European Energy Crisis and the Fall of Nato

New readers should know that my Substack posts are dedicated to surveillance of matters related to a central premise, and that premise, put at its simplest, is that the collective West, made ever more desperate and ruthless because of its unsustainable debt load, is attempting to beat back the multiple forces of multipolarity. It is currently doing this on three main fronts: against Russia over the proxy excuse of defending Ukraine; against Iran over the proxy excuse of defending Israel; against China over the proxy excuse of defending Taiwan. But there is no limit to the number of fronts that the West will entertain.

Debunking the Trenin Scenario

My headline, of course, is a tad extreme, although we do face a real energy crisis that, if allowed to play out, will further cripple Europe and benefit the US, with uncertain long-term consequences for Russia.

I will get to this in a moment, but want first to pick up on the implications of recent commentary over an article by a respected Russian analyst, Dmitry Trenin (see this coverage by RT here: Trenin), who sees a likely end to the Ukraine conflict taking the form of a tripartite Ukraine: (1) the east, already integrated in effect, into the Russian Federation; then (2) a New Ukraine, presumably based in Kiev, one that maintains relatively cordial relations with Russia and that has accommodated all of Russia’s main demands (i.e. Istanbul Plus); and then (3) a rump Ukraine to the west - presumably headquartered in Lvov - which would essentially be controlled by a NATO-blessed consortium of Romanian, Hungarian, Polish (and, I would add), even German troops.

That, at least is my understanding. The merit of this vision is that it does provide a buffer - the New Ukraine based in Kiev - between Russia and NATO. The problems with this vision are the reasons why I don’t believe Trenin’s prediction will come about. (But, who knows - I didn’t forsee the SMO, nor the fall of Syria, and had been persuaded think that Hamas and Hezbollah would be able to put up much greater resistance to Israel than they appear to have done). They are, first, that Putin has always insisted that Ukraine be entirely neutral, and that it should never be allowed membership of Ukraine whether directly or indirectly.

I don’t see how the idea of a rump Ukraine in Lvov under the control of NATO forces and the corps of Ukraine’s remaining neo-fascist Banderites comes anywhere close to meeting Russia’s first and most important condition. What it does is to allow NATO to rebuild its forces for as long as it deems necessary, possibly over time, to engineer a reunion with the New Ukraine in Kiev.

So, frankly, I just don’t believe Russia is going to accept this. But then, one might say, so what? If NATO cannot rebuild its anti-Russia forces on the territory of the rump, then why cannot it do so in Poland or Romania or Moldava? (This is assuming that Romania is going to survive the revolutionary conditions [see below] that its imbecile elites are now establishing with the US). Or on any other part of NATO. (I expect that Hungary and Slovakia would keep their distance well away from the imbroglio).

Destroying NATO

The only satisfactory outcome for Russia is the destruction of NATO. This could come about indirectly from the economic destruction of Europe - in part because of a continuation of the energy crisis and the higher prices to be paid by Europe for oil and gas and for US LNG, a crisis that is now brewing.

More generally the fall of NATO would come about because of the recessionary and deindustrialization impacts on Europe of its misguided, misunderstood and fanatical advocacy for “Project Ukraine.”

This is a sickness due in large measure to the declining quality and intellectual strength of the European plutocracy. It is also due to an unspoken agenda of action for an aggrandizement of the European Union bureaucracy and the further decline of national sovereignty in Europe (reportedly subscribed to by none other than the UK’s King Charles, whose health afflictions, it would seem, are not merely physical) that would entail greater centralization of control, heightened repressive terror of the Liberal Authoritarian oligarchy, and greater powers of taxation and military capability.

All this to be mixed up together with Trumpian disillusion with the expense to the US of remaining a part of NATO or, at least, a Trumpian insistence that Europe pays for more of the expense of NATO (something it will find very challenging in conditions of perpetual recession). The purpose would be to release Trump to lose the USA’s next great and foolish Quixotic war, the one against China, and by way, possibly, of Iran, and to lose the failing and yet-to-be-failed color revolutions around the world.

The Multi-Polar Approach

The only way in which this fate of what has become an odious and totally unnecessary incubus, NATO, can be avoided, I think, is a genuine internationally-agreed, UN-backed, BRICS-backed, consensus as to a new global order along the principles that China has previously outlined as the basis for a settlement of the Ukraine conflict and which include a law-based international order (not the arbitrary rules-based order of Washington), firm commitment to national sovereignty and non-intervention, and to which, I would suggest, should be added a root-and-branch reform of the UN itself and its various institutions many of them at this moment firmly coopted by Washington-engineered “globalist” ideology.

No Gas for Ukraine

The new European energy crisis was initiated by Ukraine’s insistence that it will cut off the supply of Russian gas to Slovakia (unless, I believe we are entitled to say, Slovakia grabs a bribe of $500 million and supports the cause of Ukraine’s bid for membership of NATO, something to which many NATO members are in reality opposed). This is the situation as of January 1, 2025.

This is evolving at a time when European gas reserves are falling, a string of warm winters is ending, and Europe is struggling to kick-start industry back towards 2021 levels of productivity.

