Russia is trying to "corner" the energy market, a senior U.S. administration official said Monday as Vice President Dick Cheney held talks with Italian leaders following a tour of ex-Soviet republics.
"Russia has worked hard to try to corner the market, so to speak, and is working to foreclose options to transit for those energy products across Russia, because they want everything to come out through Russia," a U.S. official told reporters on condition of anonymity.
During Cheney's talks with oil executives and public officials last week as he visited Azerbaijan, Georgia and Ukraine, there were "concerns expressed" about the ability to freely pipe oil and gas through the region in the wake of Russia's five-day war with Georgia, the official said.
"One of the things that happened as a result of the Russian military operations in Georgia was to raise questions about the security of that trans-Georgian corridor for moving Caspian energy resources out to the West," the official said.
"A lot of us think it is more important that there be diverse means of gaining access to those resources. No one country ought to be able to totally dominate these deliveries," he said.
Cheney found "considerable interest in Europe and obviously out in that part of the world" for moving ahead with alternate pipeline routes such as Nabucco and keeping open the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan, or BTC, pipeline which was damaged during the conflict, the official said.
The Nabucco pipeline project, still in the works, would bring gas from Turkey through Bulgaria and Austria. The BTC pipeline can transport up to 1 million barrels of oil a day and bypasses Russia.
The U.S. vice president visited oil-rich Azerbaijan last week, followed by Georgia and Ukraine to shore up U.S. support for those nations in the wake of Russia's military conflict with Georgia over the breakaway territory of South Ossetia in August.