that the primary item on the Russian-Turkmen agenda is currently the situation with gas trade between the two sides.
Russia’s understandable concern in the wake of the late Presisent Saparmurat Niyazov’s death is that a more rational export diversification strategy may be starting to take form, with no lack of vocal egging on from regional neighbours and other international actors.
While, on the face of things, the United States has been officially circumspect in its attitude towards all recent changes in Turkmenistan, it is obvious that Washington favours the possibility of diverting gas resources away from Russia. At the 6th Georgian International Oil, Gas, Energy and Infrastructure Conference in Tbilisi the U.S. Ambassador to Georgia John Tefft reportedly spoke enthusiastically of the possibility of transporting Turkmen gas to Europe via Azerbaijan and Georgia:

“Talks are in progress on the issue. Obviously, Russia may try to create drawbacks.”

As GBC Daily News reported in March, Azerbaijan has been even more forceful on the matter, with Deputy Foreign Minister Araz Azimov openly urging the European Union to purchase gas from Turkmenistan:

“Buying gas directly from Turkmenistan rather than via Russia will strengthen energy security of EU.”

Azerbaijan, which recognises a diplomatic opportunity when it sees one, has even begun to attach conditionality to this proposal by stating that it sees no point to joining the Nabucco pipeline project until the position of Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan has been clarified. The Nabucco pipeline, which would serve to convey gas from Turkey to Hungary is a initiative transparently designed to bypass Russia as a transit point.
The expectation is that the pipeline will be commissioned by 2011 and cost 5 billion euros.
Meanwhile, at an oil and gas field development conference in Baku on Tuesday, EU representatives expressed an interested in financing a Transcaspian pipeline project to ship gas through an underwater pipeline via Azerbaijan and Georgia to Europe.
And in one of those peculiar convergences that may also unnerve Russia, a Turkmen delegation is preparing to attend the annual meeting in May of the board of governors of the Asian Development Bank, the primary sponsor of the elusive Trans-Afghan natural gas pipeline project, which would see gas transiting run from Turkmenistan through Herat and Kandahar in Afghanistan, through the Pakistani cities of Quetta and Multan, and on to India.
With immediate neighbour Iran and China thrown into the mix, Russia’s effort to secure its slice of the pie looks wrought with uncertainty.
Logically, the range of competing parties at play puts Turkmenistan in a highly enviable position, which is why Russia has decided to send its top diplomat to argue its case. It is evident that Moscow now understands that its approach will have to be far broader than the purely monetary inducements it had previously deployed with Niyazov’s abysmally avaricious regime.
On Monday, Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) Secretary General Bolat Nurgaliyev said in an interview with Itar-Tass that the organisation is keen to see Turkmenistan engaged more actively with regional processes. This type of regional political solution may represent Russia’s best hope of winning Ashgabat over to a more strictly internal Eurasian energy arrangement, which would see Turkmen gas resources consumed primarily between Central Asian nations, Russia and China. Indeed, the SCO could be the most alluring multilateral organisation for Turkmenistan insofar as it nominally comes with no hard-and-fast institutional reform strings attached. As an aside, it might be noted that the forum of the CIS has little or nothing to offer in this delicate diplomatic exchange.
The recent fortuitous, and most likely, exaggerated discovery of new gas reserves in the Mary Province may well have been designed to convey the signal that Asia will always be a energy destination, no matter what. Lavrov’s task will be finding an accomodation that preserves Turkmen neutrality, which has always been primitive code for economic, diplomatic and political sovereignty.