ABSTRACT
The Soviet period left a legacy of dependency in the former Soviet area, and nowhere is this dependency more clearly seen than in the case of energy. Indeed, Ukraine’s and Belarus’s degree of dependency on Russian oil and gas has remained very high since 1991.1 This reliance on Russian energy is largely due to structural factors since both countries depend almost entirely on Russian energy for domestic consumption: there are no pipelines connecting these countries directly to other energy producers, and alternative supplies must be transported through Russia. Both states also depend on Russian capital and sales markets, and businesses in Ukraine and Belarus are tied to Moscow business structures and Soviet-era personal networks. Additionally, the Ukrainian and Belarusian economies retain strong links to Russia in other critical areas, such as metallurgy and heavy machine building.
