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Time to Get Real About Russia
Wishful thinking about Russia got the EU into this mess. Is it time to take off the rose-colored glasses?
“Energy policy is always power policy, is always interest policy, is therefore always security policy,” admitted Robert Hallbeck, Germany’s economics and climate minister, at a March 2022 conference in Berlin. “And if you look back, you almost can’t understand how we could be so blind to overlook that.”
“We knew, or we could have known, that it was not only stupid to place all our security policy cards on just one country, but that it also wasn’t a smart idea to put them on that particular country,” Hallbeck admitted. “We have to acknowledge that we acted wrongly in the past.”
With the Nord Stream 1 officially reduced to zero this week, the European Union is facing an increasingly grim outlook. Winter is coming; Russian imports of gas are not.
Russia’s largest oil and gas company, Gazprom, had been leading the EU and Germany on a merry chase over the past few months- routinely shutting down the vital pipeline, ostensibly for “maintenance”, then turning it back on again, only to reduce the flow of energy to a trickle.
With this latest move to shut down Russian gas supplies to Europe, completely and indefinitely, the gloves are apparently off. Moscow is dispensing with the political…