Another Wake-Up Call? Europe Remains Divided Over Energy Security Policy

BRUSSELS — January’s two-week gas shutoff following a pricing spat between supplier Russia and transit country Ukraine could not have taken Europeans by surprise.

In January 2006, a similar conflict between the two countries led to a similar disruption.

After that crisis, it was said time and again that Europe must become serious about energy security, by developing and implementing a strategy of diversification. But not very much happened — in large part because European countries remain divided over the lessons to be learned from the cutoff.

For one camp, the lesson of the gas crisis of 2006 was that Europe had to decrease its dependency on Russia

… But other European countries took a different lesson from the gas crisis in 2006. For them, the problem of energy security was one not of source countries but of transit routes. Hence, the solution would be to make the big European customers of Russian gas less dependent on Eastern European transit countries, namely Ukraine. The priority for this group of countries was to build new transit routes that would bypass Ukraine and deliver gas as directly as possible to the center and the west of Europe.

Radio Free Europe – Radio Liberty