Why Putin Is Using a Gas Line to Finance His Corrupt Regime The consequence of being cut off from the world’s largest and most dynamic economy is bad enough, but perhaps equally damaging is the pariah status associated with being on the wrong end of Washington’s Treasury Department. The massive tubes that stretch across Bulgaria, at first glance, appear benign. Traveling like an earthworm both beneath the soil and over land, the so-called Balkan Stream gas pipeline futilely tries to avoid drawing attention to itself. This pipeline, though, is not akin to an earthworm burrowing its way through the Balkans, but a snake