Russia's Double Nelson

When the Czech Republic signed a deal this week to host U.S. anti-missile radar, Russia's Dmitri Medvedev said he was "extremely upset." He added, “We will not be hysterical about this, but we will think of retaliatory steps.”

Yesterday the Czechs -- like the Ukrainians, the Balts and the Georgians before them -- learned what that means. The Czechs say that the flow of oil from Russia -- their main supplier -- has suddenly slowed. Instead of about 120,000 barrels of oil a day, the Czechs are receiving about 70,000 barrels a day, and apparently will do so through all of July, according to an Interfax report quoting Euro Online, a Czech publication.

The development undercuts recent efforts by both Medvedev and his predecessor, Vladimir Putin, to assuage the West about Gazprom's growing market power in Europe. Both they and Gazprom chairman Alexei Miller have said that Russia is a reliable partner, and dismissed critics who say the country uses oil as an economic and political lever.

As Andrew Kramer at the New York Times notes, Moscow cut supplies to Ukraine in January 2006 in a dispute over prices, and later in the year stopped shipping oil to Lithuania when it sold an important refinery to a Polish buyer rather than Russia. In addition, Georgia, which has had a long, acrimonious relationship with Moscow -- has suffered numerous cutoffs of natural gas from Gazprom over the years.

This is nothing new. Such cutoffs seemed coincidentally to spring up during the Soviet period too.

Photo: crotchsplay

Rights: Creative Commons