Last week AUK students of Global Management program had an opportunity to discuss energy security issues with the respectful guest speaker, Ambassador Réka Szemerkényi, renowned energy policy expert, Senior Advisor in Transatlantic Strategy of the International Republican Institute, former Hungarian Ambassador to the US, at the online meeting dedicated to the topic "The EU Energy Policy in the Context of the EU-Russia Crisis."
While explaining the most recent developments around the Nord Stream pipeline Dr. Szemerkenyi stressed: “Energy security now is clearly at the forefront of all discussions in Europe, as a result of the pipelines' explosions. One of the strategic shifts that these attacks highlight is a fundamental shift in the EU's understanding of energy security. What we could see until now was often a series of so-to-say "parallel discussions" in which the Eastern and the Western parts of Europe were talking past each other, showing very different readings of reality.
The Eastern Europeans kept raising the challenges and risks of energy security, but representatives of the Western part of the EU seemed not to understand these concerns. Or even more – they were outright claiming that these concerns are unfounded. And now, as a result of the developments of the last few months, several top leaders of Germany for example have publicly stated that they should have listened to their Central-Eastern European colleagues regarding Russia.”
We are highly thankful to Ambassador Reka Szemerkenyi for her insights and profound talk with AUK students as well as Mark Voyger, Program Director of Global Management AUK for organizing the meeting.
Dnipro
