Russia-German Pipeline Sparks Fears in Eastern Europe
With an ambitious new pipeline planned to run along the bed of the Baltic Sea, the Russian natural gas giant Gazprom is driving a political wedge between Eastern and Western Europe.
While the Russian-German pipeline offers clear energy benefits to Western Europe, Central and Eastern European leaders fear it could lead to a new era of gas-leveraged Russian domination of the former Soviet bloc. The project has divided members of the European Union that had vowed to act collectively to protect their security.
Currently, Russian gas has to be piped through Eastern Europe to reach Western Europe. If Russia shuts off the gas to pressure a neighbor in the East, it is felt in the more powerful, wealthier countries to the west, where it touches off loud protests.
The new Nord Stream pipeline will change that equation. By traveling more than 750 miles underwater, from Vyborg, Russia, to Greifswald, Germany, bypassing the former Soviet and satellite states, it will give Russia a separate supply line to the west.
As a result, many security experts and Eastern European officials say, Russia will be more likely to play pipeline politics with its neighbors.
“Yesterday tanks, today oil,” said Zbigniew Siemiatkowski, a former head of Poland’s security service.
That is not the way the Russians present it. Gazprom, which supplies Europe with 28 percent of its natural gas, says the $10.7 billion project is commercial, not strategic.
Matthias Warnig, Nord Stream’s chief executive and a former East German, said Eastern Europe’s fears are unfounded. “The wall broke down 20 years ago,” he said. Europe needs additional natural gas to compensate for declining output from the North Sea, he said, and Russia is the best place to get it.
European officials have portrayed the project as one that helps unite Europe and enhance its collective energy security. The European Commission and European Parliament endorsed the pipeline as early as 2000 and both reconfirmed their commitments as recently as 2006. “As far as common energy policy exists, we are part of it on the highest priority level,” said Sebastian Sass, Nord Stream’s main representative to the European Union.
But officials in Central and Eastern Europe fear that while profits from the pipeline, a joint venture between Gazprom and a trio of German and Dutch companies, will flow to Russian suppliers and German utilities, the long trod-upon countries once under the Soviet umbrella will become more vulnerable to energy blackmail.
Such tactics are hardly without precedent. A Swedish Defense Ministry-affiliated research organization has identified 55 politically linked disruptions in the energy supply of Eastern Europe since the breakup of the Soviet Union.
Until now, Russia’s use of natural gas as a foreign policy tool has been limited to short embargoes, at least in part, analysts say, because it is so blunt a club.