Replacing Russia with Qatar or Saudi Arabia (Jemen war?) is hypocritical.
Replacing Russia with the U.S. gives the U.S. too much power over the EU. It can be used as a bargaining chip in unrelated negotiations like privacy rights etc.
Replacing Russia with Qatar or Saudi Arabia (Jemen war?) is hypocritical.
Replacing Russia with the U.S. gives the U.S. too much power over the EU. It can be used as a bargaining chip in unrelated negotiations like privacy rights etc.
The fallacy in this reasoning is that with the money from the sales of gas Russia can - and is continuing to - arm themselves and conquer more land and kill more people. The Qatar is not engaged in killing thousands of people right now - if they were, we would not be buying oil from them, either, for the same reasons we are reducing our dependence on Russian gas.
Russia can always trade with China to have enough money for weapons. Anyway, even with all the Europe trade in the past decades they can barely advance 50 km in Ukraine.
I agree this is a problem, and hopefully its scale will be much lower in a few decades as we are moving away from fossil fuels. But even if we were consuming them rapidly as we are doing now, we are talking ca. 50 years for oil and natural gas. Whereas the danger from Russia is right now.
I agree with this.
Bullshirt
Russia has already explicitly used energy blackmail on EU nations, and is specifically pushing Nordstream, etc. pipelines to create such dependency. Most recently Russia broke it's contracts and demanded payment in Rubles in order to support it's currency after launching a genocidal attack on it's neighbor.
US policy has been explicitly AGAINST even allowing exports for decades, and only relaxed recently in order to support our EU friends.
Russia is an entirely unreliable supplier, the US is reliable.
Take your new troll account and go back to Leningrad, Boris.
Nordstream was built because Ukraine was an unreliable transit nation:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Russia%E2%80%93Ukraine_ga...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/jan/03/russia-ukraine...
In Putin's latest speech, he laid bare the goals - to re-enact Peter The Great and restore Russian lands', which basically include anything Russia wants, not merely Ukraine, but Poland, Lithuania, Sweden (which PTG took with the same excuse of it 'being Russian'.
Putin is literally working to rebuild a 19th century empire with 19th century war rules, genocide included.
If you are supporting this in any way, again, you are at best a Useful Idiot (in the Vladimir Lenin sense) or at worst a paid bot/troll.
Stop it
You literally are carrying Putin's water in this discussion.
People doing that are either fooled, or doing it deliberately. I did leave out the option that you could actually support anti-democratic authoritarian governments, because there is no enlightened thought path to that conclusion (& no Hobbes' writings do not get there), leaving us with only the two options, fooled, or trolling for a higher power structure. I'm not really interested in which.
There are many things one could have said here (e.g. PDOs -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_designation_of_origi... , regulations on hazardous materials, etc. ) , but privacy rights is not exactly one of them. The EU can and has been squashing those on its own just fine.