Aceris
3122
But it turns out you can invade another country and Germany and Italy still want to buy your gas anyway.
I will certainly agree that it’s frustrating, but what else can they do in the short time?
As I’ve always said, Russia is actually quite considerate about Western interests. Putin thinks Ukraine and other regions are not actually part of Western interests and it’s just empty talk. For now, it seems he’s correct in this assessment and a lot of European leaders see little reason to quarrel with a convenient kleptocratic resource extraction operation.
MrGrumpy
3125
Iran maybe? (I just googled “Iran natural gas”). Of course that means the US lifting sanctions but seems something that can be reasonably done (yes, Iran is a hellish regime, but then so are the Saudis.)
According to BP statistics, Iran has the world’s largest reserves of natural gas and its fourth-largest reserves of oil. Its strategic geographic position makes it capable of supplying these resources to Europe , its Middle Eastern neighbors, and South and East Asian countries
From twitter, a short thread from one Ukrainian on fleeing to Poland (Poland has opened their border to Ukrainian refugees.)
I’ll be the first to crap on Germany’s energy and defence policies, but let’s not pretend that the Biden administration is acting any differently by also excluding energy from their sanctions packet. Has the UK done so?
Aceris
3127
The UK pain point is finance, which appears to be included. I don’t know what the US pain point is - I’m not sure there is one.
Really though, I’m just angry after 6 years of being lectured - including by posters here - about the virtuous peace-loving European project.
The time to solve the problem was in the last years, there’s no solution for now, only for years in the future, unless the invasion goes so poorly that Russians decide Putin needs to inspect some windows.
No NATO country is going to go into Ukraine, we can theorycraft all we want, he wouldn’t do it, he would, he’s dying and doesn’t care if he leaves behind an irradiated mess, it’s all a crafty plot, etc, etc, who knows.
Probably the “best” that can possibly happen is for weapons to keep being “stolen” from Western militaries and somehow show up in the hands of Ukranian rebels, those dastardly fellows, but these things happen, you know how it is, the weapons went on vacation right at the border.
And Putin is probably correct that sanctions won’t last much longer than 2 years, unless the US votes “right” and Europeans decide that it’s better to pay money now than blood later.
Aceris
3130
This is very good, especially in explaining why more wasn’t done to support Ukraine earlier and why NATO intervention is a non-starter:
Stop sidetracking it all to a false dichotomy. It’s not the question if the world is going to start the nuclear war over Ukraine. EU countries are afraid to impose sanctions that will harm their fashion and diamond industries or to seize the property of Russian officials who keep their families outside of Russia.
Don’t disagree, just don’t think that will solve the problem right now.
But yes, EU needs to decide that Russian money isn’t going to be available as long as Russia is an enemy of democracy.
Dejin
3133
It was an interesting thread, but he’s not a Ukrainian. He’s a US citizen. As far as I can tell he’s some kind of independent “journalist” — I put that in quotes, since I don’t know if he’s actually working for an actual publication (if he is, he doesn’t allude to where his stuff is actually published other than social media), so hard to say what is training is.
Here’s another tweet from him on another Twitter account (which has the same Ukraine to Poland story on it). He seems to have 3-4 of them for different topics, all explicitly linked together.
Yes, sanctions wouldn’t solve anything in 2008, or in 2014, and they won’t instantly solve the issue now. It’s even better to pretend that Russia is a perfect hive mind that doesn’t care about sanctions at all, and give them an alien unfathomable rationale to restore past borders no matter what. It’s not that hard to explain to yourself why nothing can be done so nothing should be done.
Dejin
3135
I was assuming that the Biden administration excluded energy specifically for the Europeans, because that’s clearly what Germany wants. Although it could be an attempt to keep inflation down in the US as well I suppose.
Have you seen anything definitive on why it was excluded?
I’ve only seen attempted explanations around inflation and price shocks, but I have no idea what the acutal motives are. With Europe and particularly Germany there is no question about it and it’s reasonable to assume that Biden was taking that into account.
Aceris was talking about the respective pain points of the countries issuing the sanctions above. On the receiving end, Russia’s pain point is certainly energy, so it just seems odd that the countries less reliant on Russian imports would exclude it, even if the response looks less unified and other sanctions have bigger effects. US oil imports aren’t huge yet not insignificant and Gazprom’s subsidiary has a decent share of the UK commercial gas market, but it’s not sourced exlusively from Russia. They could still be hit by the next bundle of sanctions.
SeaGreen
3138
Wow. Plus a barrel roll to celebrate! Did I just see that?
As a practical matter, is it excluded? It’s going to be hard for anyone in the US to buy Russian energy exports without transacting with / through one of the interdicted banks, isn’t it? I genuinely don’t know what the announced sanctions actually do I guess.
I dunno. I deleted it because several people are saying it’s fake.
This helped me understand it a bit better:
SeaGreen
3142
Huh. Someone has time to fake a Ukrainian jet shooting down a Russian one.
