The president of Ukraine, Viktor Yushchenko, averted a threatened midwinter shutoff of natural gas supplies minutes before Russia’s deadline on Tuesday. He did this by reaching a deal with President Putin over the repayment of an alleged $1.5bn debt to Gazprom, Russia’s state-controlled gas monopoly.
“There is a depressing sense of déjà vu” about the latest dispute, says The Independent. Putin insists politics plays no part in this row, but this is hard to believe. Two years ago, Gazprom shut off gas shipments to Ukraine in the middle of winter, a year after the Orange Revolution installed Yushchenko’s pro-Western government in Kiev. The recent threat came 22 days after Ukraine’s leaders made a formal application to be put on the path to Nato membership; Putin has also warned a Kremlin news conference that his country might aim nuclear missiles at Ukraine if Nato were to deploy antimissile systems there.
This conflict has been emerging for some time, says Robert Kagan in The Washington Post. Lithuania, Latvia, Belarus and Moldova have all been bullied over energy. Putin wants to return to “great-power status” by regaining influence in the Baltic states and Eastern Europe – now formally a part of the EU – as well as over what the Russians call their ‘near abroad’.
“Rich and resentful”, armed with vast reserves of oil and gas and a full Kremlin kitty, Russia is ready for a fight. But is Europe, which “bet massively” on soft power throughout the 1990s, equipped to respond? “Can it bring a knife to a knife fight?” It’s worth considering: it isn’t hard to imagine the “tremors along the Euro-Russian fault line erupting into a confrontation”.
Our hands, unfortunately, are tied, says The Independent. Europe has “allowed itself to sleepwalk into an ever-growing dependence on Russia for its energy” and this “circumscribes our ability to influence, let alone criticise, the Kremlin”. Russia does as it pleases, says Edward Lucas in The Guardian. It “flouts” the rulings of the European Court of Human Rights and is so wealthy that “foreign donors and creditors have no leverage”. Indeed, Russia’s firms now “romp through” the capital markets in London and New York “aided by lawyers and bankers who, when it comes to selling a stolen oil company, see not a jail cell but a bonus”.
In the West, capitalism is “made tolerable by constraint and redress” – from voters, consumers, shareholders, public officials, journalists and pressure groups. It may not work perfectly, but “it doesn’t work at all” in Russia, where the “ex-spooks and their business cronies have launched a unique experiment in state capitalism”, where the rule of law and right of the individual mean nothing. The opposition is marginalised and elections a “sham”. Dmitry Medvedev’s victory in the presidential election on 2 March (boycotted by the OSCE’s monitoring group because of restrictions placed on it by the Russian government) is inevitable.
But as Lucas himself points out in his book, The New Cold War, Russia is also weak, says Thomas de Waal in The Sunday Times. Putin’s Great Power is “largely a mirage built on a high oil price and delusions of military grandeur”. The reality is a shrinking population, an alcoholism epidemic and a health service and armed forces in collapse. Russia’s spending on defence is just 4% of that of America. And Britain, at least, has one reason to be thankful. The 2006 row between Ukraine and Russia prompted the Government’s quiet decision to start weaning this country off dependence on Russian gas.