This commentary is by Tom Evslin of Stowe, an entrepreneur, author and former Douglas administration official. It is republished from the Fractals of Change blog.
According to this story in the WSJ, Germany will continue to buy gas and oil from Russia.
“Germany and Europe are too dependent on Russian energy imports for power, heating and industrial production to be able to cut trade links with Moscow in the short term,” Chancellor Olaf Scholz said in a statement.
Tom Evslin
“Europe’s supply of energy for heating, for mobility, for electricity generation and for the industry can’t be secured otherwise at the moment,” Mr. Scholz said. Russian energy, he added, was “essential for the daily lives of citizens.”
Scholz is not exaggerating Europe’s vulnerability. Why, then, hasn’t Putin responded by cutting off oil and gas to Europe or threatening to do so if NATO keeps arming Ukraine? He doesn’t hesitate to slaughter civilians or threaten nuclear war.
The only answer I can think of is that Russia can’t afford to lose the income from these sales. Russia is at least as dependent on this trade as Europe. If this is true, immediately cutting Russian oil and gas sales way back may be an effective way to get Russia the hell out of Ukraine.
Europe has no choice but to make emergency plans for doing without Russian fuel unless it intends to surrender if Putin cuts them off. But Europe needs massive help to turn the oil weapon against Putin. Helping them is our job here in the US. We need to share their pain by sharing — and increasing — our massive domestic supplies of oil, gas, and even coal. We must find a way not to be profiteers as the world price of fuels soars but instead to be the responsible suppliers of last resort.
With our tentative new-found unity and what we’ve learned of courage from the Ukrainians, we can do this. Ending European dependence on Russian fuels within months will be painful and difficult, but not nearly as painful and difficult as the defense of Kyiv. The Russian bear that hasn’t bitten yet tells us that Putin may have to fold once it is clear he isn’t getting this revenue to prop up his kleptocracy.
Putin gave a UN G? speech in 2007 in which he mentioned his friend Angela Merkel while denouncing unipolarity as opposed to nationalism. Also denounced NATO as a relic of another era but rightly believed it to be the military arm of the NWO and globalism, also mentioning dissolution of Warsaw Pact for the same reason. Was promised after fall of USSR NATO would not expand eastward and mentions this also.
Following insurrection using CIA assets and coup by western allies to take down a sitting president, and to end war which followed, promises were made to Russia and separatists and oh pls quit b!tch!ng about Crimea which has been handed back and forth…so if a Russian President can give it away Putin can take it back, they are ethnic Russians and voted to return btw. Ukraine failed to act on terms agreed to in 2014.
JoeBama – Hussein third term – directly enabled Russia to go in bc Dementia Joe and Hunter are compromised. Putin is creating a buffer to protect Russia. He wants east of Dnieper plus Odessa, ports and more than willing to hand the land-locked dregs to the Nazis and he will get it.
Too bad no one was listening when there was time to talk…ashamed of the idiot Democrats and their abject failures and can only hope for complete demise of the party of sexism, racism, atheism and child sexualization and babykilling for organ harvesting.
Putin is rearranging the chessboard and global map:
https://stateofthenation.co/?p=108385
Right you are, Wendy.
Great to see your name in these areas again.
Hear, hear! 😀
Yesterday, Deputy Victoria Nuland of the Department of State admitted to congress there were US funded bio labs in Ukraine. Previously, the US denied there were such facilities. Nuland also stated she felt Russia would use the bio hazards–admitting these were labs experimenting with dangerous pathogens. The timing of her admission and her opinion is interesting. You can search for the video of her testimony. It’s interesting.
Several non-MSM sources have reported that some of these US funded labs were working on bio weapons, and that Russia now has control of these sites, removed the pathogens and destroyed the facilities in most cases. These sources also say there were 11 labs overall, and that three were not destroyed due to the extreme hazards on site (anthrax and plague). With the West’s media black out will we ever know the truth? If it’s true Russia has secured these facilities, why haven’t they used these bio hazards as Nuland suggests?
Is it possible that these facilities represented a threat to Russia, which Putin aimed to extinguish in this invasion? Is Nuland’s testimony a pretext for the US and NATO to move ahead with the No Fly Zone which will trigger a Russian response? Is Nuland’s testimony giving Biden a context for involvement in this war?
