Putin Snipes at EU on Access to Assets

President Vladimir Putin scrapped with European Union leaders Friday over Brussels’ plans to limit foreign investment in energy markets at a summit that achieved little on key sticking points.

Putin, in his final EU-Russia summit as president, took a swipe at proposals from Brussels that could prevent gas monopoly Gazprom from buying up power grids and pipelines while the 27-nation bloc revamps its gas and electricity markets.


He also drew a parallel between U.S. plans for a missile shield in Central Europe and the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, widely regarded as the closest the world came to nuclear war.

“I would remind you how relations were developing in an analogous situation in the middle of the 1960s,” he said. “Analogous actions by the Soviet Union when it deployed rockets on Cuba provoked the Cuban missile crisis.”

Moscow Times