The Russian authorities’ refusal to hand over Andrei Lugovoy, chief suspect in the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko, risks pitching chilly UK-Russian relations into the “deep freeze”, says Anne Penketh in The Independent. The mood between Russia and the West has “not been so icy” since Soviet days, says The Economist.
Russia says it feels “encircled” by NATO expansion and proposed US missile defences in Poland and the Czech Republic, “patronised on human rights” and “assailed by double standards” (Britain has refused 17 extradition requests from Russia, including one for the oligarch Boris Berezovsky, an outspoken critic of Putin). The West is alarmed by Russia’s “pushy foreign policy”, growing authoritarianism and tightening grip on its energy supplies.
The Litvinenko case shows that under Putin, Russia has become a “nation that matches the resources and ambition of a superpower with the ruthlessness and ingenuity of gangsters and terrorists”, says Edward Lucas in the Daily Mail. As even the “most feeble-minded” Westerners are realising, Russia poses a “profound threat to our way of life”. Kremlin death squads are targeting opponents abroad and Russia shows a “similarly cavalier attitude” to its business dealings with the outside world. It has banned Polish meat exports, cut off a vital oil pipeline to Lithuania’s oil refinery, the mainstay of its economy, and crippled trade with Estonia by applying trade sanctions and closing its main road bridge with Russia. When Estonia’s government decided to move a Soviet war memorial in Tallinn to the outskirts of town last month, the country’s most vital computers experienced a cyber-attack on an unprecedented scale, paralysing the banking system and disrupting vital public services. Ukraine and Georgia have also been on the “receiving end of Russian belligerence”, says Penketh, with both suffering gas cuts and Georgia a full trade embargo. The German chancellor and EU president, Angela Merkel, had seen this week’s EU-Russia summit as a “major opportunity to secure Russian agreements on energy security, human rights, and climate change”, says The Guardian, but concerns over Russia’s recent behaviour have made talks difficult and tense.
Dependency on Russian oil
Britain’s energy dependency on Russia may not be as great as Germany’s or Lithuania’s, but we are not immune, says Adrian Blomfeld in The Daily Telegraph. Earlier this year, Shell had to surrender control of an oil field to Gazprom, the state energy giant, and in the wake of the Litvinenko case, BP will almost certainly lose its licence to develop a Siberian gas field. Tony Blair argues this week in The Times that Britain has to build nuclear power stations partly because Russia has become so unreliable. This doesn’t mean we can “afford to be mere spectators”, says Roger Boyes in The New Statesman. Some of the states where energy dependency is high are EU members. “If we ignore these countries, their problems will become ours, making a nonsense of our most cherished projects.” Europe should stand up to Russia, agrees The Economist. We may depend on Russia for gas and oil, but it depends on Europe as its main market. Talk of switching supplies to China is a “pipedream” in the absence of pipelines, which take time and money to build. Russia’s “combination of ruthlessness, ambition and wealth” may be “scary”, but the way to bring more equality to the relationship is for Europe to stand firm against Russian attempts to divide it.