It'd also hit Europe very hard. Natgas is like a third of European electricity generation and much of the heating. Europe has supplies for the winter but if the conflict is extended and the embargo maintained, millions of Europeans would be under heat rationing and rolling blackouts beyond 2022. It wouldn't be a humanitarian disaster with some planning but it's certainly not going to be popular, nor particularly good for the economy.
It's not that there isn't sufficient natgas to offset most of the Russian production. The LPG terminals, pipelines and other infrastructure required for that doesn't exist yet, and even if we started crash construction projects today they wouldn't be online in time to prevent a disruption. That said, such construction clearly needs to start anyway.
Europe isn't able to do such quick emergency projects anymore. The environmental review to see what kind of salamander's might be woken up by the digging would take years alone.
Events like a war going on in Europe can change such policies. We have a madman at the door and continuing to finance his war makes us co-responsible. It is the least painful option anyway (the other being letting him to realize his goals of resetting Europe to pre-1997 state as he stated in his recent speech, or direct military conflict with NATO that nobody wants for obvious reasons - and in both cases, climate change would be the least of our worries).
The West is looking for ways to impose effective sanctions. Investing in increased trade between the US and Europe which also hits Russia seems like a promising approach.
Russia is obviously geographically closer than the US to Europe. Once an investment is made and the infrastructure built, to what extent could American natgas compete with Russian on price if there is a return to normalcy?
US exported LNG can't compete with pipeline gas from Russia on price, nor on volume.
There is no answer, unfortunately, in US LNG exports to Europe. That's merely a very small bandaid on a serious energy wound. It's impossible to push US LNG exports high enough to offset the pipeline supply from Russia, no matter what we do.
At best it can relieve a bit of the pricing pressure while Europe figures out something else (nuclear, bolstering their own natural gas production, increased renewables).
If the us could feasibly supply the gas via LNG at cost then I’d imagine it would have been done.
The best bet would be for all energy suppliers to max production, however there is good evidence that that is already the case due to preexisting energy shortages.
Next step would be shutting down energy intensive operations such as bitcoin mining, gold mining, driving, potentially some steel production and shipping activities.
That is why it is only being contemplated in response for a brutal and unprovoked invasion of a sovereign country. It wasn't contemplated lightly. And Putin flagrantly leverages this power over Europe... paying for the privilege of enriching a neighbor that has now made it clear is your determined enemy is less unpopular than you may realize.
It's a pity, but what else we can do to stop the agression? As an European, I'm ready to bear the costs if it will help to stop the agression and the war. Spring is coming and it should be enough time to prepare for the next winter.
indeed. my point was that diplomacy has seriously failed here, all sides share in that responsibility. yes russia is inside ukraine, but there are broader answers to the question "what else can we do"
Instead, the clearest understanding of Putin’s complaints about NATO is that they are reflections of his real fears, but that as diplomatic negotiating tools, they were red herrings, designed to create exactly the sort of smokescreen that some media personalities worked to create and exploit domestically. The ‘tell’ here in many ways were the initial demands, which amounted to rolling back NATO positions to pre-1997 status; such demands would be utterly unacceptable to NATO countries (like Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and Poland) who would thus be left outside NATO’s line of protection. Putin – and the Russian Foreign Ministry – knew those demands were obvious non-starters, that’s why they made them – presumably to generate that smokescreen and to try to divide NATO internally. But the demands themselves were never serious, as Putin’s actions this week prove.
----
The "promise Ukraine won't join NATO" demand was not made in good faith and conceding it would not have mattered.
this guy claims not to be an expert on the matter, admits his bias against russia, and then proceeds to talk as though he is an expert on russia and ukraine (there are significant factual mistakes and ommissions in the link above). i would be hesitant to cite this as the "clearest understanding"
This is called the appeasement option, and it notably historically hasn't worked on unhinged psychopaths with a proclivity for imperial conquest. Putin is conducting an invasion of a country on the basis (according to him) that they are Nazis and drug dealers who are effecting a genocide. Even if he doesn't actually believe this, the gaslighting evidences his psychopathy.
that reminds me of Canada, which was in a state of martial law over a nazi insurrection of its parliament. of course, they werent nazis, but theyre in jail now just the same. its just never been fashionable for the western media to demonize canada the way it has "the communists"
This argument makes no sense from a logical viewpoint.
NATO is a defensive union. The only reason to fear it is if you’re planning to invade other nations. Putin ostensibly should have no reason to fear NATO expansion unless he has ill intent.
And if the argument is: yes, it is defensive now, but it might turn offensive against Russia at some point. Well, for that you just need an alliance of countries, it does not need to be NATO. A group of countries comprised of NATO and non-NATO members can gang up against Russia any time they want, without any NATO involvement.
I believe Putin only says this because he wants to keep invading other countries on the table as an option, and that is precisely the reason to keep expanding NATO.
If NATO is a defensive union please name one defensive war it was involved in. You’re right, none, s as opposed to 20+ aggressions NATO states have been involved in.
Afganistan was the only time Article 5 was used and you can disagree, but yes that was a defensive war. One with an occupation that lasted way too long, but that's a different story.
Taliban weren't friendly with Al-Qaeda, and attempted to surrender in the first week of the war. In the first month of the war, its alleged target ObL decamped to Pakistan. After a decade, someone somewhat resembling ObL who had been living under close Pakistani military supervision a mile from PMA Kakul was allegedly murdered as a campaign event for BHO's reelection, although no corpse was ever examined. After another decade, NATO forces left Afghanistan with tails between legs, while experts assured us that the "government" they had installed would last several years. Realists assumed that meant it would last several months, but even we were surprised when that actually meant several hours.
It seems "way too long" somewhat understates this. There is no sense in which this was a defensive war, and if this were as you say the only thing NATO ever did (perhaps something might have happened in Kosovo?) then that is a complete indictment of NATO.
Jess you can disagree, but at the time of this writing this is what one of the introductory paragraphs of the war's Wikipedia states:
> Following the September 11 attacks in 2001, then-US President George W. Bush demanded that the Taliban, then-de facto ruling Afghanistan, extradite Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of the attacks and who was, until then, freely operating within the country. The Taliban's refusal to do so led to the invasion of the country; the Taliban and their al-Qaeda allies were mostly defeated and expelled from major population centers by US-led forces and the Northern Alliance.
Taliban and aQ were "allies" in the sense that they both fought against Northern Alliance. aQ were (are?) foreigners to Afghanistan, only welcomed by locals they regularly paid, which included some Taliban. Taliban, who themselves were not a monolith, were happy to receive weapons and training from aQ, but it wasn't out of love. It made political sense for American war media to blur the lines between them, but by now we know never to trust what we're told in the first few weeks of a new war.
