A while back I started a series on “frozen conflicts” in the former USSR. The first two (on Transnistria) can be found here and here. I was planning to do them in order from least bad to worst (which would put South Ossetia next) but decided to jump ahead a bit to Nagorno-Karabakh.
What [...]

“Against stupidity, the Gods themselves contend in vain.” — Schiller
So Serbia’s government has agreed to sell its oil and gas company, NIS, to Russia’s Gazprom.
By itself there’s nothing wrong with this. What’s stupid about it is the price. NIS has a market value of around $2.8 billion. The government is selling it [...]

Well the new EU energy plan has been released (and here, and you can also find the actual Commission statement here). The final product is pretty much as the leaks suggested.
As was indicated yesterday, Russia related concerns are central. The FT comments:
Russia supplies a quarter of Europe’s gas needs and the Union’s dependence [...]

Expanding on (and slightly copying) my comments in Edward’s post below, I was really shocked to see the spin in the western coverage of the Ukrainian gas crisis. The part that didn’t shock me - just made me groan - is the spin of a western press that seems to have decided in advance [...]

Over at TYR, I argued that the explanation of the Ukraine-Russia gas dispute was an effort by the Russian side to break up the European gas customers as a negotiating block by exploiting the conflict between the transit states (like the Ukraine) and the customers (like Germany). This gave rise to further discussion down-blog right [...]

This is a kind of bits-and-bobs post without a lot of coherence, as I am trying to make sense of something which is hard to make sense of, so anyone with more specialist knowledge, please chip-in.
Now I think what we have here is a highly complex situation, and if individual actors behave strangely in a [...]