Russia's vast energy supplies worry US
The Russians now supply about 25 percent of the European Union's crude oil needs and half of its natural gas.
And Moscow, with its recent attack on its former Georgian republic, may be trying to blunt the West's counteroffensive in the deadly serious energy competition. A key, U.S.-backed pipeline that carries oil out of Caspian and Central Asian fields to a Turkish port on the Mediterranean was nearly hit in recent attacks.
That pipeline carries Caspian crude to international markets from suppliers independent not only of Russia but also OPEC. Lesser amounts flow through the Baku-Supsa line, which ends on the Black Sea.
The stakes are high for the Europeans.
Some U.S. lawmakers worry about divisions within NATO due to Russia's domination of European gas markets and the threat of cold, dark winters if an angry Kremlin closes the valves.
"It is unlikely that aggression against our NATO allies will occur with aircraft and tanks and troops," said Indiana Sen. Richard Lugar, the senior Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in an Associated Press interview. "A nation could achieve the same and worse effects simply by turning off the taps- people freeze, industry stops."
To counter this influence, the U.S. sent special envoy C. Boyden Gray to energy-rich Central Asia to lobby for new routes that run through Georgia -- notably the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline that was almost hit by a Russian bombing raid Monday.
The Caspian Sea port of Baku is the capital of Azerbaijan, another former Soviet republic that controls major petroleum reserves.
In Azerbaijan, Gray's visit in early June was overshadowed when Alexei Miller, the chief executive of Russia's government-controlled energy giant, Gazprom, made a bold offer -- still pending -- to buy all of Azerbaijan's natural gas exports at market prices.
Gray continued on to Turkmenistan. Russian President Dmitry Medvedev immediately announced his own trip and flew there a month later to unveil a major gas agreement that dealt another blow to U.S. hopes.
Those setbacks underscore the challenges confronting Washington and the European Union, which is hamstrung by its limited power to set a unified energy policy in the face of Russia's divide-and-conquer strategy in the gas market.
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