Posted on 05/22/2019 11:25:42 PM PDT by NorseViking
Bovanenkovo (Russie) (AFP) - Deep in the Russian Arctic anticipation runs high ahead of the launch of a natural gas pipeline that has emerged as a source of tensions pitting Moscow and Berlin against Washington.
Gas sourced from the giant Bovanenkovo field on the remote Yamal Peninsula far above the Arctic Circle will feed the Nord Stream 2, a multi-billion-euro energy link between Russia and Germany.
Critics of the Gazprom-led project -- in particular Washington and Kiev -- say the pipeline aims to increase Europe's reliance on Russian gas and isolate Ukraine, which it bypasses.
US Secretary of Energy Rick Perry said in the Ukrainian capital Kiev this week that Washington was moving towards imposing restrictions on the companies involved in the project.
The Nord Stream 2 consortium and supporters of the project say the 1,230-kilometre (765-mile) pipeline that runs under the Baltic Sea will help secure Europe's rising gas needs at lower prices.
"We have all these political discussions saying it's a political project," Henning Kothe, chief project officer at Nord Stream 2, told reporters during a tour of the field on Tuesday.
But, he added, the shortest way for gas to reach Europe was "via Nord Stream 2, which is 2,000 kilometres shorter than the existing route through Ukraine.
"That is for me a fact and not politics," he said.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
Germany has a long history of working with Russia. It is probably time to cut our ties with Germany and let them fend for themselves.
Agreed. And we need to find better ways of helping to supply actual allies like Poland and turning Ukraine (which has a promising new leader) into a stronger economic partner and ally of ours in the meantime.
Many forget they were Germany’s allies in the 1939 dismemberment of Poland to get WWII really rolling in Europe.
The Poles sure don’t.
Yes, build an LNG plant in Ukraine.
Because German electricity rates are the highest in Europe, why?
Because Germany went crazy green, how so?
Because they closed down atomic energy plants, they screwed up the entire electricity supply system with solar and wind. Because Chancellor Schroeder sold out to the Ruskies.
So endith the lesson of unintended consequences of leftist crusades.
No one would be trying to bypass the Ukraine if they didn’t have a history of intercepting gas that was supposed to be passing through.
Yep, that was a problem of ginormous proportion.
Actually there are no legit reasons to dislike abundant cheap energy.
Agree....
As an isolated proposition-agreed
In this case too. The market is there and nobody is blocking non-Russian entities from selling their energy.
If Schroeder sold out to Russia at the end of his chancellorship in exchange for a lucrative seat on the board, was there a free market?
If the pipelines are controlled by Russia and no one else, or few others, you have a monopoly or an oligopoly. Is that a free market?
Free markets should control almost everywhere and I confess to a pesky libertarian streak but it does not extend, as Khrushchev predicted, to the last capitalist selling the Communists the rope with which to hang the capitalists. In some circumstances existential considerations of national safety must override considerations of profit.
Trump is correct when he complains that America spends billions to defend Germans who default in the funding they themselves guaranteed of their armed forces while at the same time getting into bed with the Russians thus leaving themselves and the rest of Europe vulnerable to Russian petro aggression.
That’s one twisted look at free enterprise. Russian companies don’t have any preferred status by default.
Other players which don’t have the competitive edge and pushing political schemes to gain the market are against free enterprise.
The French are thinking of putting punitive tariffs on Euro carbon imports to save the climate... I wonder if they will be able to impose that on Germany and Russia.
Europe is fracturing more and more with Germans dominating and doing whatever they want.
There even are stories of a proxy militia war in Libya between the French and Italian sectors...
It’s been time to cut Germany and several other useless Yurp leeches loose for almost 30 years now.
Upon reading that I simply did not know how to respond. I contemplated saying that all Russian companies that exist exist only because they have achieved preferred status and that through corruption. Then I recalled a reply I had submitted here in 2009 about a business trip to Moscow in 2007. I think this better describes the corruption in Russia than any conclusion area language I can dredge up now:
About two years ago I participated with a group of German real estate investors in a tour of the real estate market in Moscow. Two anecdotes remain with me and illustrate my sense of the whole situation in Russia, or at least in Moscow.
First, I recall as we were riding through Moscow we passed the statue of Lenin which was pointed out to our group and the Germans had no particular reaction. I asked my seat mate who is a journalist covering our group, "what do you suppose the reaction would be upon seeing a statue of George Bush? "He laughed without responding to the question directly because it required no answer. Lenin is more popular in Germany than George Bush.
On another occasion we were escorted into an old factory area which had been converted into an office complex and looked like something resembling an American shopping center. We were awaiting the arrival of the entrepreneur who had performed this renovation and who was described to us as a man who could get things done in Moscow because he was a former city councilman, in other words, an apparatchik. The representation was made not by inference but explicitly that this man could achieve entrepreneurial miracles in Moscow because he was connected and in fact would bribe the officials.
Our apparatchik was late but eventually the gate opened and three blacked out SUVs came into the courtyard and formed a semi circle around us. Huge men, better described as gorillas, emerged from the vehicles and formed a circle around us sweeping back their coats like Wyatt Earp to reveal very impressive looking firearms at their belts. Only then did Wyatt Earp himself emerge from his SUV and began to address us through an interpreter. He reiterated the pitch: he could do business in Moscow because of his connections.
I said to one on my German colleagues, "how can you be a partner with this man? What do you do in the event of a dispute? He just told us that everything in Russia is corrupt so you get no fair treatment from the courts? Would you hire a bigger gang of thugs to have a shootout to settle your partnership disagreement? No thank you."
Today Russia is a one trick pony: natural resources, oil and gas, with the bulk of that being shipped to my neighbors here in Germany. By the dictates of geography, Russia enjoys considerable leverage over Europe but her destiny is to resemble the Arab Middle East, rich in oil but poor in every other respect.
No rule of law, no vital capitalism. No real capitalism, no real progress.
If I were compelled to offer up one word to describe the situation in Moscow two years ago it would be, cynicism. It is ubiquitous and I believe it will ultimately do great damage to Russian society. It is almost the ultimate application of what we in America call, the critical theory invented by THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL to undermine resistance to communism.
The irony ought not to escape us.
That is a very grim picture but what exactly makes said pipelines a corrupt project? It is by all accounts less corrupt than alternative schemes. It has an economic sense to start with.
I understand your point about corruption going on in Russia but does it mean it should not participate in trade?
1. Yes, when it is a danger to national security. As I said in a previous post:
In some circumstances existential considerations of national safety must override considerations of profit.
The tables were once turned when Stalin learned to his sorrow and to the sorrow of nearly 20 million dead Russians that supplying raw materials to the Germans right up to the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 was an existential threat to national security.
2. This situation is even worse because:
A) the need for cheaper energy was aggravated by left-wing green policies as pointed out in another earlier reply:
Germans like this idea of gas from Russia at cheaper rates, why?
Because German electricity rates are the highest in Europe, why?
Because Germany went crazy green, how so?
Because they closed down atomic energy plants, they screwed up the entire electricity supply system with solar and wind. Because Chancellor Schroeder sold out to the Ruskies.
So endith the lesson of unintended consequences of leftist crusades.
B) the gross unfairness of the situation is further exacerbated by the fact that Germany places its own national security at risk and also the national security of its fellow European neighbors at risk so it can enjoy cheaper gas from Russia knowing that the risk is minimized because Americans pay for the security the Germans are undermining to spare their own purses.
I am yet to see modern