Word: gazprom
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...Gazprom, Russia's state-run gas company, says it is acting simply to bring Belarus' prices more closely in line with world market levels. It gave similar reasons exactly a year ago when it turned off gas supplies to Ukraine, ensuring Kiev's swift agreement to new, tougher terms. Another former Soviet republic, Georgia, confronted with steep increases to Gazprom prices, is urgently seeking alternative supplies. Both countries are at odds with the Kremlin over pro-Western policies. Belarus, by contrast, has been seen as Moscow's closest ally - so close, in fact, that in 1997, its President, Alexander Lukashenko...
Russia has never been shy about using its enormous natural gas and oil resources - and its neighbors' lack of the same - as a not-so-subtle diplomatic weapon. Last New Year's Eve, amid icy blasts of winter, Russia's state-owned Gazprom turned off the gas on democratizing Ukraine, which has often tacked the other way from Russian President Vladimir Putin and the other former Soviet republics under his thrall. This year, however, the focus is Belarus, the nouvelle Stalinist state run by Alexander Lukashenko, a man who has tried to appear to be Putin's acolyte...
...chill through Europe and brought a public rebuke from U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney. In December, Russia threatened to cut gas to two other former Soviet republics, Georgia and Belarus, unless they paid higher prices; and the Anglo-Dutch oil firm Shell bowed to pressure to let state-owned Gazprom gain control of a $20 billion natural-gas project in Sakhalin Island, shocking foreign investors...
...Russia, the Kremlin treats the media as a powerful weapon, to be purchased, coerced, or driven out. Partly spawned by the Chechen conflict, the government has been using proxies like its oil behemoth, Gazprom, to acquire media outlets for years. Examples of this include the NPV television network and Izvestia, a leading newspaper. Anna wrote for the Novaya Gazeta, which is one of the last bastions of dissent in Putin’s Russia, partly owned by Nobel Peace Prize winner Mikhail Gorbachev...
...strapped for cash. "This is what happens when Russian oil companies have their headquarters at the Kremlin," says Robert Amsterdam, the lawyer for Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the jailed former head of Russian oil company Yukos, which authorities seized and broke up in late 2004. Remarks by a top official at Gazprom, the national energy monolith, just two days after Shell's setback, fueled speculation that it was trying to get a big piece of the Sakhalin projects; in a speech, deputy director Aleksandr Ananenkov laid out a broad vision for that company to link oil fields in eastern Siberia with...