Ukraine’s Friend of the Week: Peter Hultqvist
Almost two decades into the 21st century, the ties between Ukraine and Sweden may not at first be obvious, but they are deep and they are long.
Kyivan Rus, the ancient medieval state, is considered by many historians to have been founded by Scandinavians: The first Grand Prince of Kyiv, Oleg, was the brother-in-law of Rurik, the founder of the Rus royal dynasty, who was himself a Varangian, or what we’d nowadays call a Viking.
Swedish and Kyivan Rus royalty maintained close ties for four centuries. One of the greatest kings of Kyivan Rus, Yaroslav the Wise, was married to Ingigerd Olofsdotter, the daughter of King Olof of Sweden. The name “Rus” that these Scandinavian emigres used is thought to have come from Roslagen, an area of Sweden’s south-central coast.
Later, Swedes and Ukrainians formed an alliance in the 1650s to fight against the Russian Tsar Peter the Great during the Great Northern War.
Later still, in 1781 in the time of Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia, a Swedish village was established in the newly conquered Russian imperial possession of Novorossiya, in southern and eastern Ukraine (today’s Kherson Oblast). The 1,000 Swedes that populated the new village, called Gammalsvenskby (or “Old Swedish Village”) marched there from their home village in Estonia, with half of them dying on the way.
The Swedish colonists had been promised fertile farmland (which was there) and new houses (which were not.) By March 1783, just 18 months after they had left Estonia, only 135 of them remained alive. More privations followed under Russian imperial and Soviet rule. Yet the village, now part of the village of Zmiyivka, on the right bank of the Dnipro in Kherson Oblast, still has a few villagers who speak an old dialect of Swedish.
Now, as Ukraine again faces a threat to its sovereignty from renewed Kremlin aggression, the old ties between Sweden and Ukraine are being realized in the form of political and military support. And Swedish Defense Minister Peter Hultqvist, Ukraine’s Friend of the Week and winner of an Order of Yaroslav the wise, was in Kyiv on March 5 to offer aid to Ukraine.
Importantly, Sweden has expressed its readiness to take part in a United Nations peacekeeping mission in eastern Ukraine. Given that the Minsk peace agreements have long since proved to be a failure, and were probably simply a Kremlin ruse to create a frozen conflict in the Donbas anyway, it is important that Ukraine’s allies support the latest attempt to break the Donbas deadlock. Only once the Russian-led military forces and occupation-authorities are removed, replaced by a peacekeeping force, and free and fair elections are held in the Donbas, will the true feelings of its inhabitants about Ukraine and the “Russkiy Mir” or Russian world to which they have been subjected, finally be known.
Sweden’s help for Ukraine, which Hultqvist also said would take the form of Swedish military training for the Ukrainian army, is not just an expression of friendly relations, however. The country has a stake in the stability of the region, and in pushing back against a revanchist Russia.
Sweden, not a member of NATO, is under the threat of military aggression from the regime of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. There have been numerous suspected incursions of Swedish waters by Soviet, and now Russian submarines since the 1960s, with the latest occurring in October 2014.
More alarmingly, on March 29, 2013, a year before Russia launched its war on Ukraine in the Donbas, the Russian air force conducted mock nuclear strikes against targets in Sweden with Tupolev T-22M nuclear bombers. The Swedish military, caught by surprise, had to rely on a response from Danish fighter jets from NATO’s Baltic air policing mission.
Since then, Sweden has become markedly more serious about the scale of the military threat posed by the Kremlin, and its support for Ukraine is one indicator of this. Stockholm understands that if Putin is not met with a robust response in Ukraine, more countries in the region will fall victim to military meddling from an emboldened dictator.
If only more of Ukraine’s friends in the West realized that too.
Ukraine’s Foe of the Week: Alexey Miller
Superficially, it would seem sensible for Europe to buy gas from Russia. The country’s giant gas company Gazprom controlled, as of 2015, more than 18 percent of the world’s proven reserves of natural gas. There is an existing network of overland pipelines that Gazprom can use transport Russian gas to customers throughout Europe relatively cheaply. Gazprom currently supplies nearly 40 percent of the gas consumed by Europe. Its biggest customers in the European Union are Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom, the three countries in 2016 together consuming about 63 percent of Russia’s exports of gas to Western Europe (which totaled 146.2 billion cubic meters.)
But countries that buy gas from Russia incur economic and political costs as well, which should, if they look at the example of Ukraine, make them pause to reflect whether the enterprise is really worth it.
The price Gazprom charges for gas is often higher for the countries of Central and Eastern Europe than for countries in Western Europe. For instance, Estonia, right next to Russia, in 2013 paid $442 per 1,000 cubic meters of gas, while far-off France paid $394.
The price is affected by a country’s dependence on Russian gas – for instance, Estonia in 2013 got 100 percent of its gas supplies from Russia, while less than 20 percent of France’s imports of gas came from Russia.
But there is a component of the price Gazprom (which is effectively controlled by the Kremlin) charges its customers that could be described as a political proximity premium. If a country is Kremlin-pliant, it pays less. For instance. Estonia’s neighbor Finland paid only $385 for its gas in 2013, while Belarus, Moscow’s client state, was charged only $166. Poland, no friend of the Kremlin, paid $526 for its Russian gas, the highest of any EU state, while neighboring Germany paid $379.
Ukraine, of course, saw a massive rise in its political proximity premium in 2014, in the wake of the EuroMaidan Revolution. Under Ukraine’s pro-Russian former president, Viktor Yanukovych, Ukraine had been paying $268.50 per 1,000 cubic meters. After Yanukovych fled the country and a more Western-oriented government came to power, in the space of barely a week at the end of March and beginning of April 2014 Gazprom raised its price for Ukraine twice – first to $385.50, and then to $485. The overall price rise was an astounding 80 percent.
While Gazprom complained that Ukraine owed it debts for gas previously delivered, such a price rise is obviously economically unjustified, and given the circumstances was a blatant attempt to exert political pressure on Ukraine.
Gazprom has in the past even gone so far as to cut off gas supplies to Ukraine completely as a means of exerting political pressure. Gazprom is, in effect, a foreign policy tool of the Kremlin as much as it is an energy company. As such, it is under the command of a close political ally of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin – Ukraine’s Foe of the Week and winner of the Order of Lenin, Alexey Miller.
Miller is a longtime associate of Putin, having served under him in the External Affairs Committee of the St. Petersburg mayor’s office from 1991 to 1996. He has headed Gazprom since 2001, a year after Putin took power in Russia. Another Putin lackey, Dmitry Medvedev, who served as placeholder president for Putin from 2008 to 2012, was chairman of Gazprom’s board of directors.
And Gazprom proved again it is a political instrument on March 5, when Miller said the company would break its gas supply and transit contracts with Naftogaz of Ukraine, Ukraine’s state oil and gas company.
Why? Because on Feb. 28 Ukraine won a case against Gazprom in the Stockholm court of arbitration, with the Russian giant being ordered to pay Naftogaz $2.56 billion in compensation for underdelivering transit gas.
In the immediate wake of the court ruling, Gazprom on March 1 refused to start the scheduled delivery of 18 billion cubic meters of gas to Ukraine, leaving Kyiv scrambling to sign a replacement contract (it did, with Poland) and forcing the government to call on the nation to reduce its gas consumption – all amid a period of the coldest temperatures this winter.
All the same, Ukraine has since 2014 drastically reduced its consumption of Russian gas, and Europe would be wise to follow its example. The headline price of Russian gas may seem attractive, but the Kremlin’s gas deals come with lots of hidden risk that could cost a country dear in terms of its energy security and economic stability.