Did someone in Bush's administration ask some Taliban poobah for ObL, at some time before the invasion? Probably! That would have been like asking for a unicorn pony. They didn't have him in custody, and they weren't going to be arsed to engage in whatever deadly combat would have been required to get him in custody. Unlike today, at that time Taliban weren't really a national ruling entity. They ran the courts and the tollways in some of the populated parts of Afghanistan. ObL was holed up in the hills somewhere. USA military didn't have a great deal of luck digging him out either, once they gave it a try.
The proportional action would have been to occupy only those parts of Afghanistan in which one could reasonably imagine ObL had hidden, and hire both Taliban and Northern Alliance to provide security on the condition they not fight each other while USA troops were around. It's not as though Taliban had created aQ, our supposed ally Saudi Arabia did that. Taliban, just like everyone else in Afghanistan, would have been perfectly happy for aQ not to have escaped Sudan.
Somehow the goof troop that got us fighting a war in Iraq also screwed up the operation in Afghanistan. At this point that can't be a surprise to anyone. But you're talking about mistakes made leading up to and in the first several weeks of the occupation. The point of this thread is the following two decades of pointless brutality.
Al-Qaeda are foreigners, yes, but that was because of their very founding as a force of volunteers to help the Afghans during their war with the Soviets. They were trained by the Americans as part of the cold war, but their real friends were the Taliban and everybody knew it. You can say "they weren't going to be arsed to[...]" but the reality is that they were close friends. If they weren't, the Taliban could have easily retained power by inviting the Americans in to aid their capture.
As for why Nato stayed so long in Afghanistan, it is difficult to imagine now, but 20 years ago we had just won a giant string of wars and in most of them democracy was installed and life got better for everyone. We tried to make it work in Afghanistan too, but it didn't work for a multitude of reasons.
Anyway, with respect, I was talking about Article 5 and the defensive alliance that is Nato. Countries within Nato can choose to go to war outside of A5, but they are only compelled to help under it.
Sure, USA created these groups in order to undermine Afghanistan's existing government that was sympathetic to Moscow. Astute observers note the similarity to USA creation of e.g. "Right Sector" in Ukraine.
Taliban did offer to turn over ObL, and this was known by the public at the time. [0] This may not have been such a realistic offer, given the hiding-in-caves-with-lots-of-guns aspect mentioned above, but they tried to do exactly what you advise and it didn't work. Maybe they learned a lesson about how USA policy is entirely controlled by the military-industrial complex through the sockpuppet war media?
Let's ignore mistakes made over twenty years ago. We could have withdrawn at any time over that twenty years, so I'm more complaining about the mistake made every minute since then.
The point of the thread is that NATO is not "defensive". You offered as a counterexample, NATO's war in Afghanistan. If that's all you've got, we can conclude that NATO is indeed not defensive in nature.
Last comment because, well, I've learned to limit how much I go back and forth on these types of things.
First, even the article you liked didn't offer to turn over Bin Laden. It offered a discussion, asked for proof, etc. This isn't how international relations with a super power that's just had it's financial sector gutted in a once-in-a-decade event go. There is this retreat to minutiae that often happens in political debates. Sometimes it helps, but it usually does.
1. USA was attacked (for the second time) by a religious extremist.
2. They invoked Article 5, the only time in the history of the alliance that countries involved had a pre-commitment to jointly aid in defence. This isn't to say that individual Nato countries can't join together in other military exercises, like, say the invasion of Iraq. But that isn't Nato. That's UK + USA, it doesn't include Canada.
3. Every major ally of the USA responded by deploying troops to Afganistan. Even France.
You can talk about the "industrial complex through the sockpuppet war media" and yes we have to be careful about how much we trust reporters because black propaganda is sadly a real thing, but the constant denial of ground realities and suspicion of Nato is clearly false on the merits. People are not lining up to immigrate to Russia or China or Afghanistan.
Everyday people know that you have to try pretty hard to piss off Canada and if Canada is part of Nato maybe it isn't because of a giant world sized conspiracy theory. Maybe, just maybe it's because (mostly) peaceful democracies naturally want collective defence.
If we were concerned with defending against credible threats to our security, our spending on weaponry would be proportional to that of such threats. Can we credibly expect attacks from off-planet?
Defense spending is preventative. If you lower your spending, the threats become more credible. We're literally watching what happens when NATO defensive capabilities don't exist.
The US spends more than is defensively necessary, but NATO as a whole is absolutely spending proportional to the threat level. Perhaps the US should spend less, and the rest of NATO should spend more.
Perhaps more relevantly, a single member, the US, spends more than the rest of the world combined. Remove the US, and NATO is spending less than China. This doesn't seem like an honest argument.
Putin as been in power since 1999. In that time NATO countries have invaded (direcly or through proxy forces):
- Iraq
- Syria
- Yemen
- Libya
- Afghanistan
Just two days ago NATO countries conducted drone strikes in Somalia. NATO aligned forces have been conducting air-strikes and other forms of aggression against the Palestinians in their native lands.
The destruction wreaked, the number of death and maimed, of those ongoing acts of war by NATO and NATO-aligned forces is very substantially higher thank those coming from Putin.
An interesting question is: is it irrational, in the light of this undeniable fact of NATO aggressions, to want to be safe from NATO?
No my argument is based on NATO members being perfectly able to join up with non-NATO members to invade another country without needing to do it through NATO. Ukraine did not need to join NATO to join with them to wage war against Russia, if that is what they wanted. They only wanted to join for defensive reasons, and with very good reason as it turns out.
There is no reason to join NATO except for defense. Zero. None. Yes, NATO members do sometimes gang up to invade other countries, but they would also do so if they weren’t NATO members.
No, that didn't do the trick. If you had paid attention you would have noticed that Ukraine did not join NATO and was not on track to join NATO. This is just a convenient excuse for Putin to be able to do what he wants to do anyway.
Half a year is not nearly enough time to prepare. It's not just heating and electricity. It's also chemical industry etc. You will have to be willing to do more than just turn down the heating a bit. How about job security? 20% inflation?
There will be much anger. However, with Covid-19 there was no one really to blame, so people turned against local politicians imposing measures or people turned towards conspiracy theories for explanations and comfort. Here the culprit is clear and has one name.
Is not that the nord stream 2 pipeline? Germany was able to buy Russian gas without problem. Why build the new pipe?
It seems that Germany thought that Russia was a rational player interested in growing their economy, but it seems that it was just power play for personal aspirations.
Most of e.g. Germany's gas consumption is from heating, not electricity. So nuclear plays a minor role, though admittedly even needing just 10% less gas might be the difference of being able to procure what you need from non-Russian suppliers or rationing. (Sure, heating and electricity is kind of equivalent if many households had heat pumps, but they don't.)