I am not excusing the invasion of Ukraine. I am suggesting the fog of war is so dense that we may not know all of the factors for some time, and the true objectives of the Russians is still unknown.
The claim of biolabs making chemical weapons is part of a disinformation campaign by Russian and a tactic they have used before when making an invasion on territory it claimed in the neighboring country of Georgia.
Check out a report from Fox News on March 9:
https//www.foxnews.com/politics/russian-claims-is-biolabs-absurd
And you can verify this how? By a news article in the press that has been lying to us for years?
Russian propaganda works by playing on what people might want to believe. Many people feel so alienated from our current President that they would believe anything that puts him and his administration in a bad light.
The invasion of Ukraine is by a brutal tyrant who wishes above all else to restore the old boundaries of the Soviet Union. The heroic resistance of the freedom loving Ukrainian people makes believing Russian propaganda very difficult. Yet, it can be hard to break with our preconceived beliefs and desire to blame Biden and the Democrats for everything that is wrong.
However, the battle in Ukraine is bigger than our partisan differences. It is a fight between good and evil. Putin is lying to his own people and the rest of the world in a vain attempt to justify the death and destruction he is causing. We should be smart enough not to buy into his propaganda and support the valiant people of Ukraine along with the rest of the free world.
Watch Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland admit, under oath, during a Senate hearing on Tuesday, that there are biological research facilities in Ukraine that are under the control of the United States government.
https://twitter.com/shehzadyounis/status/1501300844649615362?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1501308361937096704%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es4_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fussanews.com%2Fconspiracy-theory-confirmed-state-department-admits-concern-over-russia-gaining-control-of-ukraines-bioweapons-labs%2F
Link predictably doesn’t open lol…Fox and many websites have ppl on both sides of issue so your allegation once again is more pure unadulterated bs…kindly get a life outside of littering and derailing all threads with your John Freitag/”Jim” sock roadshow of false information and narcissistic nuttiness.
Highly respected Fox news reporter Jennifer Griffin explained the Ukrainian biolab facts to host Sean Hannity on the Wednesday night on the “Hannity” show. She said, “It is a long program that has existed where the Pentagon has partnered with these biolabs. These were Soviet-era labs that — remember the Nunn-Lugar Bill and trying to deal with proliferation when the Soviet Union ended — that this is part of the effort to clean up those Soviet-era labs and make sure that nothing escapes from those labs. And so the U.S. has been very open about its involvement there with that. But what Russia does is they take that information, distort it, turn it around, and turn it into disinformation”.
The fact that some people in this country choose to believe propaganda put out by a corrupt ruthless KGB thug is indeed discouraging. God bless the Ukrainian people for being willing to stand up to him, and being willing to fight and die for their freedom.
Highly repected…by who…not me lol, she is a warmonger and is dishonest enough to need her carefully curated lies subject to an ongoing fact-check.
Hannity is also a warmonger…Fox fell from grace long ago and serve as state-sponsored stenographers for the deepstate war machine using half-truths and outright lies plus the anecdotal “human interest stories” as part of the concerted propaganda effort to bring us into WWIII.
It will happen but begins @ the Euphrates River. However I for one am not falling for any of this – the entire west and EU should be ashamed for giving false hopes to Ukrainian ppl and entirely corrupt Ukrainian government and pls stop calling it a “democracy” and frontpaging every tear…Ukrainians have been genociding Donbass separatists hence the “mass graves” – a well deserved description of the Nazis they are as Putin so accurately stated.
Trump can say “I told you so” to N.A.T.O.
EU and Germany have shot themselves in the feet by decommissioning
their Nuclear Reactors instead of rebuilding them. They can no more run
on glow and blow greentrd energy then we can. Now their stuck with
buying Nat gas and oil from Russia. Incidentally Russian extraction of oil
and gas has 30% more evil carbon foot print then the US so the greenie
weenies are REALLY sticking it to Gretta…(the child warm monger)
EU and Germany have shot themselves in the feet by decommissioning
their Nuclear Reactors instead of rebuilding them. They can no more run
on glow and blow greentard energy then we can. Now their stuck with
buying Nat gas and oil from Russia. Incidentally Russian extraction of oil
and gas has 30% more evil carbon foot print then the US so the greenie
weenies are REALLY sticking it to Gretta…(the child warm monger)
“The Russian bear that hasn’t bitten yet tells us that Putin may have to fold once it is clear he isn’t getting this revenue to prop up his kleptocracy.”