Europe has been able so far to survive its reckless decision on behalf of Washington in February 2022 to stop buying Russian gas. The decision was executed immediately by Poland which shut off the supply of Russian gas to Europe along the Europe-Yamal pipeline from the Yamal peninsula and western Siberia. That gas also passed to Germany, and the Polish decision to stop the supply was a move of great destructive moment to Germany. Yet its taps can be turned back on at any moment, unlike those of Nord Stream that were sabotaged by the US at Biden’s request. The Nord Stream pipelines, by the way, evaded Ukraine, and their destruction heightened Russian dependence on Ukrainian transit.

Exemptions from Europe’s decision to wean itself off Russian gas were allowed for many European countries, including Slovakia, Hungary, Moldava, Austria and Italy. Europe has also continued to buy Russian gas from other sources, including the Turkstream network controlled from Istanbul, and it has bought European gas from middle men, including Indian suppliers who buy the gas directly from Russia delivered by Russia’s “shadow fleet” of hundreds of ships. These evade European sanctions by buying their insurance outside of London’s near-monopoly on shipping insurance. This fleet, as I have noted in recent days, is currently under attack by NATO sabotage operations.

European countries have also been buying sales of Russian LNG gas that until recently had not been sanctioned. But in the final days of the Biden administration the US-dominated regime of sanctions warfare is being extended to Russian LNG sales and to sales of Russian oil.

The cost of LNG is far higher than that of pipeline gas. All this would be beneficial to the USA, at least in the short term, and the US is becoming more important as a source of LNG for Europe. But the US must also worry about the inflationary impact of higher gas prices within the US, and also about what appears to be a tailoring off of the “shale revolution,” based first and foremost in Canada. There simply is not enough US gas, nor enough from any other source, including Qatar, that can compensate for the loss of Russian gas.

This situation therefore is one of considerable scarcity and under condictions of scarcity prices must go up. A lot.

At the recent Eurasian Economic Union summit, Russian president Vladimir Putin explained the ramifications of the decision by Ukraine to shut off the supply of Russian gas that travels through Ukraine to Slovakia. Slovakia is on the front line of this conflict because it is the first of existing European customers for Russian gas to have to renew its contract with Gazprom. But others must follow.

Russian gas until now and throughout the war has arrived to Ukraine from Sudzha in Kursk (currently under Ukrainian control, but maybe for only one or two more months as even Bloomberg now acknowledges) and to a station, Sokhranivka, in eastern Ukraine that is now under Russian control. Ukraine has refused to continue taking gas into its network from the station in Sokhranivka in eastern Ukraine.

And now, Ukraine has announced that as of January 1st it will not renew its “transit contract” with Russia’s Gazprom.

Ukraine has belatedly realized that this will also create a big problem for Ukraine itself. This is because of a “reverse flow” mechanism that Ukraine had established with the European customers for its supply of gas that it had originally purchased from Russia and carried across Ukraine to Europe. Formally, the notion of “reverse flow” suggests that some of the gas that is taken by European customers is sent back up the pipeline for Ukrainian consumption. In practice, what this really means is that European customers buy more gas than they need and allow Ukraine access to some of this. It is another way, it seems, in which Europe has been subsidizing Ukraine throughout the war.

Since Russia will have no market left for the gas it has up until now been delivering to Ukraine for European consumption, it logically has no reason to continue supplying the gas.

Ukraine had proposed a solution to this problem in the form of a “middle man” or consortium that would buy the gas from Russia at the Sudzha connection and then sell it on to European customers at the borders of Ukraine with Europe. However, this would increase the overall cost of the gas to Europe because two contracts rather than only one would now be involved. Even so, there would be another problem arising from the long-term nature of Gazprom contracts, some of which run up to 2030. These would need to be renegotiated and this process could take considerable time.

And then there is another, big, problem. When Ukraine closed the movement of Russian gas through Sokhranivka, it also sued Russia for non-supply (!). This of course is total idiocy. But Ukraine’s case has gone to a court in Stockholm which, like nearly all European institutions, legal and other, is existentially prejudiced against Russia and has always favored Ukraine. The Stockholm court would almost certainly favor Ukraine’s idiotic suit, and impose some silly, unbelievably large penalty on Russia and would require European customers for Russian gas to pay the money not to Gazprom but to Ukraine.

Naturally, Russia says No Way Jose! Ukraine will simply have to do without Russian gas, and Russia might conceivably decide that since the Ukrainian pipelines are no longer carrying Russian gas then they should be destroyed by Russia, making it very difficult fro Ukraine to distribute supplies from alternative sources. Ukraine could receive gas from Europe, but Europeans will already be paying much more for their gas and struggling to acquire sufficient quantities of it to meet their own domestic requirements.

Fading Color in Color Revolution

Georgia’s departing (and French national) president (largely a ceremonial post), Salome Zourabichvili, who over the past months emerged as the leader of the country’s pro-Western movement and claimed that she would not vacate the presidential palace has today said in a speech outside the presidential palace that she will leave office voluntarily. She called the inauguration of her replacement, Mikheil Kavelashvili, “a parody” and described the governing party as “scared, illegitimate, sold out, sanctioned and angry.”

