(((Mind you, even if you heroically manage the transition into EU membership, that doesn't mean you get off the hook with the gas pipes.)))
(((If you're a real basket-case like Belarus, you're a nationalist dictatorship, you're a slave to the pipe and the EU won't even look at you. How is this struggle gonna play out? It's not a Cold War any more, it's.... how do I phrase this...
it's like a tepid, globally-warmed war where it's a tossup between adhering to eighty thousand multilingual virtualized pages of legalistic regulations versus the harsh, crass, physical realities of simply freezing in the snow while your electrical generators gasp their last... but the guys with the regulatory bureaus are actually *financing* the guys choking off the gas pipes. That's the interesting, fully-modernized part.)))
INTELLECTUAL SAYS BELARUS'S SUPPLY OF 'HONOR FOR SALE' HAS BEEN
EXHAUSTED. Valery Bulhakau, editor in chief of the intellectual
Belarusian-language monthly "Arche," told RFE/RL's Belarus Service on
November 14 that Belarus during the rule of President Alyaksandr
Lukashenka, like the Belarusian SSR, has been "a prostitute selling its honor to Russia." "This honor consisted of her [Belarus's] ethnic idiosyncrasies – its language, culture, genuine traditions, and so on," Bulhakau noted. According to Bulhakau, Moscow invested heavily in Belarus during the Soviet era in order to make the republic loyal to the center and to prevent the Belarusians from becoming a nation.
"From this point of view, Russia's recent [gas-price proposals] show that the Russians have begun to realize that the Belarusians have nothing more to sell on the symbolic level. The Belarusians have already become almost identical with the Russians, therefore their resources of honor for sale have been exhausted. If this logic is true, then we will unavoidably see a serious increase in gas prices,"
Bulhakau said. JM
Mp>(((NATO vs the GAS OPEC!! Except, uh, the members of the gas
OPEC wanna be in NATO and a lot of NATO members ship gas.)))
NATO WARY OF RUSSIAN-LED 'GAS OPEC.' Britain's "Financial Times"
reported on November 14 that a recent confidential NATO study warns
"the military alliance that it needs to guard against any attempt by
Russia to set up an 'OPEC for gas' that would strengthen Moscow's leverage over Europe." The NATO economic experts suggested that
"Russia may be seeking to build a gas cartel including Algeria,
Qatar, Libya, the countries of Central Asia, and perhaps Iran." The study noted that Russia wants to use energy policy for "political ends," as it has recently toward Ukraine and Georgia. On November 13,
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in Moscow that "only a madman could think that Russia would start to blackmail Europe using gas, because we depend to the same extent on European customers" as they do on their Russian suppliers. He added that there is "no substance at all" to the idea that Russia wants to form a gas cartel. On
October 31, the Moscow daily "Kommersant" reported that Valery Yazev, who heads the State Duma's Energy, Transport, and Communications
Committee, told the board of the Russian Gas Association on October
30 that producers and transporters in CIS countries should form an
International Alliance of National Nonprofit Gas Organizations.
Yazev, whom the daily described as "Gazprom's chief lobbyist in the
State Duma...[and] unofficial mouthpiece of the Russian authorities,"
suggested that President Vladimir Putin first came up with the idea but placed it "on the back burner" at the time of the July St.
Petersburg summit of the Group of Eight (G8) industrialized countries
(see "RFE/RL Newsline," June 20 and October 31, 2006). PM
