Russia to resume natural gas exports to Europe

Russia is reasserting its status as a great wold power.
(AP Photo/Aleksandr Prokopenko)

After keeping EU in the cold for two weeks, Russia today, Sunday, decided to resume natural gas exports via Ukraine. The deal reached by the Russian and Ukrainian prime ministers, Vladimir Putin and Yulia Tymoshenko, will have Ukraine paying for Russian gas at a more expensive EU price. The EU has lost about 30% of its gas imports since the dispute started and an EU monitoring team was sent to Ukraine on the 10th.

“Europe needs reliable partners”, EU Energy Commissioner Andris Piebalgs said, “a commercial dispute cannot have such disproportionate consequences”.

The question is if the quarrel between Russia’s Gazprom and Ukraine’s Naftogaz was simply commercial? Failing, at the time of the Iraq war, to create a Russo-German-French axis to counterbalance Washington and London, Russia has found it selves without friends, and with a choice to either accepting subservience or reasserting its status as a great world power.

Their foreign policy choice seems clear. Both the United States and Europe have been supporting both regime changes from within and geopolitical reorientation in Russia’s borderlands -  in Ukraine and Georgia.