The Geopolitics of Oil

The issue of what to do with the Odesa- Brody oil pipeline goes to the core of Ukraine’s problems in defining its own national interest within the context of Russo-Ukrainian relations. Russia has consistently pursued a policy of hegemony in the former Soviet Union, except for the Baltic states, where it has had no choice. The Commonwealth of Independent States itself was created and still exists only because Russia is determined that the former Soviet republics retain some sort of association that would ensure continued Russian hegemony in the region. Since 1991, when Russia’s former President Boris Yeltsin instructed his country’s enterprises to stop doing business with their Ukrainian partners in a failed attempt to bring Ukraine to its knees, tactics may have changed but not the overall strategy.

Given that Russia is in essence a Third World country (exporting raw materials to pay for finished goods from the advanced First World) with rich subsoil resources and nuclear weapons, its main instrument for making good on its geopolitical claims is to control the energy tap. After all it was in order to secure Europe’s dependence on Soviet oil that the original pipeline was built through Ukraine and to “snap one of the prongs off the Ukrainian trident” that post- Soviet Russia took up the project of building a bypass line through Belarus. After Ukraine responded by creating GUUAM and building an oil pipeline to the Polish border in order to counter such clear present and future threats to its independence, Russia has now offered to lend a helping hand to Ukraine in its time of financial difficulties by proposing the pipeline be turned into a spur off the main line that would remain in Russian hands through the energy transport consortium, and there is no shortage of voices in Ukraine insisting that a project designed to safeguard the nation’s independence be evaluated strictly from the perspective of temporary economic expediency.

In themselves, the economic arguments might be persuasive. But the real issue is one of Ukraine’s independence, whether it is serious about becoming a full-fledged European nation sufficiently attractive and important to the member-states — states with which it has supposedly chosen integration as its basic strategy — of European and Atlantic structures or drift into dependence on the center of Europe’s sometime partner and eternal other, the Eurasian remnant the former Soviet Union. The importance of what is done now can hardly be underestimated, for a central fact of the contemporary world geopolitics is that for the foreseeable future the world economy will run on oil, a nonrenewable resource that will become more precious as it is depleted. And when the oil is gone, the world will still be left with the relationships structured when it was still flowing, just as much as postcommunist relationships in the former Soviet republics remain colored by the Soviet experience. Oil is not the only realm in which this society remains bound by the past and will have to decide how much to adapt to its Soviet heritage and how much it can afford to break with it. But it is an extremely important component of that larger choice. In other words, the direction Ukraine will be able to go in the future will largely be governed by which way the oil flows between Odesa and Brody.