Nuclear or not, the horrendous mistake was not reducing dependence on Russian exports even when their aggressive foreign policy was apparent even 10 years ago. That was inexcusible complacency.
Why is this the case? The only reason I could think is electricity prices. Here in Montreal where the average low for today is -11oC and electricity is very cheap, nearly everyone uses electric baseboards or electric boilers.
I'd imagine Germans would be quick to install electric heating if electricity was cheap, no?
Wouldn't expanding nuclear drive down electricity prices?
I don't know why gas heating is so prevalent in parts of Europe historically, I guess fossil fuels were just the cheapest way of heating compared to electricity. Google says that in Canada also much heating is gas or oil based, so perhaps the prevalence of electric heating is a feature of your particular residential area?
In any case, I think electric heating will become much more prevalent anyway since it's necessary for the clean energy transition. But that will take far longer than the current Russia crisis, so it's unfortunately no short term fix.
You've got loads of hydroelectricity in Québec, that's fairly cheap. In Europe most of the electricity was (and still is) generated with fossil fuel so if you are going to heat a place, you might as well use the gas directly, that's more efficient.
There are a few special cases though: if you go in southern Europe, especially in Greek islands, you will find a lot of solar water heating. And France has a higher than average electric heating due to its nuclear grid.
There is a lot of pressure put on Germany right now regarding SWIFT.
The exclusion from SWIFT will hit Germany hard, as it will also mean the end of gas delivery. The resulting outages, rising gas prices, the profiteering of the new gas vendors will also have an affect of public support for the sanctions.
It will also be a boost for the alternative systems, that China already built.
In the end, this might backfire really hard.
I do however also not have any better ideas. I'm happy that I'm not the one having to make that decision.
I don’t believe that removal from SWIFT means an end to payments. Much more likely it makes the process considerably more manual, still worthwhile for larger trades. Really it’s the hit to the volume of trades that does the damage. However, they might have to rely on the two parties (or their banks) having a bank in common. That gets harder as the banks themselves get sanctioned.
Poland is just finishing a pipeline to Norway, we'll stop buying any Russian gas at the beginning of 2023. And we also have ability to import LNG through a shipping terminal at Swinoujscie.
Well, I assume that "full capacity" includes gas they decided to sell to Poland when the construction of Baltic Pipe started. They might not have enough to supply the whole Europe, no argument here.
Ukraine itself is proof of how undisruptive is lowering natural gas use as it reduced it's own imports back in 2014.
Natural gas has a lot of substitutes in electricity generation and other uses, and demand will fall as prices rise (good for global warming anyway). Energy poor households can get help, so no one will freeze to death, without subisizing the natural gas. Spring and Summer are holding which makes this the best time to act.
Advanced market economies like the ones in the EU are very resilient to supply shocks like this and Eastern European countries can be helped.
Over the long term dependence on insane dictators is also bad for the economy and diversification and decarbonization are good!
That's too bad then. I'll drain the pipes here and we'll live without heat. Fortunately it is a relatively mild winter and we're getting towards the end of it.
Compared to what Ukraine is going through right now that's a very small price to pay, it is ridiculous to be standing there on the one hand hand wringing about the Ukrainian hardships and on the other to buy our fossil fuels from the aggressor directly financing the war.
> That's too bad then. I'll drain the pipes here and we'll live without heat. Fortunately it is a relatively mild winter and we're getting towards the end of it.
There is a good article at The Guardian, discussing replacing the Russian gas. The conclusion seem to be that this will be very hard and take a long time.
US oil dependence was largely ended through unexpected/unplanned technological innovation -- fracking and horizontal drilling opened up many reserves, and improved deep water drilling tech added more offshore capacity. It also happened pretty rapidly, from about 2005 to 2015.
I don't believe it for a second. Energy prices in Europe have become extremely high and will continue to climb as Russian gas exports are sanctioned more and more. A full embargo would make it financially impossible for many European homes to get heat. Chemical processes and installations that take advantage of the generation of both CO2 and heat, like greenhouses, will be forced to either close down or increase prices, with a direct impact on the availability of affordable foods, chemicals and products.
With a full gas embargo, we're one polar vortex anomaly away from protests that will only favour politicians with Russian friends who are already calling for lower sanctions. In the short term this will have an effect, but unless American gas producers artificially lower their gas prices, the long term will only see more Russia-aligned politicians gaining prominence.
Europe's reliance on America and Russia has been a problem for a while and we're seeing the impact of it as we speak.
However, I do believe that "the economy" will be fine, but "the economy" mostly benefits the richest layers of society. That wealth doesn't trickle down.
And on the North American side, many of us are willing to sacrifice and pressure our governments to make up some of that as well so that you are shouldering it alone.
The US doesn't have the greatest history of taking the grunt of the burden when it comes to sanctions.
Also as a European, is still remember as certain "fuck the Europeans" uttered by the neocons of your government when the Europeans warned that regime changing the Ukraine would maybe make the Russians feel threatened.
Europe has to find its own stance and mechanisms to counter Putin. It's pretty clear that neither the European way (economic integration) nor the US way (forever treating like an enemy) worked.
Brit here. I'm with you. There's going to be pain either some now, or more later if this disease is allowed to grow. I'll take it now, and it won't be as much as the poor buggers in Ukraine are currently suffering, not by a long way.
That's pure virtue signalling. Well off people can afford certain sacrifices. Why should people living month to month have to suffer more for what politicians decide to do in other countries.
Also, talking of hanging people. Start with the west. Iraq, Yemen, Libya etc. Wherever the west intervenes, hell follows.
Easy, Russia stores around 650 billions of dollars abroad. Confiscate it to cover the EU losses. Simple as that, you act like Hitler, you got to be punished.
but unless American gas producers artificially lower their gas prices
They should start producing more, and return us to being a net exporter as we were just 2 years ago; and, let the Keystone XL pipeline resume; and, expand domestic leases; ...
"Artificial" never works over time. Embracing reality is much more effective.
The price charged by the US gas producers is maybe 10% of the resulting price in Europe. It's all about the transportation costs, liquefying the gas, and shipping it is very expensive.
Stop trading with murderers. Rally the people to conserve energy. Rally allies to shore up LNG (Liquefied Natural Gas) supply into Europe. Maneuver the subsidies so that the western world shows solidarity and stands united in sacrificing and sharing the burden. Putin invades because he thinks the west doesn't have the strength to cut gas. Reinstate when Russian attacks stop on Ukraine. Show him he's wrong and we have a much better chance at reversing this atrocity.
Honestly, I'm surprised the Ukraine didn't respond to Russia's threats by moving demolition crews to the natural gas pipeline between Europe and Russia.
That would have drug NATO into the war, and probably acted as a deterrent.
