Shadow Integration

The latest discussions of the Common Economic Space and the gas pipeline consortium with Russia should really not come as much of a surprise to anybody. As elections approach, the national democrats fill their coffers from the Ukrainian diaspora in the West, and those in power from their Slavic brothers to the East. Both are equally illegal, but laws are broken when it seems to be necessary, especially in the former Soviet Union, which was, after all, a system that routinely made demands which could not be met without breaking the system’s rules, so practically everybody was guilty of something, and practically everybody still is.

The Common Economic Space has raised some eyebrows in the European Union, because Ukraine obviously cannot integrate into Europe and Eurasia simultaneously. However, given the number of commodities excluded from this union — Russia does not want Ukraine to buy its oil and gas at the prices Russians pay nor to sell its metal goods at prices which might worry Russian competitors — it probably will not mean very much.

What should cause much more worry is the farming out of the Soyuz gas pipeline to Russia’s Gazprom. Energy resources are fast becoming the geopolitics of the twenty-first century, and control over the facilities used to transport them across Ukraine is a vital issue of Ukraine’s future. Add to this the fact that the energy sector has long had the reputation of being the most corrupt segment of the economy. Given the realities of Ukrainian legislation and libel law, there are certain things that it simply cannot be published here, so we can only direct out readers to the Internet. On who is involved in this deal on the Ukrainian side, feel free to consult an RFE/RL publication called Corruption and Terrorism Watch at http://www.rferl.org/corruptionwatch. It makes a number of allegations that cannot be validated to the satisfaction of Ukrainian law, but let the reader come to his or her own conclusions.

The point here is that a Ukrainian entity with a highly dubious reputation is making strategic decisions that Ukraine will have to deal with for a long time to come. Indeed, it seems that there are plans to build a pipeline that will increase Ukraine’s transit capacity to what it already is and that the Germans are being left on hold until the local shady characters work out the details so that the beneficent investors can be called in to finance what the same characters will control and benefit from, deciding what the Germans deserve as their part of the take. This scheme is not new in Ukraine’s plans to attract investment, and the Ukrainians responsible seem unable to understand why under such circumstances the outside world is not knocking down the doors to give them money. Am I being overly critical, or is something wrong here?