[Mb-civic] Playing Politics With Pipelines - Anne Applebaum - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

Playing Politics With Pipelines

By Anne Applebaum
Wednesday, January 4, 2006; A17

Most Russians celebrate the new year with a few firecrackers, a glass of 
sweet champagne, perhaps vodka and pickled herring to keep the party 
going. This year the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, celebrated by 
switching off the flow of natural gas to Ukraine. As the inhabitants of 
Moscow and Kiev were waking up Sunday morning, nursing their hangovers, 
Russian state television was broadcasting live from a compressor station 
near Kursk. The pipeline branch boss was shown barking into a telephone: 
"Yes. Yes. And through the big pipes -- nothing. Fine. That's clear. Let 
the operators work on it." As the cameras rolled, workers turned the big 
metal wheels, scrutinized computer terminals and watched the gauges drop.

By the end of the day, the Ukrainian government had called the shut-off 
"unacceptable." The Russian government had denounced the Ukrainians for 
turning down a "super-beneficial" new gas contract, one that would 
quadruple the price Ukraine now pays for natural gas. The U.S. 
government had issued a statement expressing "regret." The European 
Union had announced it would hold a meeting. And thus began 2006, the 
year in which Russia will assume the presidency of the Group of Eight 
for the first time, the year in which the Russians want "energy 
security" to be the G-8's major theme.

In a way, it made sense. By no ordinary measure does Russia deserve to 
belong to the G-8, a group meant to include only the leaders of the 
world's richest democracies. In sheer size, Russia's economy lags behind 
those of Holland, Mexico and Brazil, among others. In per capita income, 
Russians lag behind Malta, Brunei, Chile and Uruguay. Even in 
conventional military power, Russia, with its army still stuck deep in 
the Chechen mud, is hardly the behemoth it used to be.

But in its ability to manipulate European supplies of natural gas, 
Russia is once again emerging as a superpower. There are still 
limitations: It is true that Ukraine was paying less than the world 
price for its gas, and also true that Ukrainian and Russian oligarchs 
were both profiting from that post-Soviet arrangement (which helps 
explain why it existed so long). It is furthermore true that Ukraine, 
through which Russian gas also flows to Western Europe, is not without 
leverage. Indeed, on Monday, as gas flows into Austria, Italy, France, 
Hungary, Poland and Slovakia dropped sharply, too, loud protests forced 
the Russians to switch the gas back on.

Nevertheless, the theatricality of the shut-off -- those television 
pictures of big men turning big wheels -- suggests that this was a 
political decision. The facts suggest that, too. After all, the object 
of the blackmail was Ukraine, a country that is striving to achieve 
political independence from Russia -- not neighboring Belarus, a country 
that remains subservient to Russia. It was also President Putin, not 
Gazprom, the Russian gas monopoly, who publicly announced the decisions 
this week.

More to the point, the decision fits neatly into a pattern. Last month, 
when Gerhard Schroeder, the former German chancellor, accepted a seat on 
the board of a consortium led by Gazprom, the Russian gas monopoly -- a 
consortium that will build a Russian-German pipeline that Schroeder 
approved during his final days in office -- we learned that Russian gas 
money has already been used to garner political influence. This week's 
events are further proof that the Russian government is willing to use 
its gas pipelines for political purposes as well. Today, Ukraine -- next 
year, why not Germany?

Europe can still avert future blackmail. European governments could 
invest in alternative infrastructure, such as marine terminals for 
receiving and storing liquefied natural gas -- more of which would make 
gas easier to trade internationally -- or a pipeline from the Caspian 
Sea, under the Black Sea and through Ukraine. Theoretically, the 
Europeans could also fight back diplomatically, in concert with the 
United States. Take that presidency of the G-8, for example: Is 
everybody still absolutely sure that Russia should remain a G-8 member? 
Is everybody absolutely positive that they want Putin to act as the G-8 
president?

But before Western leaders can even contemplate asking such impolitic 
questions, they'll have to recognize Putin's new year's celebration as 
the warning signal it was. Manipulation of television stations, 
harassment of human rights activists, imprisonment of the president's 
political rivals -- none of that has so far excluded Russia from the 
club of civilized nations. Like the war in Chechnya, Russia's bitter 
dispute with Ukraine over gas prices was, until now, largely dismissed 
as a regional spat. That has to change. Perhaps if the Russians want to 
talk about "energy security" in 2006, we should take them up on it.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/03/AR2006010301280.html
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