..
Scholz decides Europe can pay more for energy...
Germany makes decision on Nord Stream 2
The move comes after Russia announced it would recognize the two
breakaway Donbass republics
Germany will put an immediate halt to the certification of the Russian-backed Nord Stream 2 pipeline, Chancellor Olaf Scholz has announced, after Moscow recognized the two breakaway Donbass regions of Donetsk and Lugansk.
In a statement issued on Tuesday, Scholz said the green light cannot be given for the pipeline to begin pumping supplies in the light of the current standoff between Russia and Ukraine.
"Given Russia's latest action" the certification "cannot go ahead," Scholz told reporters. "This is now about taking concrete steps relating to the situation that we have seen now."
Just hours before, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky called on Europe to suspend the gas pipeline "immediately" after Moscow signed a deal recognizing the two breakaway Donbass Republics in Donetsk and Lugansk.
Construction on the pipeline, which is intended to link the gas fields of Siberia to consumers in Western Europe via a port in Northern Germany, was completed last year. However, it has been waiting for approval from Berlin's regulators to begin operations.
Last week, Ukrainian Prime Minister Denis Shmygal said that the delays to its approval were down to Kiev's lobbying efforts. “Today, we are successfully blocking the Russian hybrid gas weapon Nord Stream 2 and will continue to do so,” he claimed.
Ukrainian officials have consistently opposed construction of the pipeline, which would see supplies transported under the Baltic Sea instead of solely through the country's overland network of Soviet-built pipes. Kiev has said the project amounts to an effort to undermine European energy security, and warned it stands to lose billions of dollars in transit fees if Moscow were to turn off the taps.
Washington has previously said Nord Stream is a "threat" and imposed sanctions on companies involved in the construction. However, Germany had continued to support the project despite objections from Ukraine, the US and other nations, including Poland and the Baltic States.
The day before Scholz's announcement, Putin held a televised national address in which he said “I deem it necessary to make a decision that should have been made a long time ago” to “immediately” recognize both as sovereign states. The move, he said, was in response to years of fighting in Ukraine’s war-torn east and to Kiev’s attempts to “drag foreign states into conflict with our country” with its efforts to join NATO.
Leaders of the breakaway republics and officials in Kiev have accused each other of carrying out heavy shelling along the contact line for several days. Last week, Donetsk and Lugansk announced that they had begun evacuating civilians to Russia, amid what they claim is a sharp spike in hostilities, and have ordered the mobilization of all able-bodied men to be ready to fight in a potential conflict.
Ukraine rejects claims it is preparing to attack, with Aleksey Danilov, the secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, claiming that “there is an attempt to provoke our forces,” and that Kiev’s troops “can only open fire if there will be a threat to the lives of our service members.”
Gas price in Europe smashes all-time high
European futures have soared past $2,200 per 1,000 cubic meters on supply fears
European natural gas prices spiked above $2,200 per 1,000 cubic meters on Wednesday for the first time in market history. The escalating crisis between Russia and Ukraine has raised fears of supply shortages.
The April futures at the TTF hub in the Netherlands soared from around $1,500 to $2,226 per 1,000 cubic meters, or $213 per megawatt-hour in household terms by 09:30 GMT, hitting an all-time high, data from the London ICE exchange shows.
The spike in prices follows sanctions placed on Russia by a number of Western states amid Moscow’s military operation in Ukraine.
A huge increase in applications is raising the price by the minute, Kaushal Ramesh, senior analyst at Rystad Energy, told Vesti. He said it had also been affected by fears of supply outages due to possible damage to infrastructure in Ukraine, through which the majority of Russian gas is delivered to Europe, and the possibility of supply restrictions on Russian oil and gas.
==========================================================================================
Hungary weighs in on reasons for Ukraine war
Russia was not afforded security guarantees, says President Viktor Orban,
and energy cooperation with Moscow must continue
© Sputnik / Ivan Rodionov
War in Ukraine was inevitable, because the US and NATO didn’t provide the security guarantees required by Russia, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said on Thursday.