Yes. Specifically empymologically it stems from U meaning "at" and "krai" meaning border region. It makes sense especially right now why Ukraine would want to distance themselves from being called "the border region" (of russia)
Thanks for the correction, though I guess my comment was meant to be interpreted as "someone in the border region where the conflict is" rather than "the Ukrainian government".
I'm guessing "the Ukraine" will be a hard word to change in "The United States of America" though. "United States of America" could mean the old confederacy, or the Dakotas or something (assuming they're united in some cause)
Along similar lines, couldn't "ukraine" mean any of the Russian borders?
In that scenario, wouldn't Ukraine, a non-NATO country, be the aggressor against NATO? How would that deter anything? It seems that would turn NATO against Ukraine for threatening their energy supply.
How did Europe not freeze to death during Cold war. It's not like it recently became cold there. I don't think this is about actual availability of Gas. It is about gas being cheap. If that is indeed the case, Germany in particular has to think hard on whther lives matter than money.
Well, significant part of Europe was on the eastern side of the iron curtain, getting gas from Russia.
And note that in the past, home heating with coal (which is available locally) was common. We gradually moved from coal to gas for heating and now also for electricity generation, and that is something that cannot be reverted over one year.
> How did Europe not freeze to death during Cold war
With Soviet gas. There was never a full Western embargo of the USSR, especially after detente. Trade directly between the USA and USSR averaged about $4 billion per year (1980 dollars) in the late 70s. Not large but also not insignificant.
In many ways the USSR was also a petrostate. Some, then and now, have argued this propped up the USSR beyond its natural life expectancy.
How much difference would it make if everyone in Europe turned down their heating by 1°C? (Including e.g. electric heating in France or Norway, since the nuclear/hydropower can instead be used somewhere where electricity is made from gas.)
Online forums are full of misinformed high anxiety folks that are extremely anti-nuclear-anything. So, while I agree with you completely, I wanted my comment to last for longer than two minutes before being flagged and downvoted into oblivion.
I am NOT an expert. Just an amateur. But I doubt this.
Pro Forma: To anyone who gets upset, the following is not an opinion over the war either for or against. Just some thoughts from a random person who likes energy and is a geopolitical realist.
First the good news: Europe can wean itself off Russian gas, but only over the course of a decade or more. Specifically Europe would have to:
- Build nuclear power plants
- Build LNG plants
- Build coal plants (coal is easy to store, just a pile. This gives it massive strategic importance)
- Accept even higher energy prices
- Probably accept that CO2/GDP will go up. NatGas is very clean wrt to CO2 compared to coal.
- It's also not obvious that there is gas readily available to be LNGed. (See second list below)
All of these take ten years at best given the regulatory and political realities in Europe. They are also massively expensive and it's not obvious to me that the Europeans have much money left (a lot of that money is in Russia's state coffers). These are things Europe should have done ten years ago.
But it gets worse; the available supply in the short term is tragic for the EU:
- Russian gas that isn't piped doesn't have an LNG terminal (yet). It's therefore a massive hole in global supply. Therefore, the EU would be competing with Japan, Korea, India, etc for Qatari and Australian gas. Prices would increase massively and expect the Asian countries to get very aggressive to protect their supplies.
- The US has little LNG presence. This is because (I believe) until recently it was illegal to export nat gas. Therefore LNG terminals have to be built in the US.
- The export ban and lack of LNG terminals in the US has shielded nat gas users in the US. It's also, effectively, a massive subsidy to American industry. It's not obvious what political support exporting gas will have from the non energy-sector. Heavy industry needs gas and American's want to get back to "building things".
- Currently the US energy sector isn't benefitting from the high energy prices because production is tapped out due to lack of investment in the last five years. Specifically, the US' industry is not obviously sustainable (financially) and banks are getting shy. Expect them to get more shy if interest rates rise.
- On top of that there is a shortage of "shale sand" needed to extract shale oil. US gas is a byproduct of oil extraction.
- Keystone. Or the lack thereof. Oil and gas are somewhat exchangeable goods (in an expensive pinch, you can burn oil in many gas plants. You can also crack oil. The EU is in an expensive pinch). The more oil you make available into the market, the lower nat gas prices gets. Keystone is dead, limiting Canada's ability to export oil
So the EU is not in a good place strategically. How about the Ruskies?
I believe that Russia can more readily wean itself off of the European consumer than vice versa.
- Russian financial reserves are massive. Much larger with respect to her needs than the EU's gas reserves wrt to EU's needs. Look up Russian foreign reserves wrt to Russia's GDP. Remember, Russia only has to supplant 3% (?) of her GDP, not all of it. It appears to me that Russia can stay solvent far longer than EU can stay thawed.
- China is not going to stop buying Russian gas. Neither is India. Or Korea. Or Japan.
- Russia can have LNG terminals too. A short pipeline and a LNG terminal in Murmansk and a lot of the gas that would have gone to Germany can be shipped out.
- Russia has a lot of gas. Gas production requires continual investments. It appears to me that Russia's capacity to produce gas is not resource limited but capital goods limited. By redirecting investments (again, not financial investments, excavator time) to gas fields west of the Urals to those east of the Urals, Russia can tack east.
I'd love to have ppl comment on which ever of those points they disagree with.
I think your take for solving this is somewhat wrong. The big issue isn't gas for electricity (only around 14% of gas in Germany is used for electricity) but gas for heating as well as industry, fertilizer and the likes.
This means the steps to solving this should begin with addressing those:
- Move heating systems away from gas (and oil). Heat Pumps are probably the best way moving forward.
- Moving the industry of gas and oil. Parts can probably be somewhat easily electrified, but parts like fertilizer and other chemical production probably should be converted to hydrogen. (Hydrogen generated from electricity, not gas, since that's a bit useless)
This means quite a bit more need for electricity where some of your proposals come in:
- Building nuclear power plants. Will probably take >15 years, so probably not helping much. Extending the runtime of existing plants might help, but I'm not sure how much.
- More coal. Will likely work. Capital costs are likely too high to use them instead of gas plants for filling gaps in renewable supply instead of investing in storage.
Some further important steps:
- Massive expansion of renewables. Very cheap and possible intermittency issues are likely not as important for producing hydrogen and gas. With sufficient overproduction and interconnection in europe the need for storage can be greatly reduced.
- Storage including Power to Gas. Meshes well with renewables. Especially Power-to-Gas will benefit from existing, then less used, infrastructure.
In general, LNG terminals are likely very helpful, especially for the next few years and high energy prices are probably going to happen.
I doubt that Russia can wean itself of Europe that easily. China won't be able to (fully) fill the gap (around 70% of russian gas is exported to europe) and is likely not that interested on heavily depending on foreign energy. LNG terminals are also very limited in capacity compared to pipelines and with europe switching more to LNG terminals a lot of new ships need to be built. Furthermore, if europe is successful in weaning off of fossil fuels, other countries are likely also going to reduce the need for gas due to scaling and learning effects (Renewables, especially solar, have seen huge cost reductions in the last 20 years and are killing of coal plants in Australia and electric cars are very likely going to kill of combustion engine cars in the next 10 years).
