The Belarus Connection: Exporting Russian Gas to Germany and

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Poland

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Stanford Institute for International Studies

2004

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INTRODUCTION

In the early 1990s the giant Soviet enterprise of Gazprom began work on a new project to export

gas across Belarus to Poland and Germany. Close examination of this project offers crucial

insights into the potential for Russia’s future gas exports because it was the first (and so far only)

large new Russian gas pipeline project constructed after the dissolution of the CMEA system and

the Soviet Union. The Russian government envisions that total gas exports to Western Europe will

rise to 200 billion cubic meters (bcm) per year by 2020 (up from about 130 bcm today); whether and

how such ambitions are realized depends on the practical experiences with this project—the first

constructed in an era where markets have played a larger role than state-controlled financing in

determining the size and route of pipelines.