...is how the Russian foreign ministry described President Mikhail Saakshvili, Georgia's temperamental but brilliant leader, and his reaction to the January 22 near simultaneous early morning explosions of two natural gas lines just inside Russia along its border with Georgia.
The Georgian President hit the proverbial roof, immediately calling Russia, and its 1993 capitalist upstart Gazprom (a publicly traded company with appox. 40% of its shares owned by the Russian government and alone responsible for 8% of Russia's GDP), the "enemy" whose actions were "outrageous blackmail".
The President had every right to be upset, it being the dead of winter in the Caucasus and the lines that were destroyed were his entire country's (and by default, because they came from the same source, Armenia's) only source of gas. And it's winter...and it is cold. Place this event in the context of Russia's earlier tiff this year with Ukraine over the cost of Russian supplied natural gas (a proposed price increase on the Ukraine of appox. 500%), and you can see his point. To add insult to injury, later that day, and several hundred kilometers away, an electrical line from Russia to Georgia was "interrupted".
Post-Soviet economic blackmail by a former ruling government or minor industrial accident?
I'll let you decide...
2 comments:
This is incredible news. I'll put a link over at the Dumb Ox.
This hits home for me as my wife is Ukrainian and her family has been hit hard by Russia's strong-armed economic policies which I failed to post about...
Post a Comment