The World

I will be in Moscow later this week which should be fascinating since I haven’t been for a couple of years. For reasons too tedious to go into, I won’t be able to do the blog from Russia. So, after this post, there will be a short period of silence.

In preparation for the trip, however, I’ve been talking to lots of people. The single most memorable conversation I have had about Russia was with a "senior administration official" in Washington,a few weeks ago. The man in question is not generally regarded as a hardliner or a hawk. But his view of developments in Russia was extraordinary bleak. Here are the edited highlights:

"The Russians are loaded with money and they think they’re back. The European Union is waking up to the fact that it has a Russia problem." The symptoms of this are many and various. They include – and here I am quoting – "the ‘hate week’ against Georgia, the cyber-attack on Estonia, the Litvinenko murder, the constant pressure on free speech and democracy, Russian recalcitrance over Kosovo, Russia’s threat to pull-out of the CFE treaty; the threats made to Poles over missile defence and Russia’s possible recognition of Abkhazia." This, according to the official, would make Russia a “revisionist power, which would be getting us into very dangerous territory”.

His summary of the situation was "Russia is authoritarian in politics, corporatist in economics and revisionist in foreign policy, with a rancid 1930s stew of nationalism and authoritarianism." So, I said, you are basically saying that Russia is a facist country. The official barely bothered to disagree: “I wouldn’t’ say that, because fascism is a loaded word", was his reply.

As this particular American sees it, the only solution to a newly assertive Russia is western solidarity. But he is worried that not everybody in Europe sees this. The French, the British and the German Greens are praised by him for "thinking strategically". Angela Merkel was praised for her handling of Mr Putin. But the German SPD were condemned as "acccomodationist".

The EU’s major strategic vulnerability, as the Americans see it, is its growing dependence on Russian gas. The administration official mused that sometimes the Americans seem more concerned about this than the Europeans themselves.

"Europe", he said "needs a serious gas policy, with a major high level EU push to get Caspian gas out on a pipeline that does not go through Russia." That means that Europe must make the building of the Nabucco pipeline through Turkey, a "top strategic priority". It also means continuing to support the independence of  Georgia, for strategic as well as ideological reasons. If Georgia is brought back within the Russian ambit, then it becomes impossible to build a pipeline that is outside Russian control -  unless (gasp) you go via Iran.

Europeans also need to develop their links to Norwegian and North African gas. And they should "revisit the decision to build the Schroder pipeline" – the shorthand name for the under-sea gas pipeline linking Russia and Germany, but bypassing Poland and the Baltic states.

And what happens if we in Europe don’t do any of this? “The biggest medium-term risk is that Europe becomes irreversibly dependent on Russia and Russia starts rolling back freedoms gained in the former Soviet Union – starting with Georgia and then moving onto Ukraine."

I will be interested to see what the Russians themselves have to say about all this.