Russia’s Gazprom energy giant is again suspending gas supplies to Europe through its Nord Stream I pipeline. This latest three-day hold underlines two important, if already established, truths.
First, that German Chancellor Gerhard Schroder (1998-2005) is Russia’s most successful Western political prostitute. It was Schroder, after all, who approved Russia’s Nord Stream I in full awareness that it would make Europe dependent on Russian gas and thus on Vladimir Putin’s whims. Since leaving office, Schroder has been a very well-paid adviser to Russian energy firms.
Second, while lauded by commentariat luminaries such as the Los Angeles Times editorial board, the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin, and CNN’s Stephen Collinson, German Chancellor Angela Merkel (2005-2021) was a catastrophe for Western security. Viewing cheap gas as the holy grail of political success, Merkel pushed through Russia’s Nord Stream II energy pipeline (doing so against complaints from the United States and much of Europe). In her abandonment of nuclear power and simultaneous trust in Putin’s nonexistent goodwill, Merkel destroyed the credibility of the European Union’s most powerful economy with its most vulnerable eastern-facing members.
Without Schroder and Merkel’s folly, Europe would not now be suffering gas prices that have soared 400% since August 2021. Reaping the whirlwind of their delusions, European families and businesses are under immense financial pressure. And their governments are newly vulnerable to Putin’s brutally cold blackmail message: Abandon your support for Ukraine or see your citizens and economies freeze come winter.
Putin is now shifting his war strategy off the Ukrainian battlefields and into Western European homes and businesses. Russian forces have suffered upwards of 70,000 casualties since Putin’s massed invasion began in February. Depleted in manpower, vehicles, munitions stockpiles, and morale, led by a mixture of incompetent commanders, and highly vulnerable on both their front and rear lines, Russian forces are stuck. Making matters worse for Putin, Ukraine has now launched a counteroffensive around the southern city of Kherson. It’s an area of key strategic value due to its bisecting of the southern Dnieper River and prospective ability to act as a defensive stronghold for Ukraine’s valuable western Black Sea ports. Putin’s forces are struggling to hold the line.
The Russian president thus has a desperate need for a restriction on the Western financial and arms support that is enabling Ukraine’s advance. Putin recognizes that Schroder’s corruption and Merkel’s stupidity gives him the best means of achieving that objective.
Led by Putin’s puppet, CEO Alexey Miller, Gazprom offers Putin a means of variably rewarding or punishing European powers. Relying upon his Hungarian partner Viktor Orban to obstruct tougher EU sanctions on Russia, Putin is moving to make Europe’s energy crisis a catastrophe.
Gazprom is now supplying just 20% of its pipeline capacity to Europe, shamelessly inventing various reasons why additional supply is impossible. Gazprom and its subsidiaries face sanctions-related maintenance challenges in their processing and storage facilities, but the company has the ability to pump far more gas to Europe immediately. This gas shortage, then, is part of a very deliberate effort to use the physical cold to turn up the political heat on Brussels. Putin knows that key EU leaders such as European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, and the Italian and Spanish governments prefer appeasement to confrontation. He knows that France is open to compromise, even as Emmanuel Macron recognizes Ukraine is a major test for the European project. Most important of all, Putin knows that winter is coming and temperatures will soon plummet.
In turn, just as Putin has his air force bomb maternity hospitals in Syria and his artillery smash Ukrainian apartment blocs in order to achieve political effects, so, too, is he happy to see Western Europe’s poorest citizens suffer amid the cold. There is both a short-term and a long-term strategy in play here. Over the short term, Putin wants to use his imposition of European suffering and economic difficulty (it’s hard for European small businesses to survive when their budgets are absorbed by energy bills) to force the EU into compromise. He wants pressure on Kyiv and Washington to grant Moscow some breathing space. Over the longer term, Putin wants to foster the populist belief — always brewing in the key EU powers of France, Germany, Italy, and Spain — that the costs of opposing Russia for the sake of a relatively distant democracy outweigh any benefits, that keeping Putin happy is always preferable to making him mad.
The U.S. would normally be a reliable bulwark against this agenda. However, with President Joe Biden focused on the approaching midterm elections, Putin’s cold gambit may well succeed.
