With Ukraine in continued crisis and Moscow deflating under a crippled ruble, the European Union has begun scouring for non-Russian gas. Azerbaijan, in the gas-rich southern Caspian, should present a natural replacement.

But progress on the Trans-Adriatic Pipeline (TAP), one of the chief vehicles for moving Azeri carbon to eager European markets, has not advanced with the alacrity officials in the capital city of Baku had hoped. Environmental organizations and civil groups have pushed back at the planned pipeline—set to connect to the Trans-Anatolian Pipeline, which will help bring Azeri gas to southern Italy—by pointing to its threat to farmers and fragile marine habitats.

Instead of waiting to see whether the fracture between Moscow and Brussels would accelerate the pipeline’s construction, the consortium spearheading the project, including BP, turned to a familiar face: former British Prime Minister Tony Blair. The move, based on the scant information on the relationship available since the July announcement, comes with the presumption that Blair’s presence will smooth the pipeline's remaining obstacles. One senior official at Azerbaijan’s state-run gas company told this reporter Blair’s hiring brought “knowledge and expertise,” but offered scant detail. Perhaps that's because Blair’s presence seems gauged to help assuage continued concerns in working with one of the most notoriously authoritarian nations in the region.

This won’t be the first time Blair has helped to inflate Baku’s coffers. While prime minister, Blair helped guarantee the completion of the Baku-Ceyhan-Tbilisi pipeline, ending Russia’s chokehold on post-Soviet hydrocarbon transit. After leaving office, Blair continued to buff Baku’s image. In 2009, he gave a speech in Azerbaijan—for a price of nearly $150,000—to bless a new methanol plant. Rather than highlighting Baku’s backslide toward autocracy, Blair entirely ignored Azerbaijan’s rights clampdown at the time, and seems to have remained mute among calls to donate his fee to charity.

That was 2009, when Baku could tout some civil and media rights, and Blair could discuss Azerbaijan’s “very positive and exciting vision for the future” with some semblance of plausible deniability. Now Azerbaijan’s civil space, the room for dissent and democratic lobbying, has withered as quickly as any post-Soviet nation has seen in recent years, outpacing even Russia’s rate of repression in the years since. Journalists and human rights activists have been intensely harassed and savagely beaten. Political opposition stand imprisoned with little legal recourse. Even U.S. citizens haven’t proven immune to Baku’s bludgeon. The deterioration of civil and media space in Baku has gotten so bad that former U.S. State Department officials, including a former ambassador to Azerbaijan, have—despite Baku’s remarkable ability to find hacks willing to lobby on its behalf in American publications—begun publicly pushing for sanctions on Baku’s ruling claque.