He added that “there were no arguments for curbing our energy cooperation with Russia,” despite the ongoing military conflict.
“NATO is steadily expanding eastward, and Russia likes it less and less. The Russians put forward two demands: Ukraine should declare its neutrality and NATO shouldn’t accept Ukraine. The Russians didn’t receive these security guarantees, therefore they decided to receive them through a war,” the PM explained in an interview with Hungarian outlet Mandiner.
It would have been so simple and easy for NATO/Washington to agree with those conditions. It would have made this war completely unnecessary. But they refused the conditions - yet they had to have known that they were pushing Russia into war. The question is why?
Last year, Russia demanded the US provide written security guarantees that NATO wouldn’t expand into Ukraine and Georgia. It also urged the American-led military bloc to scale back its provocative military activities near Russia’s borders. However, talks on the issue between Moscow and Washington ultimately proved fruitless.
Hungary has had the closest relations with Russia of all EU members in recent years, but the invasion of Ukraine had put Budapest in “a new situation,” Orban said. He condemned the Russian operation, urging the two sides “to get back to the negotiating table as soon as possible.”
"The whole of Europe” should now work to achieve peace between Moscow and Kiev, he added.
Orban said his country wouldn’t hamper the introduction of new sanctions against Russia by Brussels, because “the unity of the EU is of prime importance at this time.”
However, the long-time Hungarian leader insisted “there were no arguments for curbing our energy cooperation with Russia.”
“It’s obvious that Russia will keep existing after the war. And Hungary and the EU will have their interests even after the war,” he pointed out, asserting that “EU leaders have also stated that sanctions will not affect energy supplies from Russia, as this would ruin the European economy.”
Orban had visited Moscow for negotiations with President Vladimir Putin in early February, with the Russian leader subsequently revealing that their two nations had signed a deal that would allow Hungary to purchase Russian gas at a discount until 2036. Budapest has been buying it at five times cheaper than the European market rate, according to Putin.
Hungary made it clear on Wednesday that it would not be sending any offensive arms to the Kiev government and nor would it be allowing fellow EU member states to transit such equipment through its territory. Budapest was willing only to provide humanitarian assistance to Ukraine.
Russia launched what it termed its “special operation” in Ukraine last Thursday in order to “denazify” and “demilitarize” its neighbor. According to Moscow, it was the only way to end the bloodshed in the breakaway regions of Donetsk and Lugansk, and prevent Kiev from attempting to reclaim those areas by force.
Ukraine has denied any plan to mount a full-scale assault on the two republics, and blamed Moscow for waging an unprovoked war.
Leading experts warned NATO expansion would lead to conflict.
Why did no one listen?
From Kennan to Kissinger, Western foreign-policy thinkers saw NATO’s eastward march
was a dangerous game
Bradley Blankenship is an American journalist, columnist and political commentator. He has a syndicated column at CGTN and is a freelance reporter for international news agencies including Xinhua News Agency.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has provoked serious backlash around the world, particularly in the Western world – an understandable reaction against a war of aggression in violation of international law. However, it’s also true that this outcome had been predicted by the world’s foremost foreign-policy experts for decades.
Specifically, experts have consistently warned that NATO’s eastward expansion would provoke conflict with Russia. So, this begs the question, how did we get here if so many people warned about it? Before getting into the answer, here are some examples of those warnings.
For starters, the top American Russia scholar George Kennan, the man who laid the foundation for US Cold War foreign-policy strategy, said NATO’s expansion into Central Europe in the 1990s was “the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era.” He warned that expanding NATO would damage the US-Russia relationship so deeply that Russia would never become a partner and would remain an enemy.
That, of course, could well be the whole point of this exercise.
The US Ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1987 to 1991 penned an essay nine days before the invasion, answering the question of whether the brewing crisis was, at that point, avoidable. “In short, yes,” he explained. On whether it was predictable, “Absolutely. NATO expansion was the most profound strategic blunder made since the end of the Cold War.”
