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Gazprom's announcement recently that it has begun construction of a gas pipeline through Leningrad Oblast that will ultimately pass under the Baltic Sea to the West and thus bypass the Baltic countries and Poland is only one part of a much larger Russian strategy to use its energy supplies to Europe as a political weapon.
On 19 August, Leningrad Oblast Governor Valerii Serdyukov announced that Gazprom has begun to lay a pipeline across his region that will immediately allow the completion of the gasification of rural areas there and ultimately connect to a pipeline to be laid on the Baltic seabed from Vyborg in the Russian Federation to Greifswald in Germany.
To be built jointly by Gazprom and Germany's BASF, that 1,189-kilometer subsea section of the pipeline is scheduled for completion in 2010 and will carry gas from the Russian Federation's South Russia fields to Germany and Western Europe. Branches to be built later will carry Russian gas to Finland, Sweden, and Great Britain.
The construction of this pipeline will significantly strengthen the negotiating position of Gazprom and the Russian government, which owns the company, with those countries, including Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Ukraine, and Belarus, through whose territories Russian gas now passes westward to Europe.
Once the pipeline is built, Moscow will be in a position to play one or more of these countries against the others, thus limiting the ability of these states to cooperate in ways that the Russian government finds objectionable -- or in the most extreme case, the Russian government can threaten not to send gas westward across any of them.
And at the same time, the Russian government's ability to make such choices on at least some occasions may allow Moscow to play up divisions between the more Atlanticist states of the "new Europe" and the European Union's older members, particularly Germany.
Rising gas prices have made this long-discussed project
economically viable, but both Russian officials and German analysts
have indicated that Moscow's primary goal is political because such a
pipeline gives the Russian government enormous leverage on the Baltic
countries and Poland
(http://vlasti.net/index.php?Screen=news®ion=main&id=119749).
Those four countries, German Russia expert Alexander Rahr says, are very concerned about what this new pipeline will mean for them, with Poland identifying it as a major foreign-policy challenge and the Baltic countries proposing an alternative underground, and hence more ecologically secure, "Amber" route through their territories.
That Moscow will use its new leverage against the Baltics was already demonstrated earlier in August, when Gazprom demanded that the Lithuanian authorities end regulated natural-gas prices for major consumers, something that could trigger inflation there and thus by itself prevent Vilnius as well from entering the eurozone as planned.
Indeed, even in advance of this Russian ultimatum, London's "Financial Times" reported on 25 July that central bankers across Eastern Europe are convinced that dramatic increases in Gazprom prices could "wreck the expansion of the eurozone in 2007" and thus leave the EU's newest members out in the cold.
Whether Gazprom will get its way now and indeed whether this much-discussed northern gas pipeline will in fact be completed, of course, remain very much open questions. But even the possibility that they will be represents an important contribution to Moscow's "power" politics in the region.
And in yet another indication that Moscow views this kind of pressure as most effective, the Russian government has now announced plans to lay a high-voltage cable under the Baltic Sea in order to sell Finland 8.7 billion kilowatt-hours of power annually from the Leningrad Nuclear Power Station near St. Petersburg, "The Moscow Times" reported on 22 August.
TWO GEORGIANS IN MINSK DECLARED PRISONERS OF CONSCIENCE. The international human rights group Amnesty International has declared Giorgi Kandelaki and Luka Tsuladze, two activists of Georgia's Kmara youth organization, prisoners of conscience and demanded their immediate release from jail in Minsk. Kandelaki and Tsuladze were detained in Minsk on 24 August, reportedly because the authenticity of their passports raised official doubts. The following day a KGB official announced on Belarusian Television that they were to be deported from Belarus for meddling in the country's internal affairs. But on 29 August a Minsk-based court sentenced the two Georgians to 15 days in jail each for "petty hooliganism" (see "RFE/RL Belarus, Ukraine, and Moldova Report," 1 September 2005). "Amnesty International believes that the two men are being held solely for their political activities, to punish them for peacefully exercising their right to freedom of expression, and that the administrative charge against them has been fabricated," Amnesty International said in a statement on 31 August. JM
GAZPROM REPORTEDLY TRIPLES PRICE OF GAS FOR UKRAINE IN 2006. "Kommersant-Daily" reported on 1 September that during talks in Kyiv with Naftohaz Ukrayiny head Oleksandr Ivchenko the previous day, Gazprom Deputy Chairman Aleksandr Ryazanov offered to sell Russian gas to Ukraine in 2006 at a "starting price" of $180 per 1,000 cubic meters. According to the daily, Ivchenko countered the Russian offer with a proposal to increase the costs of Russian gas transit across Ukraine fourfold. Under current arrangements, Ukraine pays $55 for 1,000 cubic meters of Russian gas and collects $1.09 per 1,000 cubic meters per 100 kilometers of Russian gas transit across Ukraine. "We have moved not so far as we would like to but we have firmly agreed on working out a market price. We have been tasked with proposing a final price to the Russian and Ukrainian governments by 10 September," "Kommersant-Daily" quoted Ryazanov as saying after his talks with Ivchenko. JM
