LIKE a blast from the past, President Putin of Russia raged yesterday against Western efforts to frustrate his country’s global ambitions.

“We are being blocked to the north, the south and the west on any pretext,” he said before a meeting with Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, in Tomsk, Siberia.

The remarks could have been made by any number of his Tsarist predecessors. Russia’s fear of being boxed in by enemies real or imagined goes back centuries to Peter the Great, the first Russian leader with ambitions to extend the reach of Russia’s imperial arm.

The Tsar’s ambition was year-round ice-free ports with access to the ocean. Mr Putin has a similar approach to Russian commercial ambitions. He wants export routes so that his energy champions Gazprom and Rosneft can build commanding positions in Western markets. Hence the Kremlin’s support for a gas pipeline across the Baltic, a project of dubious economic value, and its ten-year struggle to stop the construction by BP of an oil pipeline from the Caspian Sea to Turkey, because it avoids Russian territory.

The Russian President’s strategic world view of bridge-heads and global positioning sits uneasily in the polite world of level playing fields and carefully constructed competition inhabited by European business regulators.

It is all bluff and bluster — Mr Putin’s implied threat to shift exports to China if Europe refuses to do business on the Kremlin’s terms is incredible. Russia has no pipelines, oil or gas, linking Siberia with China. Work is only just starting on the first leg of an oil pipeline from Angarsk in Eastern Siberia to Nakhodka, near Vladivostok. Years of shadow-boxing between China and Russia over a gas pipeline have only recently turned into hard negotiations, but no deal is yet in sight.

For the next five to ten years, at least, Europe is the only game in town for Russian energy exporters, but Mr Putin’s complaint should be taken seriously because it reveals his brand of strategic thinking.

It is consistent with comments from Alexei Miller, Gazprom’s chief executive, and a recent suggestion by the head of Transneft, the Russian state oil pipeline monopoly, that Europe is “overfed with oil,”.

Behind the bluster lies the fear that Russia will miss out on the opportunity afforded by high energy prices to gain market share and bind European customers to Russia with long-term contracts.

Contracts and pipelines would protect Russia from an inevitable collapse in gas and oil prices.

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