Recent events in Ukraine again bring up the question of Ukraine’s energy policy choices and the role of powerful domestic groups in relations with Russia and the EU. The Politics of Energy Dependency looks at theses issue from the perspective of post-independence energy politics in three post-Soviet states:
Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania. It compares these three states’ reactions to the serious external shock of their sudden transformation, virtually overnight in 1991, from constituents of a single energy-rich state to being separate energy-poor entities heavily dependent on Russia, as well as politically independent transit states. Using extensive field research and until now untapped local sources in Ukrainian, Belarusian, Russian and Lithuanian, the project analyzes how these states’ unique location, not only between a major energy producer (Russia) and its main market (the EU), but also between powerful domestic economic actors often making a profit of their situation of energy dependency (“oligarchs”), and Russian power, has affected Russia’s ability to use energy as a foreign policy tool in the region – and these states’ own political development.

Margarita M. Balmaceda is Professor of Diplomacy and International Relations at Seton Hall University and Research Associate at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. She is the author of, among others, Energy Dependency, Politics and Corruption in the Former Soviet Union (Routledge, 2008), The Politics of Energy
Dependency: Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania Between Domestic Oligarchs and Russian Pressure (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), and Living the High Life in Minsk: Russian Energy Rents, Domestic Populism and Belarus’
Impending Crisis (Budapest: Central European University Press, January 2014).

Chair and commentator: Lucan Way, University of Toronto