“President [Vladimir] Putin and the Russian security services operate like a super PAC,” Russia expert and former National Security Council member Fiona Hill testified during former President Donald Trump’s first impeachment proceeding. “They deploy millions of dollars to weaponize our own political opposition research and false narratives.”
Hill, a scholar at the liberal Brookings Institution, testified how Russian agencies “deploy millions of dollars to weaponize our own political opposition research and false narratives.”
Putin wanted greater partisan rancor, he wanted less faith in American democracy, and, as Hill would later comment, Putin hates fracking.
During those impeachment hearings, then-Rep. Mike Conaway, a Texas Republican, asked Hill whether Putin saw fracking in the United States and Europe as a threat to Russia’s oil and gas industry. “In November 2011, I actually sat next to Vladimir Putin at a conference in which he made precisely that point,” Hill said.
“He started in 2011 making it very clear that he saw American fracking as a great threat to Russian interests,” she said. “We were all struck by how much he stressed this issue. And since 2011, and since that particular juncture, Putin has made a big deal of this.”
This makes perfect sense — Putin hates fracking just like any crony capitalist hates competition.
“We will never frack,” Putin has said. “We don’t need to develop shale oil at all. First, we don’t need to increase the supply of oil to world markets, and we have enough oil we can get from the Arctic shelf.” He’s derided fracking as “terrible for the environment.” His state-owned television station RT has run anti-fracking documentaries.
So there’s plenty of reason to believe that in Europe and possibly in the U.S., Russian money has funded anti-fracking environmental activism.
French journalist Dominique Reynie said on television this week that he’s found that European environmentalist groups have been funded by Putin.
“On a retrouvé des financements de Gazprom en particulier dans des ONG écologistes qui ont fourni des ministres à certains pays d’Europe et qui ensuite sont embarqués dans une sorte de retour d’ascenseur en défendant la sortie du nucléaire” souligne @DominiqueReynie. pic.twitter.com/vNzmxmnKr4
— Jean Louis (@JL7508) February 26, 2022
Former NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said in 2014, “I have met allies who can report that Russia, as part of their sophisticated information and disinformation operations, engaged actively with so-called nongovernmental organizations, environmental organizations working against shale gas, to maintain European dependence on imported Russian gas.”
Rasmussen could not provide proof, but the burden of proof is actually on the other side.
If Putin is a ruthless operator who expertly infiltrates U.S. politics with disinformation and money, which is what we have been told for six years now, and given that he stands to lose from robust fracking or other oil and gas exploration in the U.S. and Europe, then we have to assume that he is funding anti-fracking and anti-drilling messages in the U.S. and Europe.
The question is: Just which anti-fracking groups in the U.S. are funded by Putin, and just how much did they help him?
