Asian "Energy Players" and Their Role in the Balkan Energy Strategy

The development of the political processes in the countries of Central Asia, the Caspian Sea and Caucasian regions have always been dynamic and difficult to predict. These processes characterize the last 20 years with escalating dynamism, starting with the disintegration of the ex Soviet Union and origination of a number of sovereign countries. So in time an enormous in dimensions political geographical region was formed, including the lands from the Persian Gulf to the Ural and from the Caucasus to the Pamir Mountains, a region with a very large energy and geopolitical potential. In the conditions of constantly growing deficiency of energy resources, inevitably here were concentrated the attention and interests of the world-wide (USA, Russia, China) and regional (Turkey, Iran) players on the “Big chess-board”, as Zb. Brzezhinski successfully called them (1997).