https://oec.world/en/profile/country/rus
Russia’s exports are >50% oil and gas products.
The biggest retaliation the West can make right now is a commitment to a rapid exit at unprecedented speed from the oil economy, in favor of renewables.
Russia’s exports are >50% oil and gas products.
The biggest retaliation the West can make right now is a commitment to a rapid exit at unprecedented speed from the oil economy, in favor of renewables.
Makes me wonder why the west thought the third time would be the charm in this case. A big difference may be domestic politics in the west, things are pretty tenuous both socially and economically, which could benefit from this grandstanding far from home.
Ignorance and arrogance, but mostly arrogance.
Millions of Ukrainians. That is going to be the real tragedy.
Russian politicians care about Ukraine being a prospering democracy and a model for russian citizens. That's it.
Ukraine in NATO means US nukes on Russia border, tipping the balance. It would be similar to Russia placing their bases and weapons into Canada or Mexico.
No, it does not. A number of Eastern European countries are in NATO and none of them have American nuclear weapons.
Where does this silly idea come that after joining NATO, American missiles somehow appear in the new member? Modern-day NATO is a cooperation platform for joint exercises etc, not some missile club that starts delivering ICBMs every month.
Yet. There were murmurs about moving them from Germany to Eastern Europe.
Additionally - US has DCAs (Defense Cooperation Agreement; straightly bilateral, nothing to do with NATO) with most EE countries. Nobody knows, what they brought there, US is certainly not telling anyone. The nukes might be already there.
And Russia is big, they have an immense second strike capability from land and from the sea. Wladiwostok is 8000km away from Kiev.
On the other hand i cannot think of a critical role played by ICBM's in Central Europe, could your share some insights?
Tactical weapons are not deterrence but actually meant to be used. Nobody will use a tactical nuke for the can of worms it represents. Whatever target can be found for a tactical weapon, it's not important enough to justify a nuke and basically start WW3.. They're a leftover of 50/60s doctrine.
Please engage based on arguments, and do not do personal attacks even if you don't like them.
It is not silly idea, it is Russian misinformation. "The corrupt fascist gay West we are under constant attack by wants to put army on our borders," except in nicer words.
Russia could have asked for this guarantee if it really cared about, it wasn't even a topic of discussion.
Ukraine had nukes and gave them up. Nukes in Ukraine would be such a ridiculous topic that Putin didn't even dare to bring up.
They did exactly that, only to be ignored, and denied that they could even ask for it.
> it wasn't even a topic of discussion.
Whaaat? It is public, you won't have any trouble to find it.
> Ukraine had nukes and gave them up.
Soviet Union had nukes, not Ukraine.
Trump's first impeachment was related exactly to this.
Russia is powerless to stop this, since any attack on a NATO country would likely trigger a counterattack.
Hence, instead, Russia must prevent these countries joining if they want to ensure no nukes on their border.
And they aren't happy about it. At the time, they weren't in a position to do much about it though.
For that to happen they would have to first turn into a tyranical shithole like Russia where an impotent old man can do as he pleases.
They don't start with nukes. They first murder journalists, bomb their own appartments, poison opposition leaders.
They only country in the world which is remotely close to doing a first strike is Russia, and perhaps North Korea.
This is a game of “who blinks first”. I doubt normally US would use nukes to defend a tiny unimportant country like Latvia or Slovenia, if under attack. Russia knows this too.
Someone crazy like Trump just might, though.
Or you can just beat them up any time they look at other options.
There is nothing threatening about a country joining a defense alliance.
Say that to Libya or Yugoslavia that were attacked. NATO is not exactly just a "defensive agreement" as is being currently propagandized.
They expect to move in, battle, secure new territory, deal with stern blabber and a slap on the wrist, and it'll be back to business as usual, with slightly higher profit margins.
Lol.
Russian oligarchs make their money by robbing Russia and russians. They want to continue undisturbed.
Russia would be way ahead of Poland had Putin not taken power and made Russia an mafia-oil state.
So that's not the issue. The Baltic states have prospered, and joined Nato for that matter.
