Sophie Marineau, Université catholique de Louvain (UCLouvain)
By waiving sanctions against the Nord Stream 2 pipeline linking Russia and Germany, the United States is paving the way for the controversial project to go ahead.
Armed and backed by some of the world’s largest known oil and gas reserves, Gazprom would be more powerful than US mercenaries such as Blackwater, and also closely linked to the Kremlin.
As tensions run high over Russia’s gas supplies to the Ukraine, and by extension parts of Europe, the reality for the EU is less than perfect: it will need Russian gas for the foreseeable future.
Ten years ago, it was received wisdom in western academic, business and policy circles that Ukraine was an archetypal “captured state” – a state owned and run almost entirely by a small, insecure and fabulously…
Whether through improvisation, opportunism, fear or calculation, 2014 has seen a massive shift in the way political authority works in Russia. Moscow has moved dramatically away from a legal-rational way…
Michael Bradshaw, Warwick Business School, University of Warwick
As with the previous Russia-Ukraine gas disputes in 2006 and 2009, how we describe the current stand-off between the two countries is a matter of semantics. Those earlier disputes found solutions based…
The US$400 billion gas deal signed between Russia’s giant state-owned corporation Gazprom and China last week is 16 times larger than its predessor in the supply of gas to China - a US$25 billion LNG project…
Michael Bradshaw, Warwick Business School, University of Warwick
Gazprom’s decision to hike the price of the gas it sells to Ukraine came as no surprise as it was flagged more than a month ago. At that time the company’s website showed the Russian prime minister, Dmitry…