This is a sharp account of one serious Russian view on Russian energy issues:

Mr Chubais has spent the past 10 years masterminding the break-up of UES, the Russian electricity monopoly, which will cease to exist next week after selling off its generators in the biggest liberalisation of Vladimir Putin’s presidency. His insistence that Europe is misreading Gazprom is striking as he is a frequent critic of the gas monopoly.

He warned Europe’s actions were part of a broader international tendency in oil and gas towards increasing state intervention and closing domestic markets – which he warned were a “dead end” and posed big risks “for the world and for Russia”. A return to protectionism was “madness”.

He’s right of course in that. But Europe’s problem is that these energy issues are not symmetrical.

Russia has energy on a vast scale. Europe does not.

In Europe the use of major energy contracts as a political policy tool is ruled out. That is not obviously the case in Russia.

So, battle is joined. How does Europe import Russian energy on a huge scale while exporting greater transparency/due process back up the supply chain into Russia? Does Russia use its energy predominance craftily to export its political worldview as well?

See eg the reluctance in many parts of the EU (not only ultra-cautious Poland) to allow Russian interests to buy key energy assets, for fear that those assets will not be managed in a purely commercial way for purely commercial purposes.

Not surprising, given the way Russia under current management weighs in to rewrite former contracts and grab better terms when it feels like it.

But Mr Chubais has a point here:

Mr Chubais insisted ending subsidised gas supplies to former Soviet states was about “stopping handing out money for free”. “Why the hell should we supply gas to Ukraine” for discount prices, he asked. “And meanwhile, forgive me, these scoundrels are stealing gas…

I wrote about this problem back in 1996 while at the Embassy in Moscow. I said that the West hypocritically nagged post-communist Russia to behave in a market way, but then complained about Russian ‘bullying’ when Russia pressed eg Ukraine and Serbia to move towards paying market-prices for energy and stop ‘diverting’ gas supplies improperly.

That said, for a long time it suited Russia to leave other former Soviet republics and parts of the Balkans hooked on cheap energy as a way of keeping them within the Russian ‘sphere of influence’.

Maybe we are finally emerging from that period to a tougher game, based on world prices with ‘influence’ won or lost via different means?