The problem is that Ukraine is a huge country with a pretty large population, plus it has very deep historical ties with Russia, so it's probably a bit of that too, losing ones brother to the enemy would hurt.
I dont like Russia or want them been there. But there is no such thing as single united Ukraine. Saying this is literally a crime and "putin propaganda"
NATO is a security guarantee without which there can be no foreign investment in this part of the world.
The real reason is that Russians consider Ukrainians "the same nation" and if Ukrainians entered EU or some sort of association with it, and got richer than Russians like Poles, Slovaks, Czechs, Balts etc. - it would be very bad for Putin approval in Russia. Russians would start to think "it could be us", "it could work without the tyranny".
So Putin can't let westernized, wealthy Ukraine to exist. Same reason he helped Lukashenko to stop revolution in Belarus recently.
The rest ("history" lectures, "NATO is encroaching", "Ukrainians are nazis and bombard Russian speakers in Ukraine") - it's just bullshit excuses. Don'r repeat them, please. You are helping an aggressive nationalist dictatorship murder people by accepting their excuses.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/02/putin-ukra...
And a 2014 blog post also suggesting the same:
This isn't a justification for actions, it is about understanding the situation through the chaos.
You can't exit from the oil economy with renewable such as wind or solar due to their non-predictability.
If you want to stop importing Russian gaz, you need nuclear energy.
There is no such thing as storage systems at wide scale unfortunately
> well also run out of fuel within a few generations
Absolutely. But hopefully fusion will be around then.
I can’t find actual current annual production, only estimates for now and actual values for a few years ago, but we produced somewhere between 0.5 (what we did recently) and 1.3 TWh (what some people a few years ago thought we’d be at now) of batteries in the last year.
Given the likely usage patterns, this is already on a relevant scale to all 50 or so nuclear reactors currently under construction, and the expectation is that battery production will approximate rapid positive exponential growth at least to the end of the decade.
Also: currently, nuclear fuel cost is a small part of running a reactor. If nuclear fuel follows a similar cost/available quantity curve as other geologic resources, we should be able to find more once we start looking in earnest.
Don't forget they are easy targets when war get declared.
And even if it was nuclear is not a viable response with new projects taking decades to develop. Todays nuclear industry is delivering warmed-up 1970s technology that is expensive, slow, and inflexible.
Solar/wind/batteries with a small amount of backup capacity from hydro, power-to-gas/fuel, biofuels, or new long-duration storage is cheaper and faster to deploy.
You seem to be disagreeing with our greens. Gas is offered as the only backup source at that scale and timeframe.
>Solar/wind/batteries with a small amount of backup capacity from hydro, power-to-gas/fuel, biofuels, or new long-duration storage is cheaper and faster to deploy.
Wrong. [1]Nuclear wins out when kept open a bit longer and that is without accounting for storage methods. To say "a small amount of backup capacity" is absolutely ridiculous. The amounts we need compared to what is available right now would be massive. Most European countries aren't norway with loads of hydro capacity either. Also power to gas/fuel is a pipedream due to inherent costs and losses alone. You're better off making more pumped storage power stations like in Coo but those don't fit anywhere and aren't magical either.
[1]https://www.oecd-nea.org/upload/docs/image/png/2020-12/lco_b...
To not depend on russian gas by reducing gas usage, the gas heating systems need to be replaced with heat pumps or something else and industry needs to shift, presumably to electricity (since it's unlikely that we have enough green hydrogen that's not produced from fossil fuels without depending on russia). This isn't going to be easy and unlikely to happen at a large enough scale in the next 5 years.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/feb/23/europe-winter-...
-Nordstream 2 has a capacity to transport 55 billion cubic meters per year[1]
-The biggest LNG transport ship "Mozah" built by Samsung Heavy Industries can transport a equivalent of ~162 million cubic meters in a single load
This leads to a ~339,5 full loads per year needed to replace the pipeline volume. Nordstream 2 probably wouldn't run at full capacity initially but even at 50% utilisation it would be nearly impossibe to replace it with shipping.
I'd speculate the whole action is to force the West to a new deal with Russia, so they can balance China.
Are you talking the PLC or the Nazis?