> Russia has no need of the West’s money. It has its own
The West can effectively devalue the Ruble, cripple their economy, and make them an economic pariah for generations. It would be possible to cut their economy in half in real-terms, even with China helping them.
The USSR was far mightier - both militarily and economically - than modern Russia and we economically contained them. We can break modern Russia if necessary.
And China? They're dealmakers and they will sell out Russia if presented the right deal, it's primarily a question of what they would want. The West and its affluent allies have more to offer China than Russia does by a factor of 20x.
It's possible to almost entirely isolate Russia if we need to do it.
I think GP's point was: Devaluating Ruble could cripple Russian economy only if they imported a lot, which they don't. They are self-sufficient, they have all the natural resources on their territory, and they have manufacturing capabilities to produce everything they need, they do not need any trade with the rest of the world. Also, Russian people are used to being poor, so it's not like they will rebel because of getting even poorer.
> And China? They're dealmakers and they will sell out Russia if presented the right deal, it's primarily a question of what they would want.
No, they want Taiwan and US wouldn't consider that. China wouldn't sell out Russia for anything other than World domination, they are Chinas only friendly big neighbor and their best companion against the US.
The US is way more self-sufficient than Russia is: we have abundant natural resources, plenty of food, technology that puts that of Russia to shame, a far more modern and competent military, several times the GDP per capita, etc. But nobody says the US would be just fine if it walled itself off from the rest of the world.
The Soviet Union and modern Russia buoyed their economies and national programs through gas exports.
If Europe stops buying Russian gas, then there is only so much they can ship to china through existing infrastructure. Worse Europe may block the transit of Russian gas through their borders.
This would be a lose lose situation for everyone, but It’s a test of European and eventually American will to do without vs the Russian governments failure to pay its obligations. How long will the oligarchs tolerate austerity for Ukraine?
If you look strategically Russia is in trouble, their economy is brittle and heavily relies on fossils, the same fossils the west is phasing out for "clean" alternatives.
Fuel dependency will definitely drop in the coming decade, what Russia has beyond it?
> So Russia doesn’t provide the EU with any gas in a world systemically short of gas and that’s going to hurt Russia is it.
> How exactly? They still have the gas and Europe has no fertiliser or heat.
Logistics for one thing. Where/how are they going to sell that gas? Western Canada has plenty of gas too. It cannot be used to supply Europe because of logistics.
And yet Russia would not get that money for their gas, which they seem to have in abundance, if they did not export it. All their surplus of gas would not get them anything.
Russia may be able to do its own thing inside Russia for a long time, but in the meantime the world moves on and leaves them behind. It would be unwise of Russia to let it come to this. But then again a madman is a madman ...
I won't dispute the analysis, only because propaganda is hard to prove wrong. And that's the problem here, It's on sided.
It's no secret many of the economies in the West are so-so (from Covid). What short term impact will these sanctions have on the countries issuing them? What about longer term (e.g., The Fed over-compensates).
In a global economy, these sanction actions have international reactions.
You can never be sure, we were sure afghan army will hold and we were sure Ukraine wouldn't last long, and the opposite happaned.
The logic is that this war is as close as it gets to 0% approval, and many soldiers arent happy aboit either. If they had a way to avoid killing their 'slavic brothers' that does not lead to being stuck in a gulag, a significan portion would take it. I am not sure how much money theid need, but compared to cost of a war, this is cheap. Kremlim would be bleeding manpower.
We could win the war in Ukraine by agreeing to permanently keep Ukraine out of NATO which is a fait accompli anyway since the member nations have already said they’re not going to war with Russia over Ukraine.
It's not a strange definition of "win". Winning means not getting into unnecessary fights where national interest isn't involved (for the US and many EU neighbors of Ukraine; Ukraine itself too, considering that they can never match Russia militarily).
NATO "firing bullets" is not and has never been on the table since NATO is a defensive alliance and Ukraine is not a member.
The idea of bribing Russian soldiers radically underestimates the brutal control exerted by the Kremlin over the Russian people. It also sells the Russian people short, implying individual corruption when many are patriots who oppose war against their Ukrainian cousins but are not able to speak out.
The idea that bringing in freelance freedom fighters is going to end the war "in a week" is facile and ludicrous.
You are not bribing the soldiers, you are providing a way out of war they don't want that does not end in a jail cell. The money is not a bribe, it's something to be able to start a new life
143 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 188 ms ] threadAnd seize some oligarchs’ assets to help pay for it.
Russia is obviously geographically closer than the US to Europe. Once an investment is made and the infrastructure built, to what extent could American natgas compete with Russian on price if there is a return to normalcy?
There is no answer, unfortunately, in US LNG exports to Europe. That's merely a very small bandaid on a serious energy wound. It's impossible to push US LNG exports high enough to offset the pipeline supply from Russia, no matter what we do.
At best it can relieve a bit of the pricing pressure while Europe figures out something else (nuclear, bolstering their own natural gas production, increased renewables).
The best bet would be for all energy suppliers to max production, however there is good evidence that that is already the case due to preexisting energy shortages.
Next step would be shutting down energy intensive operations such as bitcoin mining, gold mining, driving, potentially some steel production and shipping activities.
edit: spelling
And besides that, NATO or the west should not refrain from having these talks no matter what Putin says.
If Finland or Sweden wants in, they should be allowed to the same day they ask.
This is valuable reading, from a military historian frequently posted on HN: https://acoup.blog/2022/02/25/miscellanea-understanding-the-...
Here's one of the many good bits:
----
Instead, the clearest understanding of Putin’s complaints about NATO is that they are reflections of his real fears, but that as diplomatic negotiating tools, they were red herrings, designed to create exactly the sort of smokescreen that some media personalities worked to create and exploit domestically. The ‘tell’ here in many ways were the initial demands, which amounted to rolling back NATO positions to pre-1997 status; such demands would be utterly unacceptable to NATO countries (like Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and Poland) who would thus be left outside NATO’s line of protection. Putin – and the Russian Foreign Ministry – knew those demands were obvious non-starters, that’s why they made them – presumably to generate that smokescreen and to try to divide NATO internally. But the demands themselves were never serious, as Putin’s actions this week prove.
----
The "promise Ukraine won't join NATO" demand was not made in good faith and conceding it would not have mattered.
NATO is a defensive union. The only reason to fear it is if you’re planning to invade other nations. Putin ostensibly should have no reason to fear NATO expansion unless he has ill intent.
