US New & WR: Sanctioning Goliath: Why Russia's Gazprom Remains Out of Reach
Take a roll call of the Russian companies sanctioned in the wake of the Ukraine crisis, and there's a key name conspicuously absent: Gazprom, the billion-dollar oil and gas colossus that’s woven a web of subsidiary companies spanning the European continent.
“You’ve got this complex net running across Europe, which is why, I think, the Europeans were less willing to go along [with sanctions against Gazprom],” says J. Peter Pham, director of the Africa Center at the Atlantic Council. “They’re active in about roughly two dozen countries. They’re all over.”
Gazprom ranks as one of the largest extractors of natural gas and one of the biggest companies in the world – and it's mostly owned by the Kremlin. Widely seen as an arm of the Russian government, it's played a pivotal role over the past decade in the "near abroad" of former Soviet satellites, severing gas supplies to Ukraine over pricing disputes in 2006 and 2009. Last month, Russia again threatened supply disruptions over Ukraine's alleged billions in unpaid bills.