If they are serious about partnering with the west, they should have embraced reforms and become a member of NATO. The fact that they haven't is indicative of Putin's plan to counter the west. It's more likely they will partner with China just because Putin isn't thinking beyond that. He's 70 after all and they have no effective playbook against China (ala Foundation of Geopolitics against the west).
They tried that in the 90s. There are two problems. They don't want to be a colony for Western powers. Russia is a collection of a few different nations. You have to hold it by a strong hand, otherwise you have a civil war e.g. Chechnya.
So they want to do it now on partner relations with Europe. Russia will provide, natural resources, transportation link to Asia, you can relocate polluting factories to Siberia, you get access to our market and labor. Also, you we will provide security and balance China. You don't need those pesky Americans. In return Russia wants, capital, tech and modernisation of the country.
So Europeans, do you want EU from Lisbon to Vladivostok or war?
trains and artic route.
The USSR lost the cold war. The fact that they want to have their cake and eat it too is the root of the issue. The compromise to be admitted into the western system is actually pretty mild, and there are many strong nations within the western framework. Russia would have no problems operating on a similar level as Japan or France if they gave up their desire for geopolitical hegemony.
I think any trust that Russia still enjoyed in the west is gone as of today. A few days ago the official Russian position was "Nobody is planning an invasion of Ukraine." Today, Russia has invaded Ukraine. This is not how you make deals.
I thought Putin was doing the show of power for domestic consumption where he'd embarass the West by actually withdrawing the armies slightly after he promised and it'd all end in a summit with both sides claiming they 'won', but he's gone well beyond that now.
Europe is easy to bully, it doesn't have a single voice and its pretty predictable which parts will have competing interests. China is not. Russia will lose a lot of its independence if it becomes beholden to China. That would be a bad endgame.
Europe is also beholden to public opinion that does not want increased energy prices. China doesn't care about that.
The major point of Nord Stream 2 was to remove this PoF.
https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/average-annua...
> No sane country builds new energy infrastructure not firmly anchored in renewables today.
Eh??
"China Is Planning to Build 43 New Coal-Fired Power Plants"
https://time.com/6090732/china-coal-power-plants-emissions/
"China, India, Indonesia, Japan and Vietnam plan to build more than 600 coal power units"
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jun/30/five-asi...
"COP26 aims to banish coal. Asia is building hundreds of power plants to burn it"
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/cop26-aims-banish-co...
There only is "China pledges to stop building new coal energy plants abroad" -- the last word matters.
Just look at Austria, very rich but obviously Russian run EU country. (latest prime minister got fired by Russians even though Russia cyberarmy helped him win the elections. They decided he was no longer as compliant, so they leaked data many years after elections, Russian scandals several years before that etc.). Raiffeisen bank in Austria, basically launders money for Russians over the last several decades, with no consequences to the chief officers.
Hungary is another good example.
Another Austrian neighbor, Croatia, not rich, and less influenced by Russians, had one of the biggest scandals ever when the biggest privately owned company in the Balkans (owned by a Croatian), that employs a massive amounts of Croatians, went bankrupt and could have been acquired by creditors (Sberbank and VTB Bank). I guess there was not enough Russian influence in politics and Croatian government put a new law immediately, so that this kind of takeover does not happen (Croatia nationalized the company).
Russia has quite a large reach into EU.
Actual source? This "russian disinformation" and "russian election manipulation" has zero credibility if you read and listen to anything other than CNN at this point. Please send me actual proof before making claims like this.
This is just nonsense. Austrian government is not by any means run "by the Russians". Russia has been trying to enlarge it's sphere of influence in the west for a while now (which is nothing exceptional geopolitically speaking) and has few retired politicians working in the Russian private sector (Schröder [DE], Schüssel [AT], Fillion [FR], etc.). But to say that Austria and others are "obviously run by the Kremlin" is a blatant lie.
Greets from Austria
For many of us in Europe, including Austria, peace with Russia is considered a very good thing, and a lot of us want it, having lived through the enmities of hate and spite that was hoisted upon us during the Cold War.
Imagine if, indeed, the economic powerhouse of Europe+Russia were allowed to happen. If only certain entities weren't so committed to profiting from the balkanization of everything, hmm...