Leading international relations scholar John Mearsheimer gave an interview after the Russian invasion, explaining that the situation “started in April 2008, at the summit in Bucharest, where afterward NATO issued a statement that said Ukraine and Georgia would become part of [NATO].”
According to him, “The Russians made it unequivocally clear at the time that they viewed this as an existential threat, and they drew a line in the sand.” Mearsheimer discussed in the interview, as he has maintained for years on this issue, that the issue of Ukraine joining NATO is key to Russia’s core national security interests.
The famed Russian-studies scholar Stephen Cohen likewise warned in 2014, during that year’s conflict in Ukraine involving Russia, that “if we move NATO forces toward Russia's borders ... it’s obviously gonna militarize the situation [and] Russia will not back off. This is existential.”
Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, one of the most widely regarded American strategic thinkers of all time, said in a 2014 op-ed that “Ukraine should not join NATO.” This is because it would make Ukraine a theater in an East-West confrontation. He said that “to treat Ukraine as part of an East-West confrontation would scuttle for decades any prospect to bring Russia and the West – especially Russia and Europe – into a cooperative international system.”
There are many others, including former US Secretary of Defense William Perry, Russian-American journalist Vladimir Pozner Jnr., economist Jeffrey Sachs, former United Nations Under-Secretary-General Pino Arlacchi, former CIA director Bill Burns, former US Secretary of Defense Bob Gates and others listed by Arnaud Bertrand in a great Twitter thread on this topic.
With all of this out there, widely known and heavily discussed, we arrive back to that question: why? Well, it most likely has to do with controlling Europe and making sure that NATO itself doesn’t fall apart. In that sense, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has ensured this goal and then some.
I have been saying for many years that NATO has been constantly in search of a raison d'etre. As such they are the most dangerous entity in the world. Now they are risking WWIII for their own benefit.
Madrid will host a major NATO summit this June that will see the formation of the first NATO strategic concept document since 2010, which had been a major issue of contention both on the European continent and across the pond in Washington. It will be the alliance’s working strategic framework for at least the next decade and will clearly define its goals.
We had seen, prior to this, that Europe, particularly France, was pushing for a common European defense strategy – which, to be fair, was said to “complement NATO” but was so clearly in spite of it that Washington routinely resisted this stance. After actions by the US that rattled European leaders, particularly the AUKUS agreement, the administration of President Joe Biden made clear concessions that it probably didn’t enjoy.
This was clear from the read-out of a conversation between Biden and French President Emmanuel Macron in September 2021, which included the sentence, “The United States also recognizes the importance of a stronger and more capable European defense that contributes positively to transatlantic and global security and is complementary to NATO.”
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has seemingly rejuvenated NATO overnight and put Europe on high alert. This is evident in Germany’s foreign-policy pivot and the announcement that it will be increasing its military spending to over 2% of its GDP in direct response to the situation in Ukraine; Sweden and Finland having reportedly given consideration to joining NATO; and even Switzerland ending its neutral status and joining the EU’s sanctions on Russian assets.
The June summit in Madrid will undoubtedly elevate pro-NATO voices that would otherwise be regarded as extreme, discussion of more bifurcation of the international system and, no doubt, direct mentions of Russia – maybe even China – in the organization’s strategic concept document. All of this falls neatly in line with US foreign policy.
At the same time, this all has the benefit of increasing dependency on America – especially in the case of natural gas, with Nord Stream 2 now scrapped and Russia being choked economically – and on military hardware, which the military-industrial complex is surely happy about.
None of this minimizes Russia’s role in the conflict. It invaded Ukraine and, whatever the justifications, committed a violation of international law. But strategic thinkers in the West clearly predicted this would happen and, because of that, we may only assume that it fits into the larger agenda described here.
With that in mind, it’s clear that anyone who really supports the Ukrainian people must be principally against NATO’s expansion. EU residents will also suffer the fallout, both economically and perhaps even in their basic physical safety. But let’s remember that, until Russia’s invasion, Europe – mainly Germany and France – was doing all it could to diffuse the situation in spite of Washington’s brinkmanship.
===========================================================================================
