Pipeline politics is the new Great Game

‘We’re always told that Russia is using its economic resources to achieve foreign policy aims,’ President Putin told journalists recently. But, he went on, it is ‘ill-wishers’ in the Western press who paint Russia as a threat to European energy security. ‘That is not the case.’

Yet within minutes of this assurance, Putin issued a bald threat to one of the EU’s newest members that was a textbook example of how Russia has bullied its way to energy dominance.