Al Jazeera: Does Europe need the Tsar pipeline?
On the 70th anniversary of D-Day, three US senators landed on European soil in a decisive move to stop the Russian energy import advance. Their publicised destination was a conference in Poland. The real battle senators John McCain, Ron Johnson and Christopher Murphy fought was further south.
It took them a few hours, in a joint operation with the European Commission, to twist the arm of the Bulgarian government, which on June 8, announced that it was stopping the highly controversial South Stream gas pipeline. The next day, Serbia also said that it was halting the project. Once the senators flew back, the Serbian and the Bulgarian governments said that they had not exactly stopped the project. The story is dragging on and on.
South Stream is expected to cross the Black Sea, bypassing Ukraine, to deliver up to 63 billion cubic metres of natural gas to Europe each year. The project has always been a thorn in the eye of all concerned about the high dependency of Europe on Russian energy imports. After Moscow's annexation of Crimea, the geopolitical anxiety turned into a determined effort to kill the project.