Leaving Eastern Europe Out in the Cold

Sally McNamara / October 14, 2009

In January, amidst a particularly cold winter, Russia’s quasi-governmental gas giant Gazprom turned off the gas taps to Ukraine after the two sides failed to reach agreement in a pay dispute. Downstream users including Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, and the Czech Republic were also put in the deep freeze. Gazprom has become synonymous with energy intimidation and Moscow has leveraged energy to specifically target former Soviet states such as Ukraine as it seeks to carve out a sphere of influence in its near abroad. However, the conundrum for Moscow in playing petro-politics is how to control the supply to countries in its near abroad and remain a reliable energy supplier to Western Europe at the same time, since the majority of Russian energy is currently pumped via pipelines which cross Russia’s immediate neighbors.

The Russian-German planned Nord Stream pipeline, which will pump energy supplies directly into Germany and bypass Eastern Europe, has ruffled feathers across Central and Eastern Europe. Poland’s Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski has compared the deal to the devastating 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop pact which carved up large parts of Europe into others’ sphere of influences. (more…)