It is the world's longest pipeline, built during the Soviet era, and its official name is Druzhba, meaning Friendship.

But given the nasty trade dispute between two former Soviet republics, which has disrupted refined oil and gas supplies to Europe, it could be renamed the Brinkmanship pipeline.

At stake is the reliability of energy supplies from Russia flowing through Belarus to Europe. Also in question is the government of Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko, referred to by the United States as Europe's last dictator...

According to Anatol Lieven, a senior research fellow at the Washington-based public-policy institute New America Foundation, Moscow is trying to redress an economic and political imbalance with Belarus.

"Basically, if you come down to it, the basic point is that Russia, ever since the end of the Soviet Union, has been massively subsidizing several of its neighbours, really massively," he said.

But there's more to it than that. Mr. Lieven said that for a long time Mr. Lukashenko was viewed virtually as Russia's puppet.

"That was not quite true, at least not in the way it was widely assumed in the West. Lukashenko was not a Russian loyalist but a Soviet loyalist, and bitterly anti-Western. But his idea of an alliance with Russia was not Belarus simply being a Russian region."

Mr. Lukashenko has been resisting the Kremlin's efforts to control Belarussian industry through Russian companies, Mr. Lieven said...

Mr. Lieven wonders whether Moscow's pressure on the Lukashenko regime is part of an effort to unseat him.

"Is this all part of a wider Russian plan to get rid of Lukashenko? Do they have an alternative candidate? Have they decided that someone else among the Belarussian elites would be less embarrassing to them with the West and more subservient to Russian interests?.."

For the complete article, please visit The Globe and Mail website.