Bratia PutinShenkove (Brothers Puti-Shenko)

There are indeed some striking family resemblances. Both have irascible authoritarian presidents—Russia's Vladimir Putin and Belarus's brutal Alyaksandr Lukashenko—and both are inclined to risky diplomatic brinkmanship. This week that similarity propelled them over the brink and into an unfraternal trade dispute. Brief though it may have been, it had important implications for Russia's energy dealings with Europe, and perhaps also for the future of benighted Belarus. Like in Bothers Karamazov (Bratia Karamazove, in Russian) similarities are not so close.

It is all clear in the blog by Dmitry Babich. He explains several false ideas about Belaurs and Russia.

Stereotype number one: Lukashenko’s regime strives to reestablish some form of the old Soviet Union by merging Belarus with Russia.

Lukashenko went out of his way to assert the opposite. “Sovereignty and independence are sacred words; in fact, they are as sacred as some dogmas of Christianity,” Lukashenko said on Jan. 7 after a church service on Orthodox Easter. “I never said we should make Belarus a part of some other state. I just always supported the idea of a union of states, especially the ones where our brothers live.” This “union of states,” however, is not the old Soviet Union, but a strange economic centaur, where the bigger reformed partner (Russia) subsidizes the economy of a smaller unreformed one (Belarus). Thanks to the cheap energy from Russia, the old-fashioned Soviet plants in Belarus could continue operating and their workers could continue getting their salaries. The Soviet Union was partially recreated, but on a smaller scale, in a single small country named Belarus.

Stereotype number two: The Belarussian regime is dependent on Russia; it abhors Belarussian patriotism and gears its policy to Moscow.

Again, this is not completely true. Russia is often criticized on Belarussian state-controlled mass media as a “traitor” to the old Soviet (or, in modern newspeak, Slavic) cause. The media even summons up the notion of “good people – bad czar,” so familiar to Western readers. However, if the Western media preaches about “Putin’s backsliding on democracy,” Belarusian state-owned television lectures on “Russia ruled by oligarchs and corrupt politicians,” who prevent it from “backsliding on democracy” completely and becoming a true heir of the Soviet Union, as Belarus has already done.

Stereotype number three: the Belarusian regime’s power is based solely on fear, it has no public support either in Belarus or Russia. Meanwhile, Putin’s regime is “bullying” its neighbors and disregarding public opinion.

In reality, both Lukashenko’s regime and Putin’s tough new policy towards the former Soviet countries are based on certain sentiments shared by Russian and Belarusian public opinion. One of them, which Lukashenko used often during his reign, is the nostalgia for the Soviet Union. The other was best summarized by Valery Fyodorov, the director of VTsIOM, a Moscow-based think tank specializing in public opinion studies. “One section of Russians prefers isolationism, while the other one is nostalgic about the Soviet Union, despite the utter impossibility of the latter’s recreation,” Fyodorov wrote in his article for the book Integration in Eurasia. “There is a certain mistaken dualism here: either give us back the USSR in its entirety or we don’t need any integration at all, especially if it requires a payment.”While Lukashenko promises a return of the USSR in a country of 10 million people, Putin accuses Lukashenko of sabotaging a union state and imposes added payments on gas and other Russian resources. Both enjoy the support of large sections of their respective constituencies.

The two countries' tactics may be similar, but their muscle is not. Mr Putin talked of cutting oil production and rerouting supplies. The Russians also threatened duties on all Belarusian goods, many of which would struggle to find markets elsewhere. On January 10th, after the presidents talked on the telephone, Mr Lukashenko blinked; the transit fee was lifted; and oil began to flow again before Europe was seriously affected. Nevertheless, the short but nasty spat has telling lessons.

The most important lesson for Europe, however, is once again that over-reliance on Russian energy is dangerous, writes The Economist.

Russian Crude Stops Flowing to Europe. Who turned off the tap?

Russian crude oil stopped flowing to Western Europe through a major pipeline across Belarus this week. Who turned off the tap? Russia has raised its prices for oil and gas to market levels, after decades of giving Belarus and other former republics of the Soviet Union deep discounts compared with Western European customers.

