Much more troubling: Few people worldwide have the attention span and stamina to read a text of the length of an academic paper and engage its contents.
That this thread is for the moment mostly hurried comments desperate to control the message shows as much. And it's tightly related to inability to do strategic thinking.
Publish or perish has side effects, consequences, and pitfalls.
Sorting out which papers are bullshit, lean on scant evidence, were funded by organizations who want an outcome, or exist solely to meet a requirement for the author to advance towards a PhD is time consuming and almost never worth the effort.
That is ultimately why we pay people (civil servants, etc) to figure this shit out on our behalf when implementing regulations.
You don't need to read academic papers to know that Russia = evil. Eastern Europe has been parroting this for decades but Germany stuck its fingers in its ears and went "la-la-la-la, I can't hear you over the sound of my cheap gas brokered by our lord and savior, Gerhard Schröder, who's on the Kremlin's payroll".
Even after Russia's invasion of Chechnya in 1994 and 1999, and Russia's invasion of Georgia in 2008, and Russia's invasion of Crimea in 2014, nobody could have seen Russia invading another neighboring country again in 2022, it was a total shock for European politicians. /s
A lot of western countries, Germany first, believed that if we traded and opened up to those countries, they would naturally tend to adopt western values.
It turned out to be incorrect. China being an even better example. But it was not a crazy assumption at the time, and coming after the fact is hindsight 20/20.
Honestly, even knowing how things turned out, I am proud that the west tried.
You can't possibly tell me with a straight face that your argument is "Germany didn't know that Russia invading 3 countries was bad and it hoped Russia would come around if it just kept buying gas from them and pumping trillions in their economy which Russia spent on its military would make them more peaceful".
It's safe to assume that either Germany doesn't know when to take a hint that after 3 invasions, your trading partner is not gonna come around, or Germany was actively ignoring Russia's warmongering for it's own benefit.
Either way it looks bad on Germany and no made up excuses are gonna cut it.
Diplomacy is not black and white.
There was a Chechen Republic of Ichkeria that existed until getting slaughtered, occupied, and retrospectively written out of the books by Russia.
Yeltsin (and later Putin) was a baddie that West hoped to trade with, so they were willing to push aside the issue of Chechnya calling it an internal conflict.
But in reality the level of Russian war crimes was unparalleled, sometimes even worse than what's happening in Ukraine.
Internationally no high-ranking Russian officials or military officers were ever prosecuted or actually condemned for these war crimes.
Most countries have turned a blind eye and didn't act with urgency: https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/russia-programs/2020...
The US screamed so loudly that Nord Stream exploded.
The US has been screaming at DE since the 1980s, decades before fracking and LNG was a thing:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urengoy–Pomary–Uzhhorod_pipeli...
* https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/12/03/blinken-secretary-state...
And of course it’s not like AfD actually, exists, or that the German security apparatus is riddled with Russian spies and Nazis.
Nations are not single minded. Political parties, individuals, companies, diplomats, each might have their own particular interest.
But I remember not long ago, "trade and free market will bring democratic institutions" being a pretty popular opinion.
Germans like to say how much they learned from their history, but when shit got real they funded the aggressor and benefited from Putins corruption.
Or perhaps Germany couldnʼt hear them, because their actions spoke louder than their words – a majority of Eastern European countries had made themselves more dependent on Russian gas than Germany:
- Hungary: 110.4 percent
- Latvia: 100.1 percent
- Finland: 92.4 percent
- Estonia: 86.5 percent
- Czechia: 86.0 percent
- Slovenia: 81.0 percent
- Slovakia: 75.2 percent
- Bulgaria: 72.8 percent
- Germany: 58.9 percent
Meanwhile, Germany's gas imports were huge and you cannot leave 58.9 percent of your population to freeze in the winter anyway.
EDIT: Also, Finland has this in the laws:
> There is an alternative fuel obligation, so that in the event of a gas supply disturbance, other fuels can be immediately substituted.
It's as if they prepared for an event like this ;-)
In comparison, countries like Finland indeed got virtually all their gas from Russia, but that was only a few percent of total fuel consumption and couldn't be used to extort them.
The statistics disagree if you remember to compare per capita or per GDP. (Finland looks bad only if you include the refugee costs in a per GDP calculation - not many Ukrainians wanted to travel to Finland so far.) https://www.ifw-kiel.de/topics/war-against-ukraine/ukraine-s...
