Dependence on Russian gas worries some – but not all – by David Francis
A month after Russia cut off gas supplies to the Ukraine for the first time in 2006, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said that the European Union – which gets 40 percent of its gas from Russia – needed to develop a common energy policy over the next 15 years to guarantee supply security. At the same time, Russian energy monopoly Gazprom, along with its German partners E.On and BASF-Wintershall, were deciding on "Nord Stream" as the name for a pipeline that would make Germany heavily dependent on Russia for energy for decades to come. Two years later, rumors of a common European energy policy are again circling Brussels. Russia rattled the European Union this week when it cut Ukrainian shipments by half, prompting Ukraine to threaten –briefly – to siphon Russian gas sent to Europe via Ukraine. Gazprom announced Wednesday that it was resuming full shipments.
the general sentiment in Washington toward dealing with Russia and Gazprom was perhaps best summed up at a recent talk in Washington by James Woolsey, who served as CIA director under former President Bill Clinton. "If you meet a really smart, articulate 45-year-old guy at the Noga Hilton bar in Geneva, and he says he's with Gazprom and he'd like to talk to you about a joint venture in some part of the world, he might be what he says he is," Mr. Woolsey said. "He might be a Russian intelligence officer under commercial cover. He might be a senior member of some Russian organized-crime family. And the really interesting thing is that there's a pretty good chance that he's all three, and that none of those institutions have any problem with that at all."
No comments:
Post a Comment