Energy Factor in Russian-Italian Political Relations

Russia and Italy are the states, which historically have had close connections in cultural, economic, political, military and trade spheres. The cause of such a rapid development of the bilateral relations is the energy cooperation: oil and gas supplies from the USSR to Italy on beneficial terms created favorable atmosphere for the expanding of economic ties in other sectors. Nowadays, in the period of complicated relations of Russia with Western countries, sanctions and economic crisis in Russia, the role of the energy cooperation remains critical, and the topic of energy factor as an instrument of political pressure is extremely relevant for the bilateral diplomatic relations. The goal of this paper is the analysis of the dependency of Russian-Italian political relations on the cooperation in the energy sector. This thesis discusses the history of political and energy cooperation of Russia and Italy and proves that dependency of Italy on the supplies of Russian energy is the important influential factor, determining the general policy of Italy in respect to Russia, which is frequently contrary to the general purposes of the European Union.