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Posted by Craig R. Whitney on January 03, 2006 at 12:10:24:
In Reply to: S Novym Godom posted by Mir on December 31, 2005 at 20:37:39:
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5. PUTIN'S RUSSIA TURNS TRADE INTO A POLITICAL WEAPON
Concern about Russia's reputation in the West for reliability
could explain why Gazprom backed off Monday.
NEWS ANALYSIS: By Craig R. Whitney, The New York Times
International Herald Tribune (IHT), Europe, Tuesday, January 3, 2006
PARIS - By choking off gas supplies to force the Western-oriented
government of Ukraine to accept a quadruple price rise before he apparently
backed down Monday, President Vladimir Putin of Russia raised important
strategic questions for European governments that depend on Moscow for
a fifth or more of their own fuel.
Ever since the early 1980s, when pipelines from Russia were first built -
over American objections - with billions of dollars in aid from the Western
countries that needed the gas, Europeans have argued that trade was not a
good weapon in political conflict.
But Putin, like President Ronald Reagan back in the 1980s, seems to
disagree, and used economic pressure in a show of force against Ukraine
until at least partly relenting Monday night.
Two decades ago Reagan used and later lifted sanctions to try to get Moscow
to make concessions on nuclear weapons and weaken its stranglehold over
Eastern Europe.
Among the questions now are whether Putin, trying to keep Ukraine from
moving further away from the Russian political sphere of influence, thought
better of cutting off gas supplies because of unexpectedly severe
"collateral damage" to allies and European trading partners, or because he
thought he had made his point strongly enough.
More crucially, does he - and do those trading partners - believe that he
could use similar methods on them, too, one day?
Putin's Soviet predecessors during the Cold War repeatedly assured
Europeans that they would be reliable trading partners no matter how hot
American tempers ran, and the Europeans believed them.
In 1981, Soviet and West European leaders alike protested when Reagan
imposed sanctions against the first big gas pipeline project from Russia to
the West because of the declaration of martial law in Communist Poland. That
crackdown was led by General Wojciech Jaruzelski, who now says he feared a
Soviet invasion unless he stifled moves toward independence from Moscow.
Reagan's sanctions were "an attempt to interfere with our sovereign rights,"
former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt of Germany said in an interview in 1984.
Reagan lifted the sanctions in November 1982 after the death of Leonid
Brezhnev, the Soviet leader, and the Europeans agreed to keep trade from
strengthening Moscow militarily.
The Soviet Union is now history, in part because of Poles' resistance to the
crackdown and because of Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, whom
Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of Britain welcomed as "a man we can do
business with."
Whether Putin is such a man is a question that seems bound to arise at least
in some European officials' minds now that he has apparently tried to use
gas as a political weapon to keep Ukraine from following Poland out of
Moscow's orbit.
Since Sunday, Putin has been chairman of the Group of 8 leading industrial
democracies. Much of the gas that three of them - France, Germany and
Italy - get from Russia comes through the same pipeline that feeds Ukraine.
The German economics minister, Michael Glos, urged caution on Russian
leaders Monday in an interview with WDR German radio. "Russia is in the
chair of the G-8, and here too responsible conduct is called for," he said,
recalling that he had told Putin on a recent visit to Moscow that "Russian
gas has a very good reputation in Germany, above all a reputation for high
dependability and delivery reliability."
Nevertheless, Glos, a member of the conservative Bavarian CSU party, also
made a pitch in the interview for diversifying Germany's energy supplies by,
for instance, going back to atomic power plants, a step he said Chancellor
Angela Merkel's coalition partners in the Social Democratic Party had not
been ready to accept when they hammered out government policy late last
year.
Since then, her Social Democratic predecessor as chancellor, Gerhard
Schröder, has become supervisory board chairman of a new company formed
by the Russian state-run monopoly Gazprom and two German energy firms to
build a new gas line from Russia to Germany that would run under the Baltic
Sea and bypass Ukraine completely - a more reliable source of Russian gas,
in the view of the project's promoters.
Concern about Russia's reputation in the West for reliability could explain
why Gazprom backed off Monday.
But Gazprom may also have made at least some European customers wonder
whether the same thing could happen to them some day. European leaders
seem likely to ask Putin the same thing in the coming weeks. -30-
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