Left aside

Looking at the history of Russia in the past two centuries, we can see, besides other things, a relentless effort to build an empire. What form does this effort take in today's world? Russia just needs to preserve its neighbours' dependency on its fossil fuels and, when those start running out, on electricity from new nuclear stations. Russia wants to build at least 10 of them and export the power.

Today, the Czech Republic has a rather prominent position, being a transit country for some 40% of natural gas imported to Germany. If the gas lines took another route, this would diminish our influence on the European economy.

But which way will oil and gas lines lead in 10 or 20 years? Russia's energy strategy is completely straightforward: It aims at reducing the transit role of three countries that Russia views as unreliable and gradually defying its control – Belarus, Ukraine and Poland. The Russian plans would also affect the Czech Republic, as the Belarusian and Ukrainian branches now stretch across Slovakia and the Czech Republic farther west.

In the future, the network map of the gas lines is slated to change considerably. One of the routes, the Nord Stream, is to run to Germany on the Baltic Sea bed, directly connecting two countries that – as the philosopher Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev observed – traditionally have very above…