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"The recent agreement between Russian and Central Asian countries DOES threaten EU energy security and the preceding cut of Russian gas supplies to Belarus is a good lesson."
I completely agree with this summary
Well, i vigorously disagree.
The Russian-Central Asian announcement is just bluster - no pipeline will be built because they are already there! Russia fully controls Central Asian gas already, so it can threaten us more than reality does.
As to Belarus, I've written previously about it. It's about internal oligarchic fights, mostly. I can only send you back to these on TOD:
Russian gas and European energy security
Ukraine vs Russia: Tales of pipelines and dependence
The Russian-Central Asian announcement is just bluster - no pipeline will be built because they are already there!
If I'm not mistaking, the announcement came just a few days before Kazakhstan was supposed to promised its supplies for another pipeline in a conference in Poland. So Russians made sure there was no other pipeline with Putin visiting Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan during that week.
And I thought that I had explained that such promises were meaningless because there is no possibility of any other pipeline being built, because it misses major necessary ingredients.
It's all PR and show-business. It works because people believe these announcements, but they shouldn't.
You ignore that there already IS a pipeline through Russia! How does the mere possibility of *another* Russian-Central Asia pipeline threaten EU security?
Central Asia is NOT adjacent to any part of Europe, including Ukraine. The only way to build an EU-CA pipeline that bypasses Russia is go across the Caspian, through the Caucasus, and then across Turkey and the Balkans.
Europe can build it if it wants to, but nobody wants to spend the money just IN CASE Russia might disrupt supplies again for a few days. How much more secure would it be, anyway? In the long term, gas supplies through Russia are far more stable and predictable than the potential for disruption in half a dozen young democracies and dictatorships with potentially serious ethnic, religious, or terror problems. Looks like a good way for Al Qaeqda or the Chechens to get Europe's attention! Or, what would stop the Russians from encouraging "separatists" or "criminals" to disrupt pipeline operations or steal fuel? Abkhazia and South Georgia don't have to be the only Russian clients in the region.
If you're looking at tens of billions of dollars for (carbon) energy security, there's much better things to do with the money - like wind, solar, and fuel economy.
Finally, it's not like energy is the only risk Russia poses to the EU. There's lots more to create tension over, so spending all that money on this one problem seems like a bad deal. And, of course, the relationship is really not that one-sided: the EU actually has plenty of other responses it can (and does) take to exert pressure back on the Russians,