EU-Russia summit will have dark edge
ANDREW RETTMAN
23.05.2006 @ 17:55 CET
EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - The EU-Russia summit on Thursday (25 May) is set to see a friendly new visa deal, but EU mistrust of Russia's energy muscle and mounting tension between Washington and Moscow will give a dark edge to the talks.
Under the visa deal, EU and Russian citizens will be able to visit each other for €35 a trip from 2007 onward.
Russian secret service slang for the US is "Carthago" - the fortress of capitalism - Mr Landsbergis said (Photo: wikipedia)
The half-day meeting in Sochi, on the Black Sea, will also open negotiations on a post-2007 "Strategic Partnership Treaty" between the two powers and see debates on energy security and Iran.
Russia's EU ambassador Vladimir Chizhov on Monday said "much of the tension in the energy sphere is artificial" and that both sides "share a common position" on Iran - the prevention of nuclear weapons proliferation by diplomatic means.
"We are destined to be partners for the EU, but at the same time we are destined to be competitors in this globalised economy," he stated, sketching a future of enhanced EU-Russia cooperation on oil and gas exploration and international crisis management.
His optimism is not shared by many new EU member states however, with Polish diplomats seeing Russia's new Baltic Sea gas pipeline to Germany as a tool for politically blackmailing Warsaw and senior Lithuanian politicians seeing Russia's anti-sanction stance on Iran as a way of getting rich by keeping oil prices high.
Russian power
"Under Russia's protection, Iran has won a lot of time," former Lithuanian president Vytautis Landsbergis told EUobserver. "The growing conflict in the Middle East is of Russia's economic and geopolitical interest, in terms of petrodollar income."
Mr Landsbergis' darker picture of future EU-Russia relations sees Russia slipping away from stated market economy goals into increasing authoritarianism and aggressive foreign policy strategy.
"Putinist Russia is stepping the way of more and more total authoritarianism. Eventual international gains in terms of energy influence will be backed by an impressive new military program," he said, adding "No Russian official statement of assurance is reliable."
The EU's number one trade partner and NATO ally, the US, and independent analysts such as Nicu Popescu of CEPS, share the Landsbergis vision.
"The Russia of 2006 has a newly acquired sense of its own power," Mr Popescu indicated, pointing to Moscow's sharpening defence of Russian interests in conflict zones in Moldova and Georgia.
EU rhetoric masks mistrust
Western European and EU diplomats do not publicly question Russia on energy or human rights abuses. At a recent summit in Vilnius, US vice-president Dick Cheney blasted Russia on energy "blackmail" while top EU diplomat Javier Solana said little.
"You will rarely hear in the EU, with the possible exception of some new members, words similar to those the US vice-president had to say," Mr Chizhov remarked. "The style of rhetoric is more constructive in EU-Russia dialogue."
But behind the rhetoric, EU diplomats, especially those working on EU-Russia fault lines such as Moldova, agree that Moscow uses trade as a political weapon against pro-EU countries in a way that has nothing to do with market economy values.
The EU is also striving to build energy roads to oil and gas-rich Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Iran, bypassing Russia via the South Caucasus and the Caspian Sea.
The proposed Transcaspian gas pipeline hits at the heart of Russia's energy strategy by breaking its monopoly on transit of cheap Central Asian gas, with Russia's Mr Chizhov quick to criticise the project.
"When I hear that Russia is ostensibly using energy leverages for political means and the very same people and countries are pushing hard for building new pipelines that would bypass Russia, I think it's an issue of double standards," he said.
New balance of power
The humble expectations of the Sochi summit stand in contrast to the grand energy security agenda of the G8 summit in St Petersburg just eight weeks later, with St Petersburg set to address shifts in the post-Cold War balance of global power.
US analysts Keir Lieber and Daryl Press in April wrote that the US could today easily destroy Russia's degraded nuclear arsenal, in a study dubbed "irresponsible" by Moscow.
The new balance might give White House hawks more confidence in pushing pro-democracy and energy access projects in post-Soviet regions and the Middle East, the paper speculated.
Russian analyst Sergei Karaganov also recently warned Russian news agency Ria Novosti that the modern energy struggle "is a powerful catalyst" for renewing Cold War-era rivalries.
"The hopes for setting up an effective coalition of powerful and responsible nations, a new international concert…aimed against nuclear proliferation, terrorism and other new threats to international security are becoming increasingly vague," the analyst said, adding:
"I wish I were wrong."