17:0927/10/2009
TALLINN, October 27 (RIA Novosti) - The Estonian parliament on Tuesday expressed serious concern over the possible environmental fallout from the Nord Stream gas project and said it should not be allowed to go ahead.

The Nord Stream pipeline, which will carry gas from Russia to Germany under the Baltic Sea, bypassing Poland, Belarus and Ukraine, is being built jointly by Russia's Gazprom, Germany's E.ON Ruhrgas and BASF-Wintershall, and Dutch gas transportation firm Gasunie with an estimated price tag of $12 billion.

Estonian MPs said in particular that the project's developers "failed to take into account the specifics of the Baltic Sea as a sensitive ecosystem."

"The Finnish government will make a decision in early November on the passage of Nord Stream in its economic area," said Vanhanen after meeting with Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in Saint Petersburg.

This is because the Nord Stream project is part of an exclusionary agreement between Moscow and Berlin—nicknamed in circumvented Warsaw the "Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact," after the 1939 Soviet-Nazi deal to carve up Poland. It would have been much cheaper to build an overland pipeline through Eastern Europe, but the purpose of Nord Stream from the beginning was to bypass countries Moscow still considers to be part of its sphere of influence.

Russia's geopolitical message here is clear: It doesn't trust the new EU member states as transit countries or even as energy consumers and is willing to incur enormous costs to bypass them. The other message—or implied threat—is that Nord Stream will allow the Kremlin to cut off gas deliveries to Eastern Europe through current pipelines without reducing energy supplies to Germany. But what sort of message does Germany, a fellow EU member, intend to send to its neighbors?