Russia cuts oil across Belarus

MOSCOW — Russia shut off crude-oil supplies Monday that flow by pipeline across Belarus to Germany, Poland and other parts of Eastern Europe, charging that the Minsk government was illegally siphoning off oil meant for the other countries.

The dispute between two erstwhile allies will have little immediate effect because the end-customer countries have strategic reserves for at least two months. But it is rekindling discussion in Europe about the reliability of Russia as a supplier of energy.

"This shows us once again that arguments among various countries of the former Soviet Union, between suppliers and transit countries, mean that these deliveries are unreliable from our perspective," Poland's deputy economy minister, Piotr Naimski, said. Poland has long been suspicious of Russia's dominance of energy supplies on the continent.

Belarus, led by authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko, has poor relations with the United States and Western Europe. It is unlikely to garner the kind of international sympathy that Ukraine, for example, enjoyed when Russia cut off its natural gas in a pricing dispute last January.

The convulsions over Russia's pricing of energy supplies to its neighbors also extend to Azerbaijan, which announced Monday that it had halted the export of oil to Russia. Officials said they planned to divert the oil to power stations to replace Russian natural gas.

Russia doubled the price of natural gas for Azerbaijan on Jan. 1, but the country refused to accept the rate of $230 per 1,309 cubic yards, the price that Western European countries pay.

The disputes with Belarus and Azerbaijan, after Russian confrontations with Ukraine and Georgia, are likely to give new urgency to efforts in parts of Europe to diversify the supply chain and reduce dependence on Russia, one of the continent's most important suppliers. In 2004, it provided about 27 percent of the oil consumed in the European Union, according to the bloc.

For years, Russia and Belarus have been bound together by Moscow's provision of cheap energy in return for political loyalty. But the Kremlin appears to have tired of subsidizing Lukashenko, whose government could face an economic crisis brought on by higher energy costs.

The two countries have flirted with the idea of forming a political union, but Russia is interested only in absorbing Belarus as just another province, while Lukashenko has insisted on a union of equal states, an idea the Kremlin finds ludicrous.

The European Union's energy commissioner, Andris Piebalgs, said he wanted an "urgent and detailed explanation" as to why the pipeline carrying Russian crude was closed. European officials said Germany has enough oil in reserve to last 130 days, and Poland has enough for 70 days.

Russian officials said they were examining ways of rerouting oil. The network crossing Belarus also supplies the Czech Republic, Hungary, Lithuania and Slovakia.