How were your winter holidays? Mine were pretty cold. No, don’t understand me wrong – it wasn’t because of the lack of love, it was all about gas. Because somehow someone sometime in the beginning of january said: ‘Okay, cut their supplies then!’. Oh, it wasn’t ’someone’ – it was the Russian Prime-minister Vladimir Putin.
And then the big winter started. Hundreds of thousands of people freezing at their homes – in Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, etc. The reason – stopped gas supplies from Russia through Ukraine to their countries. The real reason – the lack of good policy of the EU countries on energy matters.
Well, the EU energy policy could be good enough on paper but it’s not quite working yet. And the problem is not that the strategy itself was proposed in the early 2007. The problem is that there is no common voice on the alternative gas supplies yet. The Nabucco project is going too slow and there are still many things to be decided. So this sentences countries like Bulgaria and Romania to become prisoners of Russian supplies.
‘Europe currently gets a quarter of its gas from Russia, with 80 percent of it coming through Ukraine. Some countries, like Bulgaria, are almost entirely dependent on the Russian energy behemoth Gazprom for their gas. Thus, tens of thousands of Bulgarians were left shivering in the winter cold after the supply going through the Ukraine was cut early in January.’ That statement in the business portal Eurasia.net would have just terrified me if I weren’t Bulgarian and I hadn’t suffered it myself.
In the last few days the problem arose once again - the Ukraine’s national energy company Naftogaz announced last Thursday it might face problems paying for natural gas supplied by Russia’s Gazprom as debts of Ukrainian utility companies grow. (information from the Russian news agency RIA Novosti). This means another gas crisis is comming. Sounds bad. And it will get worse and worse - and probably colder and colder.
So this is what we need: strong voice of the MPs that will find more ways to get out of the Russian dependance And this time they’d be ready to act much faster. Because the elections are comming and we wouldn’t like to wait if they can’t provide us the safety we need.
P.S. During the cold nights of January a favourite song of mine was very actual - Robbie Williams’ ‘Let Love Be Your Energy’. Since I know Russia and Ukraine don’t love each other very much… Well, thank God I’m still in love.
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* The Graphics are translated from Bulgarian and taken from Capital Weekly who quoted Financial Times.
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Wonderful post, Alex. Do you have any pictures from the gas-freeze? If so, it’d be great if you could post them here. I’m sure it would make for a very interesting slideshow that you could embed into this post? If you don’t have photos maybe you can find some on flickr and put them in here?
I believe we should not exaggerate, though… Romanians didn’t freeze at any point, for instance. While almost total dependency might be valid for Bosnia and former Yugoslav countries, it certainly isn’t so for Romania. Anyway, what’s the opinion on Nabucco of Bulgarian politicians?
Ruth, there are no pictures of the gas-freeze. Corina is right - the energy doesn’t stop because our gas stopped. Although Bulgaria has a totally dependent on Russia for its gas, the crisis was simply an inconvenience for the people. For the business however it was devastating.
There was a reportage on CNN where a journalist was showing “families freezing from the stopped central heating” in the Bulgarian city of Pleven. It turned out he shot some gypsy families in the worst neighborhood of Pleven that have never had central heating and were using wood and coil. Worst of all, the families testified that they were paid to stage extreme suffering. The comedy in it is that the central heating in Pleven had never stopped during the crisis!
Hello, good writing.
Hrmm that was unusual, my remark got swallowed. Anywho I wanted to express it’s nice to know that somebody else also highlighted this as I had problems simply finding the same information elsewhere. This was the very first place that helped me understand why. Bless you.
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