A constituent court of the Court of Justice of the European Union has ruled that the Russian state-owned energy giant Gazprom may not use 100 percent of the capacity of OPAL, an onshore, German extension to the Nord Stream natural gas pipeline. Gazprom is expected... MORE

Following last month’s (August 12) Caspian Economic Forum in Ashgabat, Turkmenistan (see EDM, September 4), a number of Russian commentators celebrated what they saw as a victory of the “Russian-Iranian approach,” which seeks to promote north-south trade over the east-west flows supported by the three... MORE

Both Iran and Russia suffer from the United States’ sanctions: the former since the 1979 Islamic revolution, the latter since its 2014 illegal annexation of Crimea. But in a recent bout of creative synergy, Crimean “deputy prime minister” and the permanent representative of Crimea to... MORE

On August 12, delegations led by the prime ministers of the five Caspian littoral states—Azerbaijan, Iran, Kazakhstan, Russia and Turkmenistan—came together at Turkmenistan’s coastal resort of Awaza to hold the first annual Caspian Economic Forum. The heads of government from two other countries, Uzbekistan and... MORE

Volodymyr Zelenskyy inherited formidable challenges when he was elected Ukraine’s sixth president this spring, including a Kremlin-backed war with “separatists” in the east, deep-rooted corruption, and an ongoing natural gas dispute with Russia. Ukraine is now responding to the gas discord by trying to negotiate... MORE

Russia’s largest independent oil refiner, New Stream, recently emerged from financial devastation to resume operations. But multi-million-dollar fraud charges against its former board chair underscore the problems in an industry reeling from decrepit facilities and a new, profit-gutting tax code. At the same time, the... MORE

The dominant player in Austria’s oil and natural gas sector, OMV, has signaled that a Russia-related political scandal that recently toppled the government in Vienna will not halt the Austrian company from deepening its ties with Russian energy firms. This became apparent in early June,... MORE

Two long-term natural gas contracts between Russia and Ukraine are set to expire in December. And as this deadline approaches, the two sides are preparing for necessary renegotiations. Kyiv needs to avoid a repetition of January 2009, when parts of Europe were left without gas... MORE

Three developments since early June 2019 call attention to China’s unrelenting efforts to become the dominant player on the Northern Sea Route (NSR)—the increasingly ice-free Arctic waterway along Russia’s northern coast, and the main segment of the longer Northeastern Passage, linking Asia and Europe. First,... MORE

On December 29, 2018, the head of the occupying government in Crimea, Sergey Aksenov, proposed to transport Ukrainian offshore oil and natural gas drilling rigs (“nationalized” by Russia after the Crimean annexation) from the Black Sea to the Syrian coastal shelf (UAWire, December 30, 2018).... MORE