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Comment by throwaway5752 | Hacker News Reader

Let's be fair: this was a massive, strategic aim of the Russian state. Germany didn't randomly fall into this situation, there has been decades of influence, bribery, and espionage in Germany to develop that dependency. Kids may need to be reminded that Germany has only been reunified for 32 years and Berlin was divided from the USSR controlled East Germany by a physical wall. Russia is is so motivated to expand its borders that they are invading Ukraine.

It can be really tempting to look at this as bad for the US, but this is really just catastrophic for Russia. Decades of investment blown up, with one of the only real non-kinetic weapons that they have.

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I see a lot of poo-poohing of the influence aspect of this. The biggest example is the man at the top, Gerhard Schröder, the former Chancellor of Germany.

As Chancellor, he began the phaseout of nuclear energy and approved the Nord Stream gas pipeline directly from Russia to Germany.

Today he's:

1. The Chairman of Nord Stream, the company that owns the pipeline

2. The Chairman of Rosneft, the third largest company in Russia

3. A member of the board of directors of Gazprom, the largest company in Russia

You figure it out.

There is no need for influence, bribery, or espionage. It was simply the cheapest, most reliable source of energy. Russian gas "won" on the market. Regardless of what route Germany takes from here, it's almost certain they'll be paying more in energy costs.

Yes, if you rule out nuclear, than Russian gas was maybe the cheapest. Energiewende fail. They are so addicted to it that they even wanted to brand natural gas as a non greenhouse energy source. This was a central point of German decarbonization prior to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. And the culprits are mainly the OPEC lobby and the Greens. With 70% electricity generated from nuclear, France does not have this problem. It's one of the things that de Gaulle got right. The others were vive la republique and fight the enemy at all costs instead of making concessions and armistices.

> It was simply the cheapest, most reliable source of energy.

What about the nuclear reactors that DE chose to shut down for Russian natural gas?

You can thank huge Russia funded "green" movement for that

German were incredibly anti-nuclear long before. Blaming this on Russia is nonsense.

And nuclear is anything but cheaper, full green glasses down but just looking economically - stop that myth :(

Nuclear might not have been competitive against gas or coal but nothing was. Funny how everybody is willing to pay extra and throw decades of support behind solar/wind but not nuclear.

And nuclear if you actually produce them in larger numbers it actually gets quite cheap.

Had Germany spend all the money they put into solar/wind into nuclear 20 years ago they would be finishing 1-2 nuclear reactor each year right now.

DE doesn't want anything nuclear - they just vetoed to keep their existing nuclear plants online, even with their huge dependence on Russian gas -

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/german-ministries-say-c...

DE wants to instead setup other renewables, such as wind, at Tesla speed.

Comparing DE government bureaucracy to Musk's Tesla is ludicrous.

Suppose everyone was simple and conspiracies didn't exist. Where might Germany get its fossil fuels? Perhaps shipped across the entire Atlantic Ocean? Perhaps from Mars? Or perhaps from the major producer on its same continent?

The bottom line is that European integration is a natural phenomenon. It is natural to have strong economic ties within one's neighborhood. You don't need a decades long conspiracy to explain basic economic advantage.

However, European/Eurasian integration is an existential problem for the one superpower that isn't part of Eurasia. Therefore we get a lot of chaos, misinformation, and artificial divisions.

Germany does need energy, and I actually give German leadership the benefit of the doubt, that they sincerely believed rapproachment with Russia was possible and Nord Stream 2 was a good faith endeavor. Sadly Russia ruined that impression, it required no work on the part of the United States to do so.

> Sadly Russia ruined that impression, it required no work on the part of the United States to do so.

The State Department would strongly disagree with you. Victoria Nuland recently gloated that they have spent over $5,000,000,000 supporting anti-Russian movements in Ukraine in the post-Soviet era.

And, impressively, all that money didn't work to stop the project until Russia started the Ukraine offensive in February.

Not even close.

> Where might Germany get its fossil fuels?

How about nuclear?

https://thebreakthrough.org/blog/the-true-face-of-the-anti-n...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26603464

Gas is used firstly for heating, then in the chemical industry in Germany.

heating with electric powered heat pumps would be way more efficient

Actually you do not need nuclear for this. The problem is not nuclear here but to that Germany messed up setting up a fiscal mechanism trying to boost renewables (by introducing the so called EEG Umlage). The problem is that electricity (even green) was more expensive than it needs to be (particularly compared to gas) and the incentives were fading to invest into renewables. Nuclear power is no option in German simply because we could not reach any national consensus about the waste which would be a prerequisite.

Apparently Germans have no problem with huge quantities of unconfined waste from coal, but tiny quantities of confined waste from nuclear fission(which can be recycled) is the concern? This is not rational.

France uses a lot of electricity for heating and it’s not going great it would seem, since a lot of their nuclear power-plants are down for maintenance.

> Kids may need to be reminded that Berlin was divided from the USSR controlled East Germany by a physical wall

They should also definitely remember what they did to cause this.

What did the East Germans do that their fellows in the U.S./British/French occupied zones did not do?

Their own 80286 clone?

I think that was a bit later, but fair point ;-)

When you put it like that, one almost has to feel sorry for Germany, bravely fighting influence, bribery and espionage every step of the way only to fall prey in the end to the Russian state which maliciously supplied the German industry with gas.

But this is not at all bad for the US, it’s great! Russia is isolated and weakened and the EU is strangulated by yet another wave of refugees and weakened economically, becoming even more dependent on the US for security.

I think that https://ceres.georgetown.edu/research/student-projects/geopo... is a fair assessment. I would add https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/dec/13/russia.germany, also. It is plainly clear that the current Russian leadership is expansionist in nature, because they are killing thousands of people in a former satellite state to reestablish prior borders.

This is definitely a less than zero-sum environment. Russia would have been better off not invading Ukraine, along with Europe and the US. A peaceful and international law abiding Russia would be a stronger and richer Russia.

The US doesn't want to have a strong Europe Russia relationship. That's the whole reason behind this conflict. The US started to bribe everyone in Ukraine and even forced a coup in 2014. History of the US destabilising regions is very evident. They are good at it.

That is a way of looking at it without nuance. Russia falsified the elections in the East in 2004 and tried to murder Yushchenko. They created a problem in western Ukraine by themselves, which precipitated the revolution in 2014. Since Russia is profoundly gifted at domestically blaming the west for their own problems, I can see how it would seem like the US forced a coup.

Perhaps Russia shouldn't invade their neighbors. It seems to make their neighbors not like them.

The US would definitely prefer that this invasion not happen. It destabilizes too much of the world.

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