ANALYSIS-Gas row shakes Europe's trust in Russian energy

By Robin Paxton and Amie Ferris-Rotman

MOSCOW, Jan 21 (Reuters) - By cutting off gas supplies to Europe via Ukraine, Russia strengthened its case for new pipelines to bypass its ex-Soviet rival. But it may also have lost Europe's trust.

European consumers, left to shiver for two weeks when Moscow shut off their gas, will now accelerate plans to develop alternative fuels and build a regional gas supply network better equipped to withstand disruptions from the East, analysts said.

Moscow might also find its political influence waning in eastern Europe, the region worst affected by the crisis, as governments there look more to the European Union for support.

"There is a lot of bitterness around the way that Russia behaved over much of the last two weeks in failing to reach any sort of workable compromise," Julian Lee, senior energy analyst at the Centre for Global Energy Studies in London, told Reuters. "There is a real sense Gazprom behaved in a way designed to embarrass Ukraine, rather than to get the gas flowing again."

Russian gas started to reach Europe via Ukraine on Tuesday after the two sides signed a 10-year deal to end the dispute, which cut supply to about 20 European countries. [ID:nLK301311]

Gazprom (GAZP.MM), Russia's state-controlled gas export monopoly, attributes the cuts to Ukraine's inability to offer safe transit. But the dispute has raised doubts in the West over Russia's long-term reliability as an energy supplier.

"When the government should have been looking to integrate Russia and unite its strengths with those of other countries, Gazprom embarked on a large-scale confrontation," said Nikolai Petrov, political analyst at the Carnegie Moscow Center.

Russia supplies a quarter of Europe's gas needs and, in the short term, customers have few alternatives. Pipelines such as Nabucco, which aims to ship up to 31 billion cubic metres a year of Caspian region gas by 2020, bypassing Russia, don't have enough gas to fill them.