And if the argument is: yes, it is defensive now, but it might turn offensive against Russia at some point. Well, for that you just need an alliance of countries, it does not need to be NATO. A group of countries comprised of NATO and non-NATO members can gang up against Russia any time they want, without any NATO involvement.
I believe Putin only says this because he wants to keep invading other countries on the table as an option, and that is precisely the reason to keep expanding NATO.
Someone claiming it was defensive doesn’t make it so.
If Afghanistan can be called a defensive war, Russian „demilitarisation“ of the Ukraine is purely humanitarian operation.
Taliban weren't friendly with Al-Qaeda, and attempted to surrender in the first week of the war. In the first month of the war, its alleged target ObL decamped to Pakistan. After a decade, someone somewhat resembling ObL who had been living under close Pakistani military supervision a mile from PMA Kakul was allegedly murdered as a campaign event for BHO's reelection, although no corpse was ever examined. After another decade, NATO forces left Afghanistan with tails between legs, while experts assured us that the "government" they had installed would last several years. Realists assumed that meant it would last several months, but even we were surprised when that actually meant several hours.
It seems "way too long" somewhat understates this. There is no sense in which this was a defensive war, and if this were as you say the only thing NATO ever did (perhaps something might have happened in Kosovo?) then that is a complete indictment of NATO.
> Following the September 11 attacks in 2001, then-US President George W. Bush demanded that the Taliban, then-de facto ruling Afghanistan, extradite Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of the attacks and who was, until then, freely operating within the country. The Taliban's refusal to do so led to the invasion of the country; the Taliban and their al-Qaeda allies were mostly defeated and expelled from major population centers by US-led forces and the Northern Alliance.
Did someone in Bush's administration ask some Taliban poobah for ObL, at some time before the invasion? Probably! That would have been like asking for a unicorn pony. They didn't have him in custody, and they weren't going to be arsed to engage in whatever deadly combat would have been required to get him in custody. Unlike today, at that time Taliban weren't really a national ruling entity. They ran the courts and the tollways in some of the populated parts of Afghanistan. ObL was holed up in the hills somewhere. USA military didn't have a great deal of luck digging him out either, once they gave it a try.
The proportional action would have been to occupy only those parts of Afghanistan in which one could reasonably imagine ObL had hidden, and hire both Taliban and Northern Alliance to provide security on the condition they not fight each other while USA troops were around. It's not as though Taliban had created aQ, our supposed ally Saudi Arabia did that. Taliban, just like everyone else in Afghanistan, would have been perfectly happy for aQ not to have escaped Sudan.
Somehow the goof troop that got us fighting a war in Iraq also screwed up the operation in Afghanistan. At this point that can't be a surprise to anyone. But you're talking about mistakes made leading up to and in the first several weeks of the occupation. The point of this thread is the following two decades of pointless brutality.
As for why Nato stayed so long in Afghanistan, it is difficult to imagine now, but 20 years ago we had just won a giant string of wars and in most of them democracy was installed and life got better for everyone. We tried to make it work in Afghanistan too, but it didn't work for a multitude of reasons.
Anyway, with respect, I was talking about Article 5 and the defensive alliance that is Nato. Countries within Nato can choose to go to war outside of A5, but they are only compelled to help under it.
Taliban did offer to turn over ObL, and this was known by the public at the time. [0] This may not have been such a realistic offer, given the hiding-in-caves-with-lots-of-guns aspect mentioned above, but they tried to do exactly what you advise and it didn't work. Maybe they learned a lesson about how USA policy is entirely controlled by the military-industrial complex through the sockpuppet war media?
Let's ignore mistakes made over twenty years ago. We could have withdrawn at any time over that twenty years, so I'm more complaining about the mistake made every minute since then.
The point of the thread is that NATO is not "defensive". You offered as a counterexample, NATO's war in Afghanistan. If that's all you've got, we can conclude that NATO is indeed not defensive in nature.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/oct/14/afghanistan.te...
First, even the article you liked didn't offer to turn over Bin Laden. It offered a discussion, asked for proof, etc. This isn't how international relations with a super power that's just had it's financial sector gutted in a once-in-a-decade event go. There is this retreat to minutiae that often happens in political debates. Sometimes it helps, but it usually does.
1. USA was attacked (for the second time) by a religious extremist.
2. They invoked Article 5, the only time in the history of the alliance that countries involved had a pre-commitment to jointly aid in defence. This isn't to say that individual Nato countries can't join together in other military exercises, like, say the invasion of Iraq. But that isn't Nato. That's UK + USA, it doesn't include Canada.
3. Every major ally of the USA responded by deploying troops to Afganistan. Even France.
You can talk about the "industrial complex through the sockpuppet war media" and yes we have to be careful about how much we trust reporters because black propaganda is sadly a real thing, but the constant denial of ground realities and suspicion of Nato is clearly false on the merits. People are not lining up to immigrate to Russia or China or Afghanistan.
Everyday people know that you have to try pretty hard to piss off Canada and if Canada is part of Nato maybe it isn't because of a giant world sized conspiracy theory. Maybe, just maybe it's because (mostly) peaceful democracies naturally want collective defence.
The US spends more than is defensively necessary, but NATO as a whole is absolutely spending proportional to the threat level. Perhaps the US should spend less, and the rest of NATO should spend more.
Perhaps more relevantly, a single member, the US, spends more than the rest of the world combined. Remove the US, and NATO is spending less than China. This doesn't seem like an honest argument.
- Iraq
- Syria
- Yemen
- Libya
- Afghanistan
Just two days ago NATO countries conducted drone strikes in Somalia. NATO aligned forces have been conducting air-strikes and other forms of aggression against the Palestinians in their native lands. The destruction wreaked, the number of death and maimed, of those ongoing acts of war by NATO and NATO-aligned forces is very substantially higher thank those coming from Putin.
An interesting question is: is it irrational, in the light of this undeniable fact of NATO aggressions, to want to be safe from NATO?
Sorry, but this is incorrect. NATO is a security union, of which a co-defense pact is a part.
Your whole argument seems to build on that and it is a faulty one.
There is a good rebuttal, but this isn't the one.
There is no reason to join NATO except for defense. Zero. None. Yes, NATO members do sometimes gang up to invade other countries, but they would also do so if they weren’t NATO members.
Nah. It might do the trick if NATO pulled back and let Russia reassert dominance over the old Warsaw Pact, again.
There aren't easy answers here.
There will be much anger. However, with Covid-19 there was no one really to blame, so people turned against local politicians imposing measures or people turned towards conspiracy theories for explanations and comfort. Here the culprit is clear and has one name.
It seems that Germany thought that Russia was a rational player interested in growing their economy, but it seems that it was just power play for personal aspirations.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xt3Zv-e4n1M
Nuclear or not, the horrendous mistake was not reducing dependence on Russian exports even when their aggressive foreign policy was apparent even 10 years ago. That was inexcusible complacency.
