Russian Resource Policies towards the CIS Countries

Abstract

President Dmitri Medvedev is the third Russian president since the demise of the USSR in 1991. While the first began as a political hero and ended as a political wreck and the second began as a political hero and ended his terms still a hero, the third Russian president lacked a charismatic lure and his greatest asset was his predecessor’s support and popularity. The second, Vladimir Putin, began a long journey in 2000 to rebuild what I refer to as ‘Greater Russia’, to recreate Russia as a great power, basically using ‘soft power’ means. The price was high: by the end of his second term, Putin had managed to split up the members of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) into those that were more closely tied to Russia and those that were more or less in open conflict with Russia — not necessarily the same constellation as in the Yeltsin years. The inheritance left to Medvedev is strategically to counter the Western drift of some — especially Ukraine and Georgia — and instrumentally to use energy issues as a carrot and stick — cheaper or more expensive oil, gas and electricity. In this chapter I am concerned with how President Medvedev has handled the inheritance with respect to using energy politics, especially gas politics as a foreign policy instrument. My starting point is the status of the ‘rebuilding’ effort by the end of Putin’s second presidential term, and I use primarily Putin’s and Medvedev’s gas politics to illustrate the mechanisms involved.¹