War by other means. Kremlin’s Energy Policy as a Channel of Influence. A comparative assessment. Case studies from Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, Romania and Hungary

Print
Publishing date: Wednesday, 24 April 2019
Views: 6134

The EU has been increasingly caught up in its own internal struggles over the past years – migration, populism, Brexit – and is facing fundamental challenges to its core principles and values from problematic member states such as Poland, Hungary or Romania. Russia stands only to benefit from such internal divisions. As usual, Moscow has three main instruments to exert significant political influence in its “near abroad”, but also to expand it in the formerly communist Central Europe and further towards the West.

Its main weapons to do so are (i) direct military intervention and conflict fueling in ex-USSR states; (ii) “hybrid war” methods such as cyberattacks, disinformation, trolls, covert financing of extremist parties and the like; and (iii) its energy leverage.

As we noted in the previous edition of our report, the EU itself has been much more vulnerable in the early 2000s than it is today to Russia’s energy leverage. Two gas crises (2006, 2009) and the military aggression in Ukraine (2014) gave the Union a strong impetus to accelerate the integration of its energy market and push for the implementation of the Third Energy Package, a process that would have been probably much slower without this sense of urgency. Interconnections and solidarity mechanisms against energy crises were also enhanced after the EC’s timely energy security stress tests in 2014, followed shortly by the adoption of the energy security strategy.

In our report, we find strong indications of Russian abusive behavior and strong similarity across Moldova, Hungary, Romania, Georgia and Ukraine, many of which are only partly understood in the West, as well as recommendations for EU institutions.

Download the report

Tags: Natalia Chitii

test

Website: test
Print

Access the monitoring application

app61
apl1 en
aplicat6en
aplicat611en
app7
apl2 en
rap eu en
app8
apl3 en
aplicat81en

Projects

scoala en

lapunct en

budget en

You use the ADS Blocker component.
We do not use advertising elements, we only present our own products or donors that promote some projects. Some features may be blocked, please disable the ADS Blocker component.
Thanks for understanding!

Resetează

Cursor:

Contrast:

Dimensiune Font:

Alb/Negru:

Referințe:

Imagine: