Berlin | The deepening crisis surrounding Moscow’s opposition to NATO membership for Ukraine has left the future of energy giant Gazprom’s contentious $15 billion pipeline project to pump natural gas from the Russian Arctic to western Europe hanging in the balance.

US and Russian officials are set to hold high-stakes talks in Geneva this week in a bid to head off an escalation of the crisis amid Western fears that Moscow is planning a multi-front offensive against Ukraine, three decades after the implosion of the Soviet empire. Russian President Vladimir Putin once described the loss of Ukraine as a “geopolitical catastrophe”.