Robert M. Cutler on Energy and Eurasia

Ukraine's positioning makes it a natural bridge between East and West. A wise U.S. foreign policy would be one that is sensitive to Ukraine's function as a bridge between Russia and the Western military alliance.

First published in Foreign Policy in Focus, March 2001, pp. 1-2. Copyright © Robert M. Cutler.

The GUAM formation (Georgia-Ukraine-Azerbaijan-Moldova) had its origin in the 1996 round of talks implementing the Treaty on Conventional Forces in Europe. The four countries found they had a common opposition to the stationing of Russian weapons on their territory. GUAM became GUUAM when Uzbekistan joined in April 1999. According to recent reports, the GUUAM countries intend, in spring 2001, to institutionalize their cooperation by forming a permanent international organization. This organization will have its own secretariat (probably in Kiev, the capital of the Ukraine) and a small number of ancillary bodies but will have principally a coordinative function with no supranational authority. In response to this prospect, three schools of thought regarding GUUAM have begun to appear in Western, principally U.S., commentary and analysis.

Excerpt from Voice of America report by Barry Wood, "Russia Seeks to Rebuild Reputation as Reliable Energy Supplier" (4 April 2006):

Last January, Russia, unhappy with Kiev's shift to a western oriented foreign policy, threatened to quadruple gas prices for Ukraine and triggered supply disruption. Robert Cutler, an energy specialist at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada says Moscow's action called into question its reputation as a reliable supplier. "The current presidential administration did something that no Soviet leadership ever did during the cold war. They cut off gas," he said.

"Harmonizing EEC-CMEA Relations: Never the Twain Shall Meet?," International Affairs 63, no. 2 (Spring 1987): 259-70.

This article reviews Soviet perspectives on the European Economic Community (as the European Union was then called) in the early 1970s and then covers subsequent developments between the two European blocs later in that decade and through the early and mid-1980s. This review culminates in an assessment, consecutively, of the legal, economic, and political aspects of EEC–CMEA relations as these stood in early 1987. The article then establishes four possibilities for future relations between the organizations and evaluates these possibilities. It concludes with an attempt to see into the more distant future. Key Eurocrats in Brussels aver that this analysis strongly influenced EEC policy towards East Central Europe in the late 1980s, while the Soviet empire in East Europe was dissolving but the USSR had not yet begun to disintegrate. It includes 23 explanatory and bibliographical notes incorporating sources and studies in English, French, Russian, and Polish.

First published in Asia Time OnLine, 28 February 2007. Copyright © Robert M. Cutler.

A significant indicator of Turkmenistan's future diplomatic and economic course is whether new President Gurbanguly Berdymuhammedov will undertake a rapprochement with Azerbaijan.

Ukraine is in the midst of a financial and banking crisis, exacerbated by political turmoil, that has driven the principal national stock equities indicator, the PFTS Index, down 78% from a high of 1,209 in mid-March to 266 on Monday. The country relies heavily on external finance, and its banking system is by some measures the most at risk after Iceland’s, which collapsed only days ago. On the basis of the cost of its credit-default swaps, Ukraine is the least creditworthy of all of Europe’s emerging markets.