Also, one should take into account that the amount of unnecessary military hardware lying around is not the same in a country that is surrounded by Nato members vs a country that shares over thousand kilometers of border with the unhinged neighbour. Further, you might not be strategically able to reveal in public how much of your stock that acts as a deterrent you have given away while the war is going on.
But this doesnʼt address the point stated by GP as follows: “The point is whether Russia could extort countries (eg: prevent from sending military aid to Ukraine) or not”, proceeding with a comparison in which Germany is heavily dependent, Finland is not, which implies: Germany could be extorted e.g. to prevent it from sending military aid to Ukraine. And this is hardly tenable when “Germany was now Ukraine’s second-largest backer after the United States”.
As I conjectured, the events indicate at some effective extortion, but a psychological one, that is leveraged by both sides drawing contradicting conclusions from the same premises (which does not mean that both arguments are equally sound).
I certainly did not mean to imply that Finland looked bad, of course it looks excellent.
But it does, when you take into account the time dimension: Why did Germany provide this big military aid package only now? I think one credible hypothesis is that they didn't provide big support while there was fear of energy extortion and did provide it after the energy dependency crisis was averted.
A big issue for Ukraine has been that the equipment has arrived too late: first we let Russia bomb the country and then afterwards we provide air defence systems. First we let Russia fortify its positions and then afterwards we provide main battle tanks. These delays have caused both destruction and prolongation of the invasion.
Also, it's not only about Germany sending or not sending aid: the Central and Eastern European and Nordic countries have been quicker but they have had to wait for re-export permissions for equipment bought from Germany.
“they have had to wait”: Germany also had to wait for (Swiss) permissions, which blocked the transmission of anti-aircraft vehicles (Gepard). And while that was merely lost time, the prolonged negotiations in the case of Leopard 2 in the end meant more tanks (which were said to be less suited first, but are very welcomed by the Ukrainian forces). This episode, however, gave another glimpse into the actual mechanism that demands caution, precaution. Donʼt let this German tank go to war, or if you absolutely must, only in company with a tank from one of the allied powers. If something goes wrong, hindsight is 20/20, and who will be blamed? In fact: “Nearly a month after Berlin gave European allies permission to send German-made tanks to Ukraine, the flow of tanks so many leaders vowed would follow [if only Germany gives permission] seems more like a trickle.” E.g.: “Finland, where many outspoken members of Parliament led the calls for Germany to allow Leopard deliveries, announced on Thursday that it would supply three Leopard mine-clearing vehicles — but none of its estimated 200 Leopard main battle tanks.” https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/28/world/europe/ukraine-tank...
Coming back to what chrysler stated is the point at issue, one had to conclude that there are many more extorted countries.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB1046295978238979863
There is a pipeline from the Nord Stream terminal in Germany to the UK. Nord Stream is owned by Russia, Germany, France, and The Netherlands. Gas was resold to plenty of EU countries, including Eastern European ones.
Poland and Ukraine collected transit fees for Russian oil/gas long after Nord stream was blown up.
There was a general feeling in the early and mid-2000s that Russia was finally changing for the better. The economy was growing and the quality of life was improving for many Russians. While no one mistook Putin for a democratic leader, he wasn't particularly bad as far as semi-authoritarian leaders go.
The invasion of Georgia in 2008 was a turning point, because people didn't believe Putin would go to war to prevent the expansion of NATO. But it wasn't a particularly big shock, because military interventions as an extension of foreign policy were quite common in the 1990s and 2000s. It was more unpleasant with "their side" doing it, but as long as "our side" was also doing it, military interventions were a legitimate policy tool. International politics is pretty childish in this respect.
After the invasion, politicians had much less favorable views of Putin. But they continued dealing with him, assuming that he would act based on rational self-interest. The real shock in the 2022 invasion of Ukraine was not the invasion itself but the irrationality of it. If Putin could miscalculate his actions so badly, it made no sense to treat him as a rational actor anymore.
the people in the US/EU that were crying snot because russians were streaming gas burners running 24/7 while some Europeans had to equip their winter jackets in their homes.
the extreme amount of wet firewood being burned smoking up entire neighborhoods so that people would not freeze to death. Are the people inhaling that smoke better off? is it rational for them to cheer "putin man bad" (asserting that they did, i do not know if they did)