But a prolonged disruption could be worrisome, writes Steven Lee Myers in The New York Times. The pipeline is one of the larest in the world. Its name, Druzhba, means friendship but the cut affected supplies of crude oil headed to Poland, Germany and Ukraine. Now the European Union has to hold talks with Russia and Belarus in a bid to resolve a row which has led to a cut in oil supplies to much of Europe.

The shutdown of Druzhba, one of the world’s largest oil pipelines, came a week after Russia and Belarus negotiated a last-minute agreement on supplies of natural gas to Belarus and their prices. Minutes before midnight on New Year's Eve, Lukashenka's regime was forced into a humiliating climbdown in its pricing dispute with Russia's state-controlled natural-gas monopoly Gazprom. This time Minsk says Russia has not been paying a transit tax for moving oil through Belarus, imposed after Russia doubled the price it charges Belarus for gas.

BBC economics correspondent Andrew Walker says the suspension is an uncomfortable reminder to Europe of the large and growing role that Russia has in meeting its energy needs.

The European Commission said it was investigating whether the Russian move would have an impact on another branch of the pipeline, which runs to Slovakia and south-east Europe.

The decision to shut down the Druzhba pipeline is the latest twist in an energy row between Belarus and Moscow that began when Russian energy giant Gazprom forced Belarus to accept a huge increase in the price of Russian gas.

For Blog finanza seems a deja vu from the first montho of last year. But this time the cut is not is not against the orange rebels in Ucraine, but against Belaurs, "la più stretta alleata di Mosca".

In Russia lies are well paid

Media corruption is part of the pervasive graft in Russia. In its 2006 Corruption Perceptions Index, ranking countries from least to most corrupt, Transparency International placed Russia 121st, out of 163 countries. Many newspapers just keep repeating the key arguments of the politicians almost word for word.

Anna Severnova, the public relations director for the St. Petersburg office of a Western European political organization, spends a lot of time rejecting corrupt proposals from Russian journalists, writes Galina Stolyarova, a reporter for English-language newspaper The St. Petersburg Times in Transitions online.

"Last time it happened was just a couple of weeks ago. An imposing-looking woman approached me at a reception, wondering if our office would be interested in a favorable article," Severnova recalled. “ 'You know what I mean,' she added with a wink. She was confident, assured, not at all embarrassed. We didn't get to discussing the price because I said I was definitely not interested."

Some offers are more sophisticated. For instance, an official from the St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly, the local parliament, suggested that Severnova's office hire him as a media consultant, at a handsome monthly wage of $1,000. " 'It's simple,' he told me. 'You tell me what you need a report about, I send a fax to the right place, the journalist writes the report, and you send them on a weekend press trip to Finland or Sweden. That will get the local press raving about you guys,' " Severnova recalled him saying. "He was very businesslike and straightforward."

In a 2001 survey of 100 St. Petersburg journalists by the Russian Academy of Sciences, 12 percent admitted that they regularly produce stories involving hidden advertising. A further 18 percent said they produce such stories occasionally, and 37 percent said they had done so more than once.



Diferences are big. While Putin travels around with a contingent of reporters just as Bush does, the Kremlin press pool is a handpicked group of reporters, most of whom work for the state and the rest selected for their fidelity to the Kremlin's rules of the game. Helpful questions are often planted. Unwelcome questions are not allowed. And anyone who gets out of line can get out of the pool.

Is what in the Washington Post analyst Lilia Shevtsova of the Carnegie Moscow Center called "the illusion of democracy."

Since he took office in 2000, Putin has taken steps to centralize power and eliminated democratic checks and balances, writes Maria Danilova, journalist from Associated Press.
He has created an obedient parliament, abolished direct gubernatorial elections, tightened restrictions on rights groups and presided over the elimination of most opposition voices from the media, especially the television networks.

And some others, paid it with their lives. Like Anna Politkovskaya, the prominent Russian journalist who was famous for her critical coverage of the war in Chechnya and was discovered dead in Moscow. She was found dead in an elevator in a Moscow apartment building by a duty officer at a central Moscow police station. She had been shot to death, and a pistol and four bullets were found nearby. Politkovskaya was working on when she was murdered at the weekend, giving a grisly account of alleged torture by Chechen officials, was published in her newspaper today. The story in Novaya Gazeta included written testimony from a Chechen man extradited from Ukraine to a Chechen government office in Grozny.