Petros Giannakouris/Associated Press
At a rally outside Parliament on Friday to protest the bailout terms, a Russian woman who lives in Cyprus held a sign written in Russian, English and Greek.
LIMASSOL, Cyprus — Andreas Marangos, a Porsche-driving lawyer here, had just woken up when he heard the news that threatened to destroy his and Cyprus's most lucrative business: setting up shell companies and providing financial services for wealthy Russians.
He rushed to his computer to check whether the "crazy talk" he had just heard was true — that his government had agreed last week to effectively confiscate 9.9 percent of the wealth of anyone holding more than 100,000 euros, about $129,000, in a Cyprus bank.
A week later, this Mediterranean island nation is still trying to figure out how to raise the $7.5 billion European lenders say it must have by Monday in return for a bailout. Late Saturday, the tentative plan was to seize a portion of all deposits above 100,000 euros, with the bite set at 20 percent for those banking with Cyprus's biggest bank.
For Mr. Marangos, either plan is bad news.
"Since last Saturday, we are just answering calls from angry clients," said the lawyer, whose firm has helped Russians and Ukrainians set up 6,000 companies in Cyprus so that they can avoid taxes, benefit from a sound legal system and, they hoped, keep their money safe. Cyprus still offers those draws, he insisted, but his clients "thought we had betrayed them."
Accusations of treachery, mostly aimed by poorer nations at Germany for demanding budget cuts and other painful steps in return for help, have become a regular feature of Europe's three-year-old debt crisis. But what began in Cyprus as just another episode in a now-familiar narrative of stingy, rich Northern Europeans versus put-upon, poor southerners has escalated into a bigger drama tinged with cold war-style language and strategic calculations involving not just money but also energy and even military power.
Cyprus had been haggling with Europe for months over a bailout deal to rescue its bloated banks. Last week, the initial plan to seize money from even modest bank depositors sent swarms of panicked residents to automated teller machines to try to withdraw their money. But the crisis involves more than financial considerations.
"There is a geopolitical game going on behind all this," Mr. Marangos said.
With just 860,000 people and a gross domestic product of only $23 billion, the Republic of Cyprus makes an unlikely strategic prize. But it sits atop a web of overlapping and potentially volatile fault lines — between East and West, the European Union and Russia, and Greece and Turkey, whose troops occupy the northern part of the island. It also has natural gas in the waters off its coast toward Israel. Nobody knows for sure yet how much — that may become clearer later this year when Houston-based Noble Energy carries out a new round of exploratory drilling.
But just the possibility of significant reserves has raised hope in Brussels, and fear in Moscow, that Cyprus could help break the European Union's dependence on Russian-supplied gas.
"There is a clear danger of this area becoming a platform for confrontation between East and West," said Harry Tzimitras, director of PRIO Cyprus Centre, a research center in the capital, Nicosia.
Cyprus has until now frozen out Russian interests from offshore gas concessions, snubbing a low bid by Novatek, a Russian company whose directors include Gennady Timchenko, a wealthy oil trader and judo club acquaintance of President Vladimir V. Putin's. In talks last week in Moscow over a possible loan to Cyprus, Russia made clear that it expected a piece of the gas pie for its own companies, according to Cypriot officials and politicians.
In Russia's view, Cyprus, which already has two British military bases, a legacy of the country's colonial past, would also be an ideal place to set up a small naval installation should the Kremlin lose access to Tartus, a Syrian port that risks being swamped by that nation's civil war.
The Moscow talks yielded no deal and dashed hopes that Russia might ride to the rescue. But many Cypriots still view Russia as a useful counterweight to bullying by Brussels. "We are not a Trojan horse for Russia in Europe, but we are trying to protect our interests like everyone does," said Petros Zarounas, a diplomatic adviser to the Democratic Party, part of the governing coalition.
According to a recent opinion poll by Cyprus's Sigma television, the public mood has turned decisively against Europe and toward Russia. More than two-thirds of those surveyed agreed that Cyprus should drop the euro and move closer to Russia because of the "behavior of our European partners." Protesters outside Parliament last week waved banners cursing the European Union and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany.
With Cyprus's banks closed for more than a week now, fear-driven rumors of secret deals and big power politics have become the main coin of the realm.
David M. Herszenhorn contributed reporting from Moscow, and Dimitris Bounias from Nicosia, Cyprus.
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