In other words, the color revolution has failed. The election that brought to power Georgian Dream was legitimate, its legitimacy endorsed by a large body of international observers, despite the characteristically specious arguments of the US and EU-backed oppsition for whom no violent opposition to democracy for the cause of democracy is too violent.

As for Romania, we have a very useful update from Kit Klarenberg at Global Delinquents, picking up from the decision on December 6 of Romania’s constitutional court to inexplicably overturn first round results of the country’s November 24th presidential election. The ruling was made mere days before a runoff in which Calin Georgescu would likely have won handsomely. The court had days earlier signed off on the results of the first round. But then Bucharest’s security apparatus released reports intimating, on the basis of no evidence whatsoever, that Georgescu’s victory might have resulted from a wide-ranging, Moscow-sponsored influence campaign, delivered via TikTok.

The foreign entity that is manipulating Romania is not Russia but NATO.

Georgescu campaigned on a traditionalist, nationalist platform and he opposed continued Romanian involvement in and backing for the Ukraine proxy war. Klarenberg reports that the TikTok campaign that purportedly boosted Georgescu had in fact been financed by Romania’s National Liberal party to harm the National Liberal party’s arch nemesis, Social Democrats.

No evidence of Muscovite funding, let alone support, for Georgescu has ever emerged.

Romania hosts multiple US missile facilities, and a giant NATO military base with a view to changing the “balance of power” in the West’s favour. Klarenbergu cites a BBC report that, while being anti-Georgescu:

“acknowledged immense “fatigue” with Romania’s doggedly pro-Western political establishment widely abounds among the local population, who harbour an ever-growing number of completely legitimate grievances, entirely unaddressed in the mainstream. By contrast, the British state broadcaster recorded, Georgescu not only spoke openly and passionately about these manifold problems, but offered concrete solutions for tackling them…

The BBC further noted Georgescu’s “pledge to Make Romania Great Again helped him perform particularly strongly among the vast Romanian diaspora.” Given Bucharest’s mass depopulation in recent years, significantly assisted by EU membership, this is hardly surprising. “Many who left because life was so tough are now getting by abroad rather than prospering,” the British state broadcaster observed. Meanwhile, in Bucharest, costs of basic goods are “climbing at the fastest rate in Europe.” An expat supporter of Georgescu forcefully declared:

“He’s corrupt? He’s with Putin? No, he’s not. He’s with the people. With Romania. Georgescu is a patriot. He wants peace, not war, and we want that too. Someone wants something good for his country and they won’t allow him to do that…Maybe he’ll be in prison in months and for what? For nothing…We feel lost right now, without hope.”

In the weeks since Georgescu’s victory was vetoed, it has been announced that further scores of foreign NATO troops will be dispatched to Bucharest, in explicit response to “the evolution of the security situation in the Black Sea region.” On December 12th, the Romanian government abruptly greenlit long-mooted, highly controversial legislation providing for the country’s military and all its “weapons, military devices and ammunition” to come under total foreign control and direction at any time, without a formal state declaration of emergency, siege, or war. In other words, NATO would have unilateral power to commandeer Bucharest’s armed forces, at its behest. A useful capability indeed, as the nearby Ukraine proxy war careens towards total collapse, and overt foreign involvement is openly mulled.

Syria

Picking up from my post yesterday on the utterly predictable escalation of new violence in Syria as a result of a jihadist invasion backed by Turkey and the US, the New York Times today reports that Syria’s new administration has stepped up a campaign of murderous revenge against members of the former Assad regime.

These, because they were members of a government of which Washington disapproved, are treated as “unworthy victims,” in the language of the classic Herman and Chomsky formulation of US media propaganda.

In the miserably colluding language of an imperial media pansy, this is said to signal that the terrorist regime “would act with a heavy hand against people it claims are challenging its ability to impose law and order.” So the overthrower of a legitimate government is said to be worried about its ability to impose law and order.

Remnants of what the New York Times calls “Assad militias” (in reality Syran Arab Army soldiers) had been arrested in the coastal Latakia Weapons and ammunitions were confiscated. (One might inquire about the Syrian Army weapons that the US is seizing from Syria in the hope of getting them to Ukraine within the next six months?).

The report concedes that a “human rights organization has raised alarms about the way the transitional government was going after Assad loyalists, saying it was carrying out arbitrary arrests.” An attempt to arrest Mohammed Kanjou al-Hassan, the former director of military justice under Mr. al-Assad, set off deadly clashes in the Tartus area.

“Security forces” (i.e. invading foreign jihadi militia) were reported to have been ambushed by loyalists of the former government. The founder of the UK-based Syrian Observatory of Human Rights (an organization that I have previously suspected of ties to Syrian rebels under the Assad regime) has said thst the new authorities should publish a list of all the people suspected of having perpetrated war crimes against Syrians and work with families in towns and villages to arrest them. He said they should then be given a fair trial.