Putin will meet Prime Minister Romano Prodi in the southern Italian city of Bari tomorrow, accompanied by key ministers from both countries, for talks that Italian officials say will result in agreements in the energy and aviation industries. Italy is Russia’s fourth-largest trading partner after Germany, Belarus and Ukraine, according to the Italian Foreign Ministry’s Web site.

Putin enjoyed close personal ties with Prodi’s predecessor, Silvio Berlusconi, who backed the Russian leader’s conduct of the war in Chechnya. Prodi’s meeting with Putin this week will be the fourth since he took office in May last year. „The political will for trade and investment cooperation is very strong” between Russia and Italy, Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in a telephone interview in Moscow yesterday. Italy accounts for 7% of Russian exports and 4.8% of Russian imports, according to the Foreign Ministry.

 

Eni SpA, Italy’s largest oil company, and OAO Gazprom, Russia’s natural-gas export monopoly, will announce details at the talks in Bari of an agreement to jointly develop energy resources, according to a statement from Prodi’s office. The companies agreed last year to examine possible joint exploration ventures for gas and oil deposits in Russia and elsewhere.

Eni CEO Paolo Scaroni and Gazprom Chairman Alexei Miller will sign a document in Bari setting out the details, an official at the prime minister’s office, who asked not to be identified, told a briefing yesterday. „The Gazprom-Eni relationship is really good, really smooth,” Peskov said. Officials will also sign a further accord under an existing joint project to make regional passenger jets between Finmeccanica SpA, Italy’s largest defense manufacturer, and Russia’s Sukhoi Civil Aircraft Co, said a spokesman for the Italian embassy in Moscow who declined to be identified.

Finmeccanica concluded an agreement last month with the state-owned Russian and Italian railway companies to develop high-speed trains. The company has expressed interest in building a high-speed rail line between Moscow and St. Petersburg.

 

Putin travels on from Bari to Athens, where he’ll sign an agreement March 15 with Greek and Bulgarian leaders to build a pipeline taking Russian crude oil from the Black Sea to the Aegean. The €700 million ($920 million), 285-kilometer pipeline will run from the Bulgarian Black Sea port of Bourgas to the Greek port of Alexandroupolis, bypassing Turkey’s clogged Bosporus and Dardanelles straits.

Its initial annual capacity will be about 35 million tons of crude oil, and that will rise eventually to 50 million tons. „The project is really very important for regional energy security,” Peskov said. Russian pipeline monopoly Transneft has been considering the line since 1994. Russia ships oil from ports on the Black Sea through the Bosporus to the Mediterranean. To alleviate congestion in the straits, Turkish authorities barred tankers longer than 200 meters (656 feet) from sailing through the straits at night.

The reduction in daylight hours in winter limits the number of ships that can use the waterway, and bad weather can clog them further. Putin, 54, starts his Mediterranean trip in Rome today, where he’ll hold talks with President Giorgio Napolitano before having his first meeting with Pope Benedict. „It’s more than a courtesy visit,” Peskov said, adding that they’ll discuss „issues of dialogue between civilizations, between religions.”

Ties between the Catholic and Orthodox churches have long been strained, with the Russian church hierarchy accusing Rome of seeking to convert Russians to Roman Catholicism. No pope has ever been to Russia. Pope Benedict, the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, is German. Putin, a former spy in communist East Germany, is a German speaker. „Of course we cannot exclude that they may exchange a few phrases in German,” Peskov said. (Bloomberg)