I'd imagine Germans would be quick to install electric heating if electricity was cheap, no?
Wouldn't expanding nuclear drive down electricity prices?
In any case, I think electric heating will become much more prevalent anyway since it's necessary for the clean energy transition. But that will take far longer than the current Russia crisis, so it's unfortunately no short term fix.
There are a few special cases though: if you go in southern Europe, especially in Greek islands, you will find a lot of solar water heating. And France has a higher than average electric heating due to its nuclear grid.
By percentage of their gas imports that come from Russia: DE, LT, PL, and IT at about 50%; FR and NL at about 20%.
* https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/02/15/business/ener...
* https://archive.fo/iUJ7j
By volume, mostly Germany and Italy:
* https://i.redd.it/qs12fw6kmdj81.jpg
Hopefully they will do the right thing and support Ukraine anyway they can.
A good indication is going to be if Germany will support the exclusion of Russia from SWIFT:
https://financialpost.com/pmn/business-pmn/germany-open-to-c...
The exclusion from SWIFT will hit Germany hard, as it will also mean the end of gas delivery. The resulting outages, rising gas prices, the profiteering of the new gas vendors will also have an affect of public support for the sanctions.
It will also be a boost for the alternative systems, that China already built.
In the end, this might backfire really hard.
I do however also not have any better ideas. I'm happy that I'm not the one having to make that decision.
Edit: see correspondent bank https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correspondent_account
(13 years out of investment banking on the technology side. Never touched SWIFT directly but was involved in more than one in multi-bank project)
Natural gas has a lot of substitutes in electricity generation and other uses, and demand will fall as prices rise (good for global warming anyway). Energy poor households can get help, so no one will freeze to death, without subisizing the natural gas. Spring and Summer are holding which makes this the best time to act.
Advanced market economies like the ones in the EU are very resilient to supply shocks like this and Eastern European countries can be helped.
Over the long term dependence on insane dictators is also bad for the economy and diversification and decarbonization are good!
> Sweaters against Putin
XD
Compared to what Ukraine is going through right now that's a very small price to pay, it is ridiculous to be standing there on the one hand hand wringing about the Ukrainian hardships and on the other to buy our fossil fuels from the aggressor directly financing the war.
And with cold showers of course.
This is the most clear case of first world problems that I can think of. Places like hospitals and so on is a different matter.
I stand with you!
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/feb/25/how-can-eur...
If I lived in Europe I wouldn't care.
No matter the cost (taxes etc.), no matter if I would have to wear multiple jackets at home.
I would still be in favor.
With a full gas embargo, we're one polar vortex anomaly away from protests that will only favour politicians with Russian friends who are already calling for lower sanctions. In the short term this will have an effect, but unless American gas producers artificially lower their gas prices, the long term will only see more Russia-aligned politicians gaining prominence.
Europe's reliance on America and Russia has been a problem for a while and we're seeing the impact of it as we speak.
However, I do believe that "the economy" will be fine, but "the economy" mostly benefits the richest layers of society. That wealth doesn't trickle down.
Is that an option? Through US government subsidies or something similar?
Also as a European, is still remember as certain "fuck the Europeans" uttered by the neocons of your government when the Europeans warned that regime changing the Ukraine would maybe make the Russians feel threatened.
Europe has to find its own stance and mechanisms to counter Putin. It's pretty clear that neither the European way (economic integration) nor the US way (forever treating like an enemy) worked.
Also, talking of hanging people. Start with the west. Iraq, Yemen, Libya etc. Wherever the west intervenes, hell follows.
"Artificial" never works over time. Embracing reality is much more effective.
Stop trading with murderers. Rally the people to conserve energy. Rally allies to shore up LNG (Liquefied Natural Gas) supply into Europe. Maneuver the subsidies so that the western world shows solidarity and stands united in sacrificing and sharing the burden. Putin invades because he thinks the west doesn't have the strength to cut gas. Reinstate when Russian attacks stop on Ukraine. Show him he's wrong and we have a much better chance at reversing this atrocity.
That would have drug NATO into the war, and probably acted as a deterrent.
FYI: today "Ukraine" is preferred over "The Ukraine" because "The Ukraine" can be understood to imply a region rather than a country.
I'm guessing "the Ukraine" will be a hard word to change in "The United States of America" though. "United States of America" could mean the old confederacy, or the Dakotas or something (assuming they're united in some cause)
Along similar lines, couldn't "ukraine" mean any of the Russian borders?
No, it wouldn't. Unless a NATO country is attacked, NATO cannot do anything. Individual countries can, though.
And note that in the past, home heating with coal (which is available locally) was common. We gradually moved from coal to gas for heating and now also for electricity generation, and that is something that cannot be reverted over one year.
With Soviet gas. There was never a full Western embargo of the USSR, especially after detente. Trade directly between the USA and USSR averaged about $4 billion per year (1980 dollars) in the late 70s. Not large but also not insignificant.
In many ways the USSR was also a petrostate. Some, then and now, have argued this propped up the USSR beyond its natural life expectancy.
We need to mass produce and build designs we already have
Pro Forma: To anyone who gets upset, the following is not an opinion over the war either for or against. Just some thoughts from a random person who likes energy and is a geopolitical realist.
First the good news: Europe can wean itself off Russian gas, but only over the course of a decade or more. Specifically Europe would have to:
- Build nuclear power plants
- Build LNG plants
- Build coal plants (coal is easy to store, just a pile. This gives it massive strategic importance)
- Accept even higher energy prices
- Probably accept that CO2/GDP will go up. NatGas is very clean wrt to CO2 compared to coal.
- It's also not obvious that there is gas readily available to be LNGed. (See second list below)
All of these take ten years at best given the regulatory and political realities in Europe. They are also massively expensive and it's not obvious to me that the Europeans have much money left (a lot of that money is in Russia's state coffers). These are things Europe should have done ten years ago.
But it gets worse; the available supply in the short term is tragic for the EU:
- Russian gas that isn't piped doesn't have an LNG terminal (yet). It's therefore a massive hole in global supply. Therefore, the EU would be competing with Japan, Korea, India, etc for Qatari and Australian gas. Prices would increase massively and expect the Asian countries to get very aggressive to protect their supplies.
- The US has little LNG presence. This is because (I believe) until recently it was illegal to export nat gas. Therefore LNG terminals have to be built in the US.
- The export ban and lack of LNG terminals in the US has shielded nat gas users in the US. It's also, effectively, a massive subsidy to American industry. It's not obvious what political support exporting gas will have from the non energy-sector. Heavy industry needs gas and American's want to get back to "building things".
