March 5, 2008
Vladimir Socor, European Daily Monitor, The Jamestown Foundation
Vladimir Socor is a Senior Fellow of The Jamestown Foundation and a regular contributor to Eurasia Daily Monitor. He is one of the foremost experts on NATO enlargement, as well as political, diplomatic and energy affairs in the Baltics, Belarus-Ukraine-Moldova, the South Caucasus and the Caspian.
He also covers Russian and Western policies, security and military issues and inter-ethnic conflict in the former Soviet Union. Mr. Socor is a frequent guest lecturer at Harvard University’s National Security Program at the Kennedy School of Government and a member of the Euro-Atlantic Security Study Group, sponsored by NATO PFP’s Consortium of Defense Academies and Security Studies Institutes. For the past five years, he has written a fortnightly op-ed column in the Wall Street Journal Europe. Previously, he was a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Strategic & Political Studies (IASPS) in Washington—sole author of the IASPS Policy Briefings: Strategic Perspectives on Eurasia, for international distribution by subscription. He also worked for many years at the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Research Institute. Mr. Socor is a U.S. citizen and currently lives in Munich, Germany.
Gazprom’s blitzkrieg capture of five European Union member countries for its South Stream project, preempting the EU- and U.S.-backed Nabucco project, has shattered the credibility of Brussels’ and Washington’s energy security agendas. Country after country (excepting the lone holdout, Romania) have succumbed to the Kremlin-backed project because the Western one had neither gas resources, nor investment funds to offer after five years of efforts to obtain them.