Stage set for Putin to host G8 summit

When Vladimir Putin hosts a lavish banquet for G8 leaders tomorrow night, his high-powered guests will find it hard not to be bowled over by the splendour of the surroundings.

With its landscaped gardens, myriad fountains and graceful channels that run out to the sea, Petrodvorets, an imposing eighteenth century palace, is Russia's Versailles.

Its imperial grandeur (it was personally designed by Tsar Peter the Great) will be laden with symbolism.

If the world's political elite needs a reminder that Russia is no longer the basket case it was in the 1990s Petrodvorets is it.

During the Second World War the Nazis reduced the palace to smoking ruins: sixty years later it is as good as new, rebuilt, and lovingly restored with Russia's oil millions.

Mr Putin has undergone a similar renaissance.

When he took over as president from Boris Yeltsin at the end of 1999, he was derided as a dour former KGB officer who wouldn't last.

He inherited a country choked with foreign debt that had fought and lost a brutal war in Chechnya and whose standing on the world stage was at its lowest level for seventy years.

Butwhen Mr Putin gets to his feet on Saturday to make a toast, he will hold forth with the swagger of a man who knows he is holding all the cards.

He may not have been able to resurrect the Soviet Union whose demise he once lamented but he has created an energy superpower whose voice is again important.

And he has placed the issue of energy security at the heart of the summit agenda.

Russia is the world's second biggest oil producer after Saudi Arabia, Europe buys over a quarter of its gas from Russian suppliers, and Russia's nuclear industry is expanding rapidly even building power stations for foreign governments including, controversially, Iran.

In the run-up to the summit Mr Putin has delighted in reminding the Western media just how energy-rich his country his.

Russia's proven oil and gas reserves are four times greater than the hydrocarbon wealth of the seven other G8 members combined.

And with world oil prices so high, Mr Putin's canny strategy is to build more and more nuclear power stations so that more of the country's oil and gas can be sold at a premium abroad.

He wants forty new nuclear reactors to be built on top of the existing 29 reactors.

Nor is Russia's 'soft' energy power a flash in the pan - it is set to grow exponentially and Western diplomats openly admit that Europe will become more dependent on Russia to keep the lights on with every year.

Gazprom, Russia's state energy behemoth, is building a North European gas pipeline to Germany due for completion in 2010 while an oil pipeline that will be the world's longest when finished is being constructed to supply China.

Russia's renaissance has forced the West to change its approach -- in the past world leaders didn't think twice about criticizing Mr Putin's controversial democratic credentials but in a sign of Russia's economic clout democracy is not even on the official summit agenda.

As a boy Mr Putin lived in a rat-infested communal apartment in St Petersburg.

On Saturday he will host the world's most powerful leaders in a Tsarist-era palace and demand a level of respect that Russia has yearned for but not got since the Soviet collapse in 1991.



- INDEPENDENT