Will South Stream push EU off course?

Greece became the latest country to deal a blow to Nabucco, the gas pipeline favoured by the EU and the US, after it signed up to Russia's South Stream project, European Voice announced.
One by one, Russia is picking off the countries, which lie between the Black Sea and its main energy markets in Western Europe.
In January, it signed transit deals with Bulgaria and Serbia for sections of the planned South Stream pipeline, which is to bring Siberian naturan gas to Western markets. In February, Hungary signed up to the scheme. In mid-April, the chairman of Gazprom, Russia's state-owned energy giant visited Ljubljana to discuss Slovenia's possible participation. And yesterday (29 April), Kostas Karamanlis, the prime minister of Greece, was to finalise an agreement on his country's participation in South Stream with Russian Presiden Vladimir Putin in Moscow. It was Karamanlis's second trip to the Russian capital in less than five months and both visits revolved around energy co-operation.
If Nabucco aims to reduce the EU's increasing dependence on Russian energy, South Stream - together with its Baltic counterpart, Nord Stream - aims to diversify Russia's energy export routes, by cutting out potentially troublesome transit countries such as Turkey and Ukraine.

FOCUS Information Agency