Letters | Russia’s energy reserves have brought it closer to both China and Europe

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An employee checks a gas valve at the Atamanskaya compressor station in the Amur region of Russia of November 29. Photo: Reuters

Published: 12:20am, 16 Dec 2019Updated: 10:08am, 16 Dec 2019

If someone invents a product it may sooner or later be cloned in other countries. China no longer has a monopoly on gunpowder, silk or blue and white porcelain. A natural resource is a different matter.

Flying as a student between Siberia and St Petersburg, I often thought my country was like an archipelago in the cold subarctic region we call taiga. Our playwright Anton Chekhov wrote: “The power of the taiga and our fascination is not due to gigantic trees or sepulchral silence but because perhaps only migratory birds know where it ends.”

Perhaps, but they are not alone, as I often see in the taiga a concrete stake with a stern inscription by geologists – the only professionals in Russia, along with the army and the police, allowed to carry firearms against predators – that it’s a government property and must not be removed.

Naturally whatever they find is top secret till that resource, which can bring former adversaries together, is developed (“American isolationism is drawing China and Russia closer together”, December 8).

So Russia may be an archipelago and one that has finally begun trading in earnest with two great land masses at its borders: Europe and China. Our pipelines are the shape of things to come.

Mergen Mongush, Moscow

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Letters | Russia’s energy reserves have brought it closer to both China and Europe