Russia supports cooperation on energy security between Russia, the US and the EU, Russia’s ambassador to Brussels Vladimir Chizov told reporters in Athens, adding that Moscow is skeptical about any possible involvement of NATO. Any effort for international stability cannot exclude Russia, specifically if it concerns the energy field, he told a round-table discussion on May 25.
Ron Smith, chief strategist at Alfa Bank, told New Europe telephonically from Moscow that any involvement of NATO in energy security was bound to make things worse for the already strained EU-Russia relations. “Especially with Russia it would be doubly sensitive. I don’t think it would help,” he said laughing. “I guess when you use the word security, that’s maybe where the idea came from, but it doesn’t sound terribly good idea to me,” Smith said.
Chizov, who was responsible for Russia-NATO relations as deputy foreign minister before coming to Brussels, was particularly critical of NATO, stressing that the defence alliance not only cannot guarantee security worldwide, but creates a sense of insecurity to citizens with its policy of placing strategic missile defence in Poland and the Czech Republic.
The envoy also noted the need to renew trust and avoid dividing lines: “We must get rid of the remains of the Cold War and focus on the joint efforts to cope with international and regional crises,” he said.
The world economic crisis provides a good opportunity for world cooperation, Chizov told the round-table discussion on Transatlantic ties, EU, US, Russia and stabilisation in the Balkans with Greek Foreign Minister Dora Bakoyannis, Serb Foreign Minister Vuk Jeremic, US Ambassador to Athens Daniel Speckhard and Lord Howell of Guildford, head of the opposition in the House of Lords in Britain.
The frustrating EU-Russia summit in the Siberian city of Khabarovsk two weeks ago served to illustrate the tension between Brussels and Moscow. The EU and Russia failed to patch up relations soured by the 2008 war with Georgia and the January gas dispute with Ukraine, which left some EU customers without gas in the dead of winter, raising concerns about Moscow’s reliability as the supplier of a quarter of the 27-member bloc’s gas needs.
Twice in the last three years, rows over allegedly unpaid bills between the EU’s two neighbours provoked Russian gas monopoly Gazprom to cut off all gas supplies to Ukraine.
Russia President Dimitry Medvedev said at the Khabarovsk summit he expected EU governments and other countries that depend on the Russian gas transiting Ukraine to help Kiev in the form of a loan pay its growing debt to Russia.
The EU’s top leaders are set to discuss the troubled gas trade between Russia and Ukraine at an EU summit on June 18-19.
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin called European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso on May 29 to warn him of difficulties he anticipates in payments coming from Ukraine to Gazprom. Putin explained that “Ukraine has asked for some support with the financing of these payments,” Barroso told reporters in Brussels.
He said that he would raise the issue with the heads of state and government of the EU’s 27 member states when they meet for a summit in Brussels on June 18-19, to see what it is possible to do.
Barroso said that it would be difficult, if not impossible, for the EU to provide any assistance from its central budget, either to add to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) package or to make it easier for Kiev to pay its growing gas bills to Russia.