dublinpilot wrote:
But this morning the EU is saying it’s not the right moment for sanctions.
Germany has blocked Northstream. The answer by Dimitry Medvedev (for whom the West used to have high hopes of replacing Putin eventually) was, ""welcome to a new world where Europe soon will have to pay €2000 per 1000 cubic meters of gas here
The question really remains, will this be all. Given the statements by Putin yesterday, it can’t be really. Putin said pretty much that Ukraine is not an independent state but a marionette of the West and therefore has no legitimation to exist. The only way he can change that is taking the whole country “Heim ins Reich”. The consequences of that will be massive.
And obviously if he does get away with this, then what will happen next? Baltic states anyone? Poland? He still has an axe to grind over Kaliningrad which is currently an enclave. Annexation of parts of Poland or Lithuania would change that.
[ broken URL cleaned up – please look at your posts after pressing Submit :) ]
Mooney_Driver wrote:
Germany has blocked Northstream.
I saw that this afternoon. The devil will be in the detail here.
It was reported here as “Germany Suspense Nord Stream 2 Pipeline”. I know newspaper headlines aren’t exactly reliable, but I read “Suspends” as much less significant than “scraps” or “abandons”. It really says to me “We’re not going to do in the next few months what wasn’t ready to be done in the next few months anyway. Hopefully by the time it will be ready, we’ll have this all sorted out”.
Likewise I read that the UK is “freezing” the assets of six Russians with the threat to expand it to others. Again “Freezing” is a lot less significant than “seizing” or “confiscating”. It at least suggests that they might be unfrozen once this is all over. Far better that they be seized and sold off, so that there is no hope of them getting them back. That would put a bigger fear in the others with assets at risk.
Too often we make the biggest possible threat but make the smallest possible bite.
dublinpilot wrote:
Too often we make the biggest possible threat but make the smallest possible bite.
Quite. And Putin has that figured out pretty darn well.
dublinpilot wrote:
It was reported here as “Germany Suspense Nord Stream 2 Pipeline”. I know newspaper headlines aren’t exactly reliable, but I read “Suspends” as much less significant than “scraps” or “abandons”.
Neither makes sense. The way I read it is that the way Germany handles it is that certification and ratification of the pipeline and therefore it’s use is suspended until such time where a solution to the current crisis is found. Nobody really wants to scrap it as both parties have tremendous amounts of money in it. The gist is: Russia can not sell us any gas via this pipeline until the situation is resolved. That time may be tomorrow or never. The idea is to punish Russia by shutting off the influx of currency for gas.
Only, Germany depends on Russia for gas, so the question will be how long can they keep that going without gas price going to explode. That is why Medvedev simply shruggs and says, your problem, not ours. Which of couse is not quite correct either, but yea, it is going to hurt both.
dublinpilot wrote:
Too often we make the biggest possible threat but make the smallest possible bite.
As far as I can tell that is how this kind of negotiations go. You ask for or demand loads more than you realistically can get and then try to get what you really want. For the moment, this also may be what Putin is doing, even though I doubt it. Right now, him seizing the russian controlled regions in Donbass and refraining from an all out invasion on Ukraine may have been what he has been after all the time but in order to get away with that, he threatens something very short of WW3.
The opposite side will do the same, threaten him with massive sanctions and implement them on the base of a full scale invasion and then ease off if he “only” goes for the Donbass provinces.
As this has become an energy supply thread, UK offshore windmill bases are being manufactured in China and delivered by Chinese ships. :-)
(Three bases per heavy lift vessel )
Mooney_Driver wrote:
Only, Germany depends on Russia for gas, so the question will be how long can they keep that going without gas price going to explode. That is why Medvedev simply shruggs and says, your problem, not ours. Which of couse is not quite correct either, but yea, it is going to hurt both.
Depends. Right now they seem to think that the Nord Stream 1 is going to be used, and all the extra gas to be sold to China & Turkey, if the second 2 is still not live.
Will that work? Who knows.
In the end that was one of the reasons why Gazprom built pipelines to China and Turkey… And continue expanding those.
The west is too sluggish, reactive and incremental. Our responses are not only minor, they are predictable and easily absorbed by Russia. Putin is able to continually adapt and dictate the next step because he never has to deal with anything surprising or anything that forces his hand.
To change the game we need to put Putin on the back foot. We need to do something drastic, something that makes him say to himself “Jeez, I wasn’t expecting that!”
Either:
1) Admit Ukraine to NATO overnight and deploy a serious military force. Not ‘military assistance’ but a major warfighting deployment – multiple armoured and infantry divisions along with the necessary air support. Stick the best trained and equipped military units in the world on the Ukrainian borders, facing off with the Russian conscripts, and then see what he does.
or
2) Arrest and deport every Russian from every EU and NATO country. Seize (not freeze) every last cent of their assets. Cut Russia off from every little bit of international trade and international cooperation. Make them like North Korea.
Those are the only two things that will make Putin go “Shiiiiiiiit………”
Graham wrote:
Arrest and deport every Russian from every EU and NATO country. Seize (not freeze) every last cent of their assets
I would guess for every Russian oligarch in the west there are a dozen or so dissidents Putin would send a welcome committee to arrest them…
The worst about this thing is that Putin has a point. The areas that have now declared “independence” are mostly culturally and linguistically Russian; the Crimea (which he already annexed) was originally Russia and became part of the Ukraine at a time when the border between Ukraine and Russia was merely an administrative boundary in the Soviet Union, with relatively little significance.
The big lesson of the 1938 Munich Agreement is that it is not a good idea to give in to a a power-hungry dictator, even if on occasion he has a valid point, as you are simply feeding the beast that does not stop when it runs out of valid points to make…
Peter wrote:
For CV19 there is obvious media control, to prevent publication of stuff like how to work around the DIY tests.
I can’t believe that. In which way? The work around is either totally obvious or there are no real benefits. Otherwise the web would be full of “articles” describing which three easy tricks to cheat on CV19 tests the government doesn’t want us to know.
It should be fairly simple to distinguish between the oligarchs and the dissidents and to treat the former much more harshly than the latter.
He may have a point on the history, but its largely irrelevant to what he’s doing and how we ought to react.
The problem is the democracies are too weak and feeble to use force to stop him, especially if he refrains from doing anything too outrageous too quickly. If Putin could discover the secret to eternal life then a hundred years from now he’d be calling our bluff on our willingness to defend Paris, having spent a century creeping west.