- Currently the US energy sector isn't benefitting from the high energy prices because production is tapped out due to lack of investment in the last five years. Specifically, the US' industry is not obviously sustainable (financially) and banks are getting shy. Expect them to get more shy if interest rates rise.
- On top of that there is a shortage of "shale sand" needed to extract shale oil. US gas is a byproduct of oil extraction.
- Keystone. Or the lack thereof. Oil and gas are somewhat exchangeable goods (in an expensive pinch, you can burn oil in many gas plants. You can also crack oil. The EU is in an expensive pinch). The more oil you make available into the market, the lower nat gas prices gets. Keystone is dead, limiting Canada's ability to export oil
So the EU is not in a good place strategically. How about the Ruskies?
I believe that Russia can more readily wean itself off of the European consumer than vice versa.
- Russian financial reserves are massive. Much larger with respect to her needs than the EU's gas reserves wrt to EU's needs. Look up Russian foreign reserves wrt to Russia's GDP. Remember, Russia only has to supplant 3% (?) of her GDP, not all of it. It appears to me that Russia can stay solvent far longer than EU can stay thawed.
- China is not going to stop buying Russian gas. Neither is India. Or Korea. Or Japan.
- Russia can have LNG terminals too. A short pipeline and a LNG terminal in Murmansk and a lot of the gas that would have gone to Germany can be shipped out.
- Russia has a lot of gas. Gas production requires continual investments. It appears to me that Russia's capacity to produce gas is not resource limited but capital goods limited. By redirecting investments (again, not financial investments, excavator time) to gas fields west of the Urals to those east of the Urals, Russia can tack east.
I'd love to have ppl comment on which ever of those points they disagree with.
This means the steps to solving this should begin with addressing those:
- Move heating systems away from gas (and oil). Heat Pumps are probably the best way moving forward.
- Moving the industry of gas and oil. Parts can probably be somewhat easily electrified, but parts like fertilizer and other chemical production probably should be converted to hydrogen. (Hydrogen generated from electricity, not gas, since that's a bit useless)
This means quite a bit more need for electricity where some of your proposals come in:
- Building nuclear power plants. Will probably take >15 years, so probably not helping much. Extending the runtime of existing plants might help, but I'm not sure how much.
- More coal. Will likely work. Capital costs are likely too high to use them instead of gas plants for filling gaps in renewable supply instead of investing in storage.
Some further important steps:
- Massive expansion of renewables. Very cheap and possible intermittency issues are likely not as important for producing hydrogen and gas. With sufficient overproduction and interconnection in europe the need for storage can be greatly reduced.
- Storage including Power to Gas. Meshes well with renewables. Especially Power-to-Gas will benefit from existing, then less used, infrastructure.
In general, LNG terminals are likely very helpful, especially for the next few years and high energy prices are probably going to happen.
I doubt that Russia can wean itself of Europe that easily. China won't be able to (fully) fill the gap (around 70% of russian gas is exported to europe) and is likely not that interested on heavily depending on foreign energy. LNG terminals are also very limited in capacity compared to pipelines and with europe switching more to LNG terminals a lot of new ships need to be built. Furthermore, if europe is successful in weaning off of fossil fuels, other countries are likely also going to reduce the need for gas due to scaling and learning effects (Renewables, especially solar, have seen huge cost reductions in the last 20 years and are killing of coal plants in Australia and electric cars are very likely going to kill of combustion engine cars in the next 10 years).
It's going to be very hard for both.
How exactly? They still have the gas and Europe has no fertiliser or heat.
Eventually mainstream economists will realise that you only export to import and that imports are a real benefit whereas exports are a real cost.
To win in international trade you want as many imports for as few exports as possible.
If Russia isn’t importing anything then it has no need to export at all.
There are plenty of jobs going making armaments and equipment for the Russian war machine, so nobody in Russia is going to be short of a job either.
Russia has no need of the West’s money. It has its own and can ensure people need to obtain it by imposing the necessary level of taxation.
Which if you don’t pay in roubles gets you a stretch in the gulag.
It really is time for some people to re-read Keynes’s “How to pay for the war”
The West can effectively devalue the Ruble, cripple their economy, and make them an economic pariah for generations. It would be possible to cut their economy in half in real-terms, even with China helping them.
The USSR was far mightier - both militarily and economically - than modern Russia and we economically contained them. We can break modern Russia if necessary.
And China? They're dealmakers and they will sell out Russia if presented the right deal, it's primarily a question of what they would want. The West and its affluent allies have more to offer China than Russia does by a factor of 20x.
It's possible to almost entirely isolate Russia if we need to do it.
No, they want Taiwan and US wouldn't consider that. China wouldn't sell out Russia for anything other than World domination, they are Chinas only friendly big neighbor and their best companion against the US.
And how is that a problem for Russia. They are self-sufficient in everything they need.
If Europe stops buying Russian gas, then there is only so much they can ship to china through existing infrastructure. Worse Europe may block the transit of Russian gas through their borders.
This would be a lose lose situation for everyone, but It’s a test of European and eventually American will to do without vs the Russian governments failure to pay its obligations. How long will the oligarchs tolerate austerity for Ukraine?
Fuel dependency will definitely drop in the coming decade, what Russia has beyond it?
Logistics for one thing. Where/how are they going to sell that gas? Western Canada has plenty of gas too. It cannot be used to supply Europe because of logistics.
Russia may be able to do its own thing inside Russia for a long time, but in the meantime the world moves on and leaves them behind. It would be unwise of Russia to let it come to this. But then again a madman is a madman ...
It's no secret many of the economies in the West are so-so (from Covid). What short term impact will these sanctions have on the countries issuing them? What about longer term (e.g., The Fed over-compensates).
In a global economy, these sanction actions have international reactions.
1. Provide any deserting Russian soldiers with refugee status and $3,000 in cash
2. Enable willing fighters from accross the world to reach Ukraine to defend it
3. Provide Ukraine with real SAM systems like patriots
Thats it, thw war would be over in a week without NATO firing a single bullet.
The logic is that this war is as close as it gets to 0% approval, and many soldiers arent happy aboit either. If they had a way to avoid killing their 'slavic brothers' that does not lead to being stuck in a gulag, a significan portion would take it. I am not sure how much money theid need, but compared to cost of a war, this is cheap. Kremlim would be bleeding manpower.
> without NATO firing a single bullet
"Not technically NATO" but "organized by NATO-member countries" is an exceptionally dangerous line to tread.
The idea of bribing Russian soldiers radically underestimates the brutal control exerted by the Kremlin over the Russian people. It also sells the Russian people short, implying individual corruption when many are patriots who oppose war against their Ukrainian cousins but are not able to speak out.
The idea that bringing in freelance freedom fighters is going to end the war "in a week" is facile and ludicrous.
This post is unserious and offtopic.