Leaders of the G8 countries — the United States, Britain, Japan, Germany, France, Italy, Canada and Russia — will gather in St. Petersburg over the weekend for their annual summit. In the beautiful city, which Emperor Peter the Great founded in 1703 as his "window on the West," Russian President Vladimir Putin will preside over the event as chairman. The occasion will provide him with a chance to prove that Russia is a full-fledged member of the Group of Eight, which grew out of the G7 group of leading industrialized nations from the former Western bloc.
Achieving such lofty international status has been a dream for Russia since it first joined the summit in 1997, attending political discussions. In this year's summit, Mr. Putin hopes to impress upon both domestic and international audiences the worthiness of Russia. But the meeting comes at a time when critics are looking at Russia with suspicious eyes due to its conduct at home and abroad.
Russia is now the world's top producer of natural gas and No. 2 oil producer. Mr. Putin wants to use these energy resources as leverage to attain the economic and political goals he has set for Russia. Moscow typically demonstrated its strategy when it agreed in 2002 to form an "energy partnership" with the U.S. Earlier this year, Russia cut off its natural gas supply to Ukraine in an attempt to break a stalemate in price negotiations with the former Soviet republic. The forceful nature of this action raised international concerns. Subsequent cuts in energy deliveries to Western European countries, which rely on Russia for a considerable portion of their natural-gas supplies, made these nations aware of their vulnerability to Moscow. At the same time, however, Russia's action backfired in that it damaged its reputation for reliability as a main energy supplier.