Such naiveté begets the truth, which is that Americans falling for this trope really know nothing about Austrian political habits, whatsoever.
Kurz fell because Kurz was dumb and corrupt from the very beginning, and his party simply incompetent, and we are all glad to have seen him in the rear view mirror.
In fact, American agitprop'ers may not know this, but crediting Russia with Kurz' dismissal only makes us more willing to make deals with the Russkies.
If "Russian influence" is on the table, then so is "CIA influence".
Or wait, lets talk about "General Dynamics Influence", and yes, with a capital-I.
And then we shall proceed to the discussion of which particular entity has the most actual blood on its hands, of innocents, as rapidly as possible.
Try at least 2-3 decades.
Personally I'm still a firm believer in nuclear power.
For example, the Blue Castle project in Utah (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Castle_Project) started on the drawing board in 2007, started looking for contractors in 2016, hopes to start construction in 2023 and hopes to be fully operational in 2030. That is if construction is not delayed in any way, which seems unlikely given the schedule so far tbh.
The US alone has over 200 coal plants operating today, so even if the new nuclear plant would be on average twice as large you would need more than a hundred new nuclear power plants. It seems wildly unlikely that they could be constructed within three decades.
Also that is in the US alone, a country with a relatively large knowledge base surrounding all things nuclear. Most of the rest of the world has no chance of replacing even a fraction of their power generation needs with nuclear, so for them renewables will be the way to go.
But if they cared, they should be able to.
Hopefully other sanctions will also help. Cutting them off from the international banking system, for example.
But when the plants already exist and you shut them down because the Japanese decided to build one in a tsunami-prone seismic zone, hire a corrupt organization to operate it well beyond its intended service life, and install backup generators in the basement, or because the Soviets built one and operated it under the "Hold my vodka and watch THIS" school of engineering, well... those just aren't good reasons, and also not the kind of thinking I expect from the Germans.
France's modern plants should help, but they won't come online for years.
I am hopeful about sanctions but I am afraid Germans won't allow ones that actually work.
For instance in france’s energy budget nat gas is almost as large as the entire electricity production. The policy over the last few decades has been to put everyone on gas distribution networks and encourage switching furnaces (from furnace oil, tbf).
Even assuming all the gas plants are simple cycle peaking plants with horrid efficiency (say 20% which is extremely low even for peaking plants), electricity still would account for about 40% of germany’s nat gas consumption.
In reality, much as in france, the vast majority (~75%) of nat gas goes to heating.
From my stand point, and this will be very unpopular here, the push to rely on the unreliables (a better name for the renewables) has been toxic and is a destabilizing force in the world.
Building out grid level energy storage looks like a way better solution than hoping the countries which are allies now will remain so indefinitely.
I call them destablizing because the unjustified attacks on fossil fuels have delivered free countries into the economic hands of despotic regimes.
In addition, without renewables, the situation would be similar as Europe would still have near 100% fossil fuel energy production (except France).
Nuclear could potentially have changed things, but that's not related to the attack of fossil fuels. That's again politics and perception.
I agree than many times the "greens" cause more trouble than solutions, and that, again, is politics.
In the United States alone we would have to *sextuple* our renewable energy sources just to make up for our usage of fossil fuels. That is not something any country can do "rapidly", and even if it became a primary focus it would consume a significant portion of our GDP for years on end and be the largest infrastructure project the US has ever engaged in.
It seems almost ludicrous to categorize such a reaction as a "retaliation".
And less energy consumption, and nuclear.
We should be honest to ourselves - short of Western citizens dying on the battlefield, there's nothing of consequence the West can do. Russia exploited our weaknesses really well - our irrational hesitance of nuclear energy, our greenwashing of natural gas, our love for petrol-guzzling SUVs, kowtowing of our financial system to ultra-rich, profit-uber-alles of our corporations, hypocrisy of our diplomacy, etc.
That the US in particular has been extremely late to the table is unfortunate but hey - what else do you expect when policy is bought and paid for by incumbents and one of the to political parties are 100% owned by Fossil interests.
Like with China. Look: as a protest for the Uygurs, the US did not send… diplomats!
What a shame.