Reverse natural gas flows from Germany toward Russia increased sevenfold on Thursday. Reverse flows entail the redirection of delivered gas back along a transit route.
What’s going on?
Well, unfortunately, we’re learning how, like Paul von Hindenburg (a German leader who helped Adolf Hitler take power) and his namesake airship, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s appeasement strategy toward Moscow is sustained only by highly combustible hot air. The scorching high energy prices that Germany and Europe are now experiencing are only precursors of what is to come.
The Germans have Gazprom CEO Alexey Miller and Vladimir Putin to thank.
Miller is a Putin crony who, like all top Russian industrialists, takes his orders from the president. Gazprom might own the advertising rights to the premier tournament in European club soccer, but the company is an extension of the Russian security establishment more than it is a commercial entity.
In turn, the reason for these reverse flows through the Yamal pipeline (which extends from Russia through Belarus and Poland into Germany) is not complicated.
Heavily contributing toward surging energy prices in Europe, the reverse flows reflect exactly the same strategy that most analysts with eyes and brains expected Moscow to employ. Russia is using its monopoly provision of gas exports to Europe as a weapon with which to extract political obedience. This strategy works because Europe has made itself dependent on Russian energy and because European winters are cold.
Although the Biden administration officials responsible for European energy security issues can’t seem to figure it out, Putin has actually been quite open as to why he is ramping up the pressure. He wants Nord Stream 2 approved, and he wants it now. Putin is freezing European businesses and homes, and (by extension) the approval ratings of European politicians, in order to get it. He’s gambling that Scholz will overrule German foreign minister Annalena Baerbock (apparently the only German Cabinet official with moral courage) and expedite Nord Stream 2’s approval. That will mean the assurance of Russia’s energy dominion in Europe and, contrary to Biden State Department fictions, the assured energy subjugation of Ukraine and Eastern Europe.
It’s not just the Yamal pipeline where the extortion is underway, however.
As a precursor to his very likely invasion, Putin has cut off thermal coal exports to Ukraine. Thus, as winter temperatures plummet, President Volodymyr Zelensky faces the prospect of his people being unable to heat their homes.
Scholz, Biden, and Senate Democrats should wake up. Putin is extorting European democracies because he is being allowed to do so. If he is threatened with broad-based sanctions on his financial access to the West, and that of his top oligarchs, he will learn to play nicer. And perhaps even with expanded U.S. energy exports (if Biden wakes up there, also), European families will rediscover that heating a home doesn’t necessarily need to be extortionate.
