This is something that has been bothering me from the start of the so called SMO. Europe relied on gas flowing through Ukraine pipelines. Couldn’t Russia just have stopped the flow, and forgone the war?
This is something that has been bothering me from the start of the so called SMO. Europe relied on gas flowing through Ukraine pipelines. Couldn’t Russia just have stopped the flow, and forgone the war?
Why would that have stopped the war? Europe is still buying Russian oil through intermediaries despite more than a dozen rounds of sanctions.
No gas through Ukraine, no money for them either
No gas through Nordstream and Russia is still getting money from Europe for Russian gas. The point I am making is that cutting Russian gas delivery off from Europe has already been done and all it means is Europe pays even higher prices for Russian gas because they’re still buying it through middlemen. Cutting off direct petroleum supply to Europe has not and would not stop the war, that is exactly why the USA blew up Nordstream and forced Europe to sanction Russian petroleum.
As Europe is finding out, you can’t win a war by fucking your own economy voluntarily.