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ARTICLE: “Russia’s Gas Diplomacy Fuels Realignment of Former Soviet Bloc,” by Marc Champion and Guy Chazan, Wall Street Journal, 30 January 2006, p. A1.
Putin and company are probably getting a faster response time to their recent energy shenanigans than they expected. This article’s lead sentence lays it out nicely:
Russia’s natural-gas diplomacy is driving some of its former satellites to look elsewhere for energy supplies but is drawing others closer to Moscow’s orbit, reshaping economic dependencies and stirring deep unease in the region.
Who’s running away? Georgia, for one. Chechnya sits between Georgia and the Russian energy, and that’s gotta feel pretty scary as a long-term prospect.
Ukraine is also moving farther away, although there’s so much bad old and new blood in that relationship, we’re probably talking a drop in a very large bucket.
Moldova is another country that was recently pressured into accepting significantly higher prices from Gazprom, but it knuckled under.
Moscow says that all it’s doing is ending a lot of old, undervalued supplies relationships with neighbors and simply asking them to pay reasonable market prices, which if you know anything about the old Soviet Union’s subsidizing of Eastern Europe through cheap energy, certainly sounds plausible enough.
It’s just that this shift to market prices was both abrupt and delivered in the usual, high-handed Russian way, and this has got a lot of former satellites thinking hard about alternatives, like Poland and Romania agitating hard for the speeding up of the construction of a pipeline from Turkey to Austria to balance their existing energy ties to Russia.
So yeah, Russia’s getting Belarus, Moldova and energy-rich Uzbekistan in this pushme-pullyou process, but it’s losing some real talent in terms of economic connectivity with the West, with Poland and Ukraine being the two great historical conduits from the West to Russia.
Me, I see Russia picking up classic Gap states and burning bridges with New Core ones, and that ain’t smart.
But again, everyone goes through a learning curve on such things. I’m just surprised at how quickly this one is unfolding for Putin and his silovki.
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