Energy Secretary Rick Perry will meet with Russian Energy Minister Alexander Novak in Moscow on Thursday, making Perry the most senior U.S. official to visit Russia since President Trump's Helsinki summit with Vladimir Putin last July.
Moscow and Washington are at odds over U.S. accusations of Russian meddling in U.S. politics, Syria, Ukraine and the poisoning of a former Russian spy in Britain.
Officials from the United States and Russia, two of the world’s largest oil and natural gas producers, formerly met regularly to discuss energy issues. Those meetings stopped in 2014 after Russia annexed Crimea.
Trump has said he wants to improve ties, but his administration is considering imposing new sanctions on Moscow, as is the U.S. Congress.
Novak has said in the past that the United States should not be permitted to impose such sanctions without a vote of the U.N. Security Council, of which Russia is a permanent member.
Perry and Novak, who last met in June in Washington, will likely discuss Russia’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline project to carry Russian gas to Germany under the Baltic Sea. Trump and former U.S. President Barack Obama have criticized the project, saying it would increase Russian influence in Europe, but Germany supports the pipeline.
Washington doesn't just want to punish Nord Stream II because of Russia's behavior in Ukraine (or Syria, or election meddling, or poisoning ex-spies in London, etcetera). Everyone in the global natural gas business knows that the U.S. wants to roadblock Nord Stream II in order to entice Europe, a huge gas market, to import more costly American liquefied natural gas. But if the U.S. Treasury does go ahead with threats to fine Gazprom's pipeline partners, they will be targeting major corporations from the U.K., Germany, France and Austria ...
Russia used to have Ukraine as its key gas route into Europe. The old Soviet allies have been embroiled in a messy divorce since the winter of 2014. Many energy policy analysts believe that Nord Stream II is a detriment to Ukraine as a transit route to the E.U. And they believe that Moscow went ahead with the project in order to hurt Ukraine's economy ...
Russia's Gazprom is the largest natural gas producer in the world. Russia accounts for nearly a third of all natural gas imports into Europe and Germany is Russia's biggest client.
Other than Nord Stream II, Russia also has the Turkish Stream pipeline that it is building as yet another alternative to Ukraine. That pipeline is not yet sanctioned, but if Turkey and the U.S. tensions continue to worsen, Gazprom should suspect that partners in that one risk being fined by Treasury, too.
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The U.S. Department of Energy said today that Perry was invited by Novak after their meetings at the World Economic Forum in Davos this winter and the World Gas Conference in Washington, DC in July. Perry will also meet other Russian officials as well as oil and gas industry representatives.
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