As Russia and Belarus sought to blame each other on Monday over the suspension of oil supplies through the northern leg of the Druzhba oil pipeline to Poland and Germany, Europe might well have paused to take stock of its own share of responsibility for the latest threat to its energy security. 

For, as charge and counter-charge flies between Moscow and Minsk over who is really to blame for the current debacle, the fact is that Europe has done next to nothing in recent years to produce a coherent response to Vladimir Putin’s increasingly authoritarian regime in Russia and far too little to tame Alexander Lukashenko’s brutal dictatorship in Belarus.