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Russia's Energy Chickens Finally Come Home to Roost
// A Frightened Europe is Beginning to Pull Away, and For Good Reason
The discussion going on in Strasbourg of a resolution that goes by the alarmist title of "The Peril of Using Energy Supplies as Instruments of Political Pressure" is a significant event in its own right. No one country is named in the document's title, but it's not hard to guess which country the resolution's authors had in mind. Almost every schoolchild knows that Russia is Europe's main supplier of gas. That means that when the delegates in Strasbourg started talking about "energy peril," they were thinking of Russia. And this when Moscow has made and continues to make enormous efforts to present itself as an exceptionally reliable and unproblematic energy partner of the West. In general, Russia's efforts to present itself as a predictable and reliable energy superpower have achieved a most unexpected result: the opposite of what was intended. The discussion in Strasbourg finally proves that Moscow has hoisted itself by its own petard. And this is not a result of any purported machinations by "groups of liberals" in PACE - let's call a spade a spade, because self-deception can get to be costly. The fact of the matter is that a qualitative shift in perceptions of Russia has been taking place in the European consciousness for the last few months. The fact that Strasbourg is an arena where Russia traditionally gets a good dunking is no longer news. It was that way even before the Putin era, under President Yeltsin. What is news is the fact that the Council of Europe and its Parliamentary Assembly have for the first time taken a step away from their traditional themes of political rights and freedoms and actively plunged into a discussion of real economic matters. After all, until yesterday the discussion of the problem of energy security took place only within the framework of the dialog between Russia and the EU. But now it's a hot-button topic, and even PACE has joined the fray.
Moscow's complaints about European attempts to see a political subtext in every move Gazprom makes and about the prejudice of the West are not entirely unfounded. However, the idea of an "energy NATO" trying to counterbalance Moscow is neither viable nor constructive: it only aggravates the energy confrontation. But this idea is the result of fear. And fear doesn't arise out of nowhere. It's real, and it's not the fruit of a sick imagination or of a media that has been manipulated by the West.
Gazprom's annoyance is understandable: the company is trying to position itself as an eminent commercial organization, not a political instrument of the Kremlin. But the chickens have finally come home to roost, and there's no getting rid of them. Russia has given Europe a real scare with its hydrocarbon conflicts with former Soviet republics, and this is the result. It's true that Europe has no chance of weaning itself off Russian gas in the near future. But it's also a fact that Europe, for its own peace of mind, would prefer to do everything in its power to be independent of Moscow in the long run. The Old World has already begun to pull away from Russia as an energy supplier. And stopping it will be difficult in the extreme, if indeed even possible at all.
Sergey Strokan
All the Article in Russian as of Jan. 24, 2007
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