So Putin/Russia has no offshore accounts hidden from prying eyes and the Chinese have no resources to help him? And Putin never calculated for economic sanctions?
Do you really think the Russians are going to back down? They’re going to say, “OK Ukraine, you win, you beat the largest country on earth that’s nuclear armed, we give up, we’re going to let the West run over us and install NATO in Ukraine”?
Europe would just love to lose Russian energy, too.
US stopping Russian energy imports means nothing: we hardly get any energy from Russia.
I think sometimes we have these dreams that have no bearing on reality. The best outcome for Ukraine would be for the West to stop having these fantasies and realize that Russia (not just Putin) was serious when they said no NATO in Ukraine. So now we want to go up against a China/Russia alliance? Great, we’ll “fight to the last Ukrainian” and Ukraine will be destroyed and the West won’t dare to put boots or planes on the ground and threaten WWIII (or maybe they will, and after all the destruction we can “build back better.”) Afterwards everyone will say what a tragedy it was and wonder why farms have been bought up by Gates because farmers could no longer afford the fuel and fertilizer prices. Brilliant! Fight to the last Ukrainian!
Tom,
Germany adds a lot of goods and services value for every million Btu of pipeline gas it buys from Russia.
The pipeline gas is far more valuable to Germany and the rest of the EU, than it is to Russia, which has an abundance of gas.
Russia exports about 200 BILLION CUBIC METER PER YEAR of pipeline gas to Europe and Turkey, and about 100 bcm to China and India
Replacing 200 bcm/y, with LNG would require 38 UNLOADINGS AND REGASIFYINGS PER DAY.
The Germans, and lots of energy systems analysts, including myself, have figured out:
there are not enough terminals in Europe to achieve that
there are not enough LNG carriers to achieve that
their is not enough gas-extraction capacity to achieve that
SCREW europe. They had lots of time to get their S–it together instead they kowtowed to Karl Schwab and his NWO in the form of the covid and climate change BS. The EU leaders are appointed and not elected. Hell of a way to run one or several countries. Go ahead keep listening to the MSM hired by the government to puke forth propaganda. You know nothing about how Ukraine got its self into this situation by not complying with treaties and agreements it made. We should have gotten out of NATO long ago instead of picking up the lion’s share of the bills. Also the UN should be out of this country and that is another place we are pissing away money.
Re: “Ending European dependence on Russian fuels within months will be painful and difficult, …”
No, it won’t be difficult. It isn’t difficult.
In fact, we had already achieved this goal little more than a year ago. All we have to do, at least all that those who voted for Biden have to do, is admit their poor judgment, and tell Federal, State, and Local administrators to reinstate all of Trump’s policies, including but not limited to:
Reinstate the Keystone pipeline and bring back local energy production.
Reconsider the new technology in nuclear power.
Close the southern border. Build the wall.
Maintain Trump’s business deregulation and tax policies.
Keep Trump’s international trade deals.
Tell the European NATO folks to carry their own weight.
And stop catering to Russia, China, and Iran.
The difficulty rests with convincing our self-righteous neighbors to stop cutting off their noses to spite their collective face. If we don’t go back to these policies, we’ll not survive long enough to offset our contribution to climate change… or what’s left of it after all hell breaks loose.
Climate change is pseudoscience. There is no emergency.
Climate change isn’t pseudoscience. It’s the interpretation of the climate data that’s questionable. Whatever. My point is that the climate won’t matter if we continue on our existing path.
Jay, thank you for all your wise commentary. It’s appreciated by many. And you are right it’s not hard to revert to the policies that gave us energy independence just 18 months ago. Energy independence was a “peace through strength” move.
What I find most shocking in the last two days is the over-the-top gaslighting and lies by Biden and his administration. He’s telling us he’s all for energy independence and he’s not stopping US energy extraction, etc…as his words do not reflect his actions. But the reality is that he is offering up both the people of Ukraine and the US economy as lambs for slaughter to the “climate crisis” religion.
Thankfully, his poll numbers show the majority of Americans are not buying Ole Joe’s BS anymore.