The Role of Oil in the Georgian Conflict…
Oil, it seems, is one issue at the heart of the violent conflict between Russia and Georgia. In striking its neighbor hard in the ostensible tussle to control the breakaway Georgian province of South Ossetia, Moscow is signaling that it won’t give up control of the oil-rich Caspian region, the Financial Times reports. “Georgia has scant energy resources of its own but hosts pipelines built by international oil majors to carry Caspian oil and gas to western markets,” the newspaper writes. “The so-called east-west energy corridor across Azerbaijan and Georgia to Turkey, established with strong political backing from the U.S., has eroded Russia’s stranglehold over energy exports from one of the world’s few remaining untapped oil provinces.” Analysts tell BusinessWeek that Moscow must walk a fine line between cementing its dominance of European energy supplies and not spooking Europeans into backing the construction of yet more non-Russian pipelines, but that any expansion of European or U.S. influence is unlikely since no Caspian leader will want to put his survival on the line by embracing a new Western project. Chris Ruppel, an energy analyst at Greenwich brokerage Execution, tells the magazine, “Russia has demonstrated that its military is a force to reckon with, that it can defeat a Western-trained force, and that the West and NATO will not act to intervene.”
It remains to be seen whether Europe is wholly without influence. This morning, just before French President Nicolas Sarkozy arrived at the Kremlin to negotiate a European Union-backed truce, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev took to the airwaves to announce that Russia would end its current military operation against Georgian forces because it has achieved its goals, as The Wall Street Journal reports. But Mr. Medvedev stopped short of saying Russia would withdraw its troops from Georgia, and even as his comments were broadcast, Agence France-Presse cited a Georgian official as saying the Russian air force had attacked the key Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan pipeline. “We don’t know yet whether it was damaged. It’s a second attempt to bomb this pipeline since Aug. 10,” Alexander Lomaia, secretary of Georgia’s National Security Council, told AFP.
