Russians Play Energy Games

The Energy Games began a number of years ago, resurfaced during the Ukraine crisis when they upped the ante on Ukraine's debt after their candidate suddenly lost support, and now gets played out in Eastern Bloc countries like Lithuania, Bulgaria and Poland.  The Russians are not used to playing this game and have had to learn new rules since they squeezed the Ukrainians out of billions of dollars.  They are sore losers, for sure.

This time, the new game is being played with US natural gas, which is finally being shipped in new tankers to Greece, Latvia and Poland.  These are countries that rely on Russia for their energy needs.  [see Georgi Kantchev, With U.S. Gas, Europe Seeks Escape from Russia's Energy Grip, The Wall Street Journal, 25 February 2016  http://www.wsj.com/articles/europes-escape-from-russian-energy-grip-u-s-gas-1456456892  There is a good chart in this article that shows the dependency by country].  Most people already know this, but the fun things in this article is how the Russians went to a lot of trouble to delay that happening.
Kantchev says, "Bulgarian officials allege Russia bankrolled a wave of street protests in 2012 that forced the government to impose a moratorium on shale gas exploration. In 2014, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, then-head of NATO, told reporters that Russia was covertly funding European environmental organizations to campaign against shale gas to help maintain dependence on Russian gas."  Gazprom always negotiated with Lithuania on New Years Day, when they could cut off supplies in the dead of winter, as they did in the pre-election run-offs in the Ukraine a number of years ago.  Not very subtle.

The Russians then noted that Lithuania was going to buy natural gas from Norway, and lowered their prices to below what Norway was charging.  Lithuania bought Norway's gas anyway and are about to buy from the U.S. too.  They have played the energy game for too long to not know the rules.
But, the one I like the best was the Russian complaint to the UN that the ship that carried the natural gas would harm the environment in a strip of land between Lithuania and Russia.  Really?  That must have gotten a few chuckles at the UN offices.  The UN found nothing that would harm the environment.

The Russians are trying to manufacture issues to get in the way of energy getting cheaper and purchased from the West.  It would be humorous if it weren't so sad.