TWENTY PERCENT OF UKRAINIAN CHILDREN ATTEND RUSSIAN-LANGUAGE SCHOOLS. Deputy Education Minister Viktor Ohnevyuk said in an interview with Interfax-Ukraine on 31 August that 1,500 schools in Ukraine instruct some 1.2 million students, or approximately every fifth schoolchild in the country, in Russian. Ohnevyuk also said some 150 schools in Ukraine instruct students in minority languages, including 33,500 students in Romanian-Moldovan, 20,000 students in Hungarian, 6,000 in Crimean Tatar, and 1,400 in Polish. Ohnevyuk added that Ukraine also has 550 schools with two languages of instruction, for example -- Ukrainian and Russian or Crimean Tatar and Russian. JM
U.S. LIFTS TRADE SANCTIONS AGAINST UKRAINE OVER CD PIRACY. U.S. Trade Representative Rob Portman on 31 August announced the lifting of punitive 100 percent tariffs that had been imposed since 2002 on $75 million worth of Ukrainian exports to the United States in connection with Ukraine's unsatisfactory protection of intellectual property rights, primarily regarding the production and distribution of compact discs (CDs), AP reported. In July, Ukraine's Verkhovna Rada introduced amendments to the country's law on CDs (see "RFE/RL Newsline," 7 July 2005), which went into effect a month later and contributed to the lifting of U.S. sanctions. "I commend Ukrainian President [Viktor] Yushchenko and Prime Minister [Yuliya] Tymoshenko for their personal involvement in securing passage of these amendments, which is expected to improve Ukraine's protection of intellectual property rights," Portman said. JM
Gazprom's announcement recently that it has begun construction of a gas pipeline through Leningrad Oblast that will ultimately pass under the Baltic Sea to the West and thus bypass the Baltic countries and Poland is only one part of a much larger Russian strategy to use its energy supplies to Europe as a political weapon.
On 19 August, Leningrad Oblast Governor Valerii Serdyukov announced that Gazprom has begun to lay a pipeline across his region that will immediately allow the completion of the gasification of rural areas there and ultimately connect to a pipeline to be laid on the Baltic seabed from Vyborg in the Russian Federation to Greifswald in Germany.
To be built jointly by Gazprom and Germany's BASF, that 1,189-kilometer subsea section of the pipeline is scheduled for completion in 2010 and will carry gas from the Russian Federation's South Russia fields to Germany and Western Europe. Branches to be built later will carry Russian gas to Finland, Sweden, and Great Britain.
The construction of this pipeline will significantly strengthen the negotiating position of Gazprom and the Russian government, which owns the company, with those countries, including Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Ukraine, and Belarus, through whose territories Russian gas now passes westward to Europe.
Once the pipeline is built, Moscow will be in a position to play one or more of these countries against the others, thus limiting the ability of these states to cooperate in ways that the Russian government finds objectionable -- or in the most extreme case, the Russian government can threaten not to send gas westward across any of them.
And at the same time, the Russian government's ability to make such choices on at least some occasions may allow Moscow to play up divisions between the more Atlanticist states of the "new Europe" and the European Union's older members, particularly Germany.
Rising gas prices have made this long-discussed project
economically viable, but both Russian officials and German analysts
have indicated that Moscow's primary goal is political because such a
pipeline gives the Russian government enormous leverage on the Baltic
countries and Poland
(http://vlasti.net/index.php?Screen=news®ion=main&id=119749).
Those four countries, German Russia expert Alexander Rahr says, are very concerned about what this new pipeline will mean for them, with Poland identifying it as a major foreign-policy challenge and the Baltic countries proposing an alternative underground, and hence more ecologically secure, "Amber" route through their territories.
That Moscow will use its new leverage against the Baltics was already demonstrated earlier in August, when Gazprom demanded that the Lithuanian authorities end regulated natural-gas prices for major consumers, something that could trigger inflation there and thus by itself prevent Vilnius as well from entering the eurozone as planned.
Indeed, even in advance of this Russian ultimatum, London's "Financial Times" reported on 25 July that central bankers across Eastern Europe are convinced that dramatic increases in Gazprom prices could "wreck the expansion of the eurozone in 2007" and thus leave the EU's newest members out in the cold.
Whether Gazprom will get its way now and indeed whether this much-discussed northern gas pipeline will in fact be completed, of course, remain very much open questions. But even the possibility that they will be represents an important contribution to Moscow's "power" politics in the region.
And in yet another indication that Moscow views this kind of pressure as most effective, the Russian government has now announced plans to lay a high-voltage cable under the Baltic Sea in order to sell Finland 8.7 billion kilowatt-hours of power annually from the Leningrad Nuclear Power Station near St. Petersburg, "The Moscow Times" reported on 22 August.