By Dan Bilefsky
Russia’s ambassador to the European Union sent a strong signal that European leaders looking for more cooperation over oil and natural gas supplies would face resistance from President Vladimir Putin at a meeting in Finland on Friday.
Russia will not yield to key EU energy demands and is increasingly weary of foreign companies’ developing the country’s energy sources, Vladimir Chizhov, Moscow’s ambassador said in an interview. The meeting between Russia and the EU the world’s largest country and the world’s biggest trading bloc will take place in an atmosphere fraught with fear that Moscow is becoming increasingly detached from the West and tinged with Russian suspicions that newer EU members from Eastern Europe are turning the bloc against the Kremlin.
‘The EU has become a multi-headed monster that many in Russia don’t comprehend and the number of heads keeps increasing,” Chizhov said.
‘The EU acquisition of the newcomers from the East made things more difficult because it brought in countries with grievances of the past Soviet era a hangover from the Cold War and one that extends as far back as the 19th century,” he said.
Accepting EU demands for Russia to slash gas prices risked destroying the Russian economy, he said. He said the call by Brussels for Russia to sign an energy charter, which the EU hopes would open up more transit lines and more access to independent gas producers in Russia and neighboring former Soviet states, faced stiff resistance. “It is unnatural to subsidize countries and their economies. We have been doing this for 15 years through offering low price energy,” said Chizhov, who is known in Brussels for emanating charm and hammering the Kremlin’s line. “Now, the EU tells us to bring internal domestic prices in line with world’s prices but that can’t happen overnight or the Russian economy will disappear.” He confirmed in perhaps the clearest terms of any Kremlin official to date that Moscow was increasingly skeptical of joint agreements with foreign companies to develop energy resources, and particularly natural gas fields in Russia. ‘I don’t expect similar deals in the future by which Russia allows foreign consortiums to develop gas and oil fields,” he said. “The trouble is that it takes a long time and as project costs double, the day when profits drop into the Russian budget comes farther and farther away.”
(International Herald Tribune, 19/10/2006)