I am guessing the Baltic countries are hit hard by the Russia sanctions and the lack of cheap energy and food imports that has to come from somewhere else now.
But then, as Estonian prime minister said recently - sure, gas is expensive, but freedom is priceless.
Typical politicians excuse, tbh. It's not like this has any relation to actual freedoms, only bs political slogans.
As much as I also hate political slogans, at least I'm not seeing a problem with this one given the context.
Europe is just now seeing the effect of being less free than it's population thought it was.
Sure it sucks when one invades another one and there are reasons to prefer one vs another (eg. I'd rather be in EU than in Russia or China; I'd rather be in the Bahamas than in EU) but the people's freedom is limited under any government.
I used to think that all we need in Government is fresh wind which will solve most our problems, but I'm realizing that age isn't by itself either the problem or the solution. See Biden for old age or Europe for young age destructive leadership. Apparently not all wind is fresh and some of it is rotten and smells like sewage.
I'm completely baffled at how people cannot comprehend basic co-dependencies in the economies, supply chain or whatever other part that is happening. The whole "we need to suffer to show a moral lesson" is easy for people to say that have had nothing to sacrifice and never had to work hard for anything in their life while never in history have so many people dropped out of the middle class in European societies.
EDIT: Don't drink your own kool-aid, is a good summary I've been given about the whole situation. European leaders massively overestimating their own importance and capability in the world(both economic and military) based on their own inflated GDP numbers and MIC commercials.
EDIT 2: It's unfortunate that even in such a platform there is no rational thinking about something that is objectively true based on propaganda that actually came from the other side. "Russia is this" "Russia is that".
Facts are still facts.
You need fertilizer to feed people. Fertilizers are byproducts of Gas production. Fertilizer prices have been rising because of dis-incentivization of hydrocarbons. Nuclear is still a lot cleaner than most of the green energy alternatives. It didn't start in February 2022 even though the white house would like you to believe that[1].
Even the Ombudsman for human rights of Ukraine that was recently fired for constantly lying, said that she has been lying about Russian war crimes to turn public opinion against Russia[2].
EDIT 3: The US DoJ used the FCPA(Foreign Corrupt Practices Act) to threaten the Alstom leadership to sell off to GE. GE then buys the nuclear business and dismantles its plants in 2019 contrary to previous promises[3]. For all the talk of "oh we'll just buy it back", it's unclear what exactly is being bought back, how much it costs to rebuild capabilities that were destroyed and how much of the IP is actually sold back. My guess is, very little. It's odd that people act like it's just a little blip, when it's very clearly an geopolitical attack on one of the most important parts of french infrastructure.
[1] https://agrilifetoday.tamu.edu/2022/01/12/report-analyzes-re...
[2] https://lb.ua/news/2022/06/03/518875_lyudmila_denisova_azovt...
[3] https://www.entreprendre.fr/alstom-general-electric-le-piege...
Sure, but you also can't help chaotic, random events taking place that make any potential plans to do that go up in smoke. The alternative in this specific issue (i.e. not standing up to Russia) is likely just further dependency on oil/natural gas from Russia and eventually just being outright colonized because you are so dependent that you can't resist. Dropping off even at a high cost protects Estonian sovereignty.
Georgia was invaded in 2008 [1].
> don't deploy NATO weapons and feel okay?
Estonia and other countries near Russia historically didn't really have a ton of NATO weapons deployments specifically because NATO wasn't intent on aggravating Russia. Training exercises from time to time because they're allies but that's about it. Troop buildups and weapons deployments have strictly been in response to the war in Ukraine which was launched by Russia. Sovereign states have the right under international law (law that Russia signed by the way) to choose their own defense arrangements and conduct their own affairs.
Maybe it's not a failure to understand. Maybe it's a symptom of the world-wide denial-of-service attack against the very concept of democracy. It doesn't cost much to pay someone to make government look bad. If you're an autocrat, it's kind of a no-brainer.
Those countries reside on the border of Russia and logistics in operations were fairly easy and cheap. That fueled the business and money flow for may years.
Check out https://data.stat.ee/profile/country/ee/?locale=en. Russia was the second biggest trading partner, having Finland as the first. Surprisingly, if you check the trading structure of Finland, it's mostly the same Russian goods.
Russia accounts in 2B trading balance of Estonian import. This is a lot for a small country. Pretty much from the beginning of 200x the most money there were made either on raw re-export of Russian goods or processing and exporting.
If you have an idea of how to replace those 2B without rising costs tremendously, please share.
So much of modern political history is taking the economic gains for granted and assuming they will stay consistent (or only be a minor inconvenience) despite an endless march of downward pressure on many of the things that made us productive and progress.
For a long time the only thing that has masked it is the gains from globalization (even though the a big percentage of the returns often only went to megacorps and the well connected). But that will either reach its limits or conflicts will disrupt it. Then we see the costs of crippling of industries, getting rid knowledge, or misalign incentives.
That is misleading. The nuclear facilities were not sold to GE, only Alstom Power Systems, which engineers turbines. (The nuclear engineering part was never sold.) Furthermore, it was sold for $13B and is being rebought by the French EDF €175M.
Other oil has gone up so much because everyone is switching off Russian oil. Russian oil is not going up. So it's actually not a bad time to be a Russian oil consumer...
Anyway it's a very bad time to be a Russian oil consumer, because you'll be funding an unprovoked invasion and the countries that have sanctioned Russia may not want to deal with you.
An alternative view is that Russian oil and gas is not cheaper, but that it has extra costs which are not directly reflected on its official price. If you could put a number on the "moral cost" (funding an unprovoked invasion) and the "pariah risk" (other countries might not want to deal with you anymore if you buy Russian oil), and add that number to the official price of Russian oil and gas, there's a good chance that the result is exactly the price you get for non-Russian oil and gas on the global market.
Only in public media. Under the radar, they will still import Russian oil
Huh, if only they could have invested enough in their local energy sector, through I don't know ... NUCLEAR!, to keep their industry energy independent of Russia, and not shut down its few remaining nukes in the middle of an energy crisis just to appease an outdated political ideology like an absolute dunce, causing energy prices across EU to further skyrockets as Germany had to compensate its internal deficit by buying from the rest.
There's a reason people undeservingly vented their frustration on Germany at Eurovision this year.
Now there is a price crunch for LNG tanker charters further pushing up prices. Also it's so disingenuous. Indians are now refining Russian oil, selling it back to Europe but Eurocrats and lying politicians get to pretend they're going off hydrocarbons.
Most of the European companies adopted the new scheme within their current contracts, so it was a technical thing. Russia just needed to be paid in currency that can not be stolen by some lunatic government.
Even freezing of central bank accounts is basically the unilateral unlawful change of contract.
Finland broke the contract with russian railroads, with russian electric providers, it cancelled the contract with RosAtom.
Additionally it started the process of joining NATO, which effectively breaks the peace treaty of 1948.
If you fuck up and get your bank account frozen that does not mean that you don’t have to pay your morgage or that you can pay it with monopoly money.
Also there is a big difference between freezing access to a bank account and taking ownership of the funds.
No it’s not so big, because freezing can be unlimited in time and you can’t use that money. What point of having money on account if you can not use them? These are just numbers on the screen.
If your account can be frozen any time by the bank, it means you don’t really own the money, and the bank is not trustworthy.
The world (EU and US included) is heavily dependent on Russian nuclear imports and technology. Here is an in-depth article on why this is so difficult to overcome:
https://thebulletin.org/2022/05/five-reasons-that-russias-nu...
I mean, lets take a 20-story building, the amount of heating energy it consumes is really high, especially during winters. So you probably would need a soccer-field size heat exchanger in order for the heat to be extracted from the ground.
I bet it will also use quite a lot of electricity to compress the transporting liquid.
As I understood, drilling deep is quite expensive and, comparing to centralized heating stations working with gas for instance, the thermal output does not allow building heat factories. In example they state that they needed 8 500-meter holes for 4 houses and only 64 apts. So they are talking about typical Scandinavian 4-floor buildings, which are as well A-class insulated.
It stands nowhere near to typical buildings of East Berlin for instance.
https://www.worldstopexports.com/lithuanias-top-import-partn...
Lists Russia as the largest trading partner for Lithuania. I guess that would be case for the other Baltic countries as well.
Killing off that trade would surely spike inflation.
Is that a fact? I know that Lithuania doesn't buy Russian oil and gas directly, but it always seemed to me that it is still the same Russian oil and gas, just through an intermediate supplier.