If you live east of Estonia, Poland, Rumania and Bulgaria, a new kind of iron curtain went up on your borders on January 1, 2007. Bulgaria and Rumania joined the European Union, despite many doubts in western Europe about the real state of their economies and of their willingness to fight corruption. Suddenly citizens of Ukraine, Belarus and Russia were the frontuer states on the wrong side of the borderless united Europe. There are many questions about just how united this Europe is, but one thing is sure. If you have a passport from the new states carved out of the Soviet Union (with the exception of the three small Baltic states), you have been excluded from the promised land, and will face daunting bureaucratic hurdles to even enter it temporarily.
But there is something that comes out of Russia, passes through Belarus or Ukraine, and becomes essential when it reaches the European Union – natural gas delivered from Russian wells through Russian-controlled pipelines . It may have seemed easy to naively dismiss Russia as a chaotic paper dragon not so long ago, albeit with nuclear weapons, but Europe is busy learning that it better think twice before putting that in the context of the energy that keeps houses warm in the winter. Last year, Germany was like Siberia for months, and this year Russia has reminded everyone that it controls the switches that determine the price the customer has to pay to keep cozy. Both Belarus and Ukraine thought they had privileged discount positions because of the Slavic brotherhood, but this year they have both learned what the price is for the special deal. And Germany and its smaller neighbours wonder when it might be their turn to discover just what it means to be competely dependant on Russian pricing, good will, and reliability.