The continuing steep rise in oil prices from 2000 to 2008 gave some Russians an idea that their resource-rich country could be an energy superpower, and its oil and particularly gas exports might be used as a tool of foreign policy – or, to put it simply, as an energy weapon. Rather maladroitly, Moscow used the threat of cutting off gas, which it sometimes executed, as a powerful argument in disputes with post-Soviet neighbors about energy price and other commercial issues. Not infrequently, these issues were richly mixed with politics, as in Ukraine after the Orange revolution in 2006 and 2009. In those disputes, the Western media and the public invariably sided with the victims of Gazprom’s energy blockades. Even though Russia never stopped supplying its Western customers with gas – not even at the time of the Soviet Union’s collapse – its reputation as a reliable supplier suffered.
As relations with Moscow began to sour in the mid-2000s, the West’s dependence on Russian gas supplies – roughly 30 percent of the EU’s imports – became a security concern, particularly in Poland, the Baltic States, Sweden, Britain and the United States. The fear here was that, by making Europe’s countries, including the EU powerhouse Germany, dependent on Russian gas supplies, Moscow was achieving undue influence over their policies and left other countries such as Poland and the Baltic States exposed to Russian diktat. What the United States, Poland and the Baltics really feared, however, was a Russo-German economic symbiosis – which Putin was advocating – that would ultimately lead to Germany distancing itself from America, taking on a more independent international role, and becoming more “understanding” of Russia’s geopolitical interests.
Particularly suspicious to the critics were direct Russian–German energy links, such as the North Stream gas pipeline across the Baltic Sea, which did not cross any third country territory, and thus, the fear ran, Gazprom held the countries in between – Poland and Lithuania – to ransom. A similar Gazprom plan to build a pipeline, dubbed the South Stream, to Italy and Austria across the Black Sea and the Western Balkans would have gone around Ukraine and left it in the lurch, making it a blind alley and also robbing cash-strapped Kiev of transit fees. The plan, moreover, might also have increased Russian influence in the Balkans and Southern Europe – Italy and Greece. The EU’s opposition to the South Stream was strong enough to block it in 2014. Any future expansion of the North Stream, despite Berlin’s clear interest in it, is meeting active resistance in Brussels, Warsaw and Washington.
With the end of the commodities super-cycle and the collapse of the oil price in 2014–16, the use of energy as an instrument of political pressure has become impractical. Moreover, the countries which feared such pressure – Poland, Lithuania, and now pro-Western Ukraine – have taken steps to minimize or even end their historic dependence on Russian direct energy supplies. In the case of Ukraine, this applies not only to purchases of Russian gas but also to electricity. As of 2016, Russia is delivering only coal to Kiev. The situation has reversed itself: the low oil price, which is hitting Russia very hard, has become a powerful factor in the Western strategy of “disciplining” Moscow. This invites a parallel to the mid-1980s, when the Saudi-engineered collapse of the oil price drove Gorbachev to the wall, turned the Soviet Union into a major debtor, and limited Moscow’s freedom of maneuver.
Russia has other means of impacting on other countries and influencing their behavior. It has a powerful cyber warfare capacity, which it probably used against Estonia in 2007, Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2015. None of these cases, however, was decisive in the conflicts between Russia and the neighboring states. Georgia and Ukraine lost on the actual battlefield, not the virtual one, and Estonia did not change its policies on moving Soviet monuments and war graves away from Tallinn’s city center. Moreover, Tallinn has since become a NATO center for countering cyber warfare operations.
In a cyber war, Russia would certainly be a formidable foe. Its capabilities in the field add to its nuclear arsenal as an effective deterrent to the United States. International agreements on cyber security, a twenty-first-century equivalent of twentieth-century nuclear arms control, are many years away. While the area remains much more impervious to outside observers than nuclear weapons and missile technology, there are good reasons to believe that the United States and its allies are at least as advanced there as are Russia and China. And they too use cyber weapons when they see a need for it – as against Iran.
When on New Year’s Eve 2016 Russia adopted its new national security strategy, most Western commentators highlighted the portions of the document which referred to the United States and NATO actions as a threat to Russia. The document itself, however, hardly breaks new ground. Rather, it sums up the changes which have occurred since the beginning of the Ukraine crisis in 2014. Moscow does see the enhancement of NATO’s military infrastructure in the Baltic States and Poland, the US and other foreign military deployments in Eastern Europe and the adjacent waters and airspace, and US missile defenses in Poland and Romania as posing a military threat to Russia, and it will respond in kind.
Many observers point out that Moscow’s “declaration of a threat from the West” is largely beamed at the domestic audience. It may be annoying to many Europeans and Americans that the Kremlin is now using Russian–Western confrontation as a source of domestic support. In the recent era of Russian–Western cooperation, however, there were similar complaints in the United States and Europe that the Kremlin was using good relations with the West to legitimize its rule. That the Kremlin can thrive politically on both good and bad relations with the West says something about the Russian political system, Russian society and the Kremlin’s ability to manage it, but hatred of the West is clearly not an obsession with the Russian leadership, which remains essentially pragmatic.
A bigger issue is Russia’s self-isolation as a result of the deepening estrangement from the rest of Europe and the West. This is happening not only as a result of Russian-imposed counter-boycotts, such as the food embargo against the EU, and the multiplying elements of xenophobia in the public domain, but also on account of the new penury which makes Russians buy fewer foreign goods, cut back on foreign travel, and keep their children in the country. The notion of the West “ganging up” on Russia has undercut the empathy toward Europe which prevailed not only in the two decades after the end of the Cold War but had existed even in the Soviet period. The already wide gulf between Russia and Europe keeps growing.
When Russia was rich, money was considered its prime political weapon. Moscow, it was often claimed, could exploit the interests of various business circles, above all in Europe, in the Russian market, to the Russians’ advantage. Surprisingly for Moscow, these groups chose not to protest too loudly against the sanctions imposed on Russia in 2014 and have accepted significant losses as a result. However, they may not have given up entirely on the potential profits of Russian trade and economic cooperation. Some have left, while others have managed to adapt to the sanctions regime. Most are looking forward to the day when the sanctions are eased or lifted.