Britannia Radio

A delicate dance with the Russian bear Europe should tread carefully now the ex-superpower holds sway via its resources, says Misha Glenny For 15 years, we heard barely a dying wheeze from the Russian bear although we could see by just looking that it was a very sick beastie. We saw plenty of individual Russians flaunting their newly acquired wealth (and in London, from where I write, the English establishment welcomed their cash with craven back and without enquiring too closely to its origins) but the state itself was virtually invisible. In August this year, however, it came roaring back onto the international scene, delivering a virtual knock-out blow to Georgia, its upstart neighbour in the Caucasus, in the space of a couple of days. Cue wailing Cassandras announcing the outbreak of a 'New Cold War', and predicting that the sore-headed animal will soon embark on an invasion of all its neighbours. Marshall Goldman - senior scholar at the Davis Center for Russian Studies at Harvard and an advisor to President Bush prior to the St Petersburg G8 summit in 2006 - is too experienced and knowledgeable to subscribe to the thesis of a New Cold War but he shares a lot of the New Cold Warriors' concerns about the nature of the Russia reinvigorated under Putin. Oilopoly explains the transformation of an erstwhile superpower that projected its might by military means into one that seeks to do the same by using its ownership of vast energy resources. But while Goldman's scholarship is unimpeachable and frequently extremely interesting (I would not want to put off anyone from reading this mercifully brief and taut book), he conveys a consistent impression that Putin's almost genetic inclination is to deploy his powerful tool in order to inflict damage on others. Like many American politicians since Reagan, Goldman warns Europe quite specifically against becoming over-dependent on Russian gas and oil. Putin and his entourage are perfectly capable of manipulating the supply of gas and oil for vindictive purposes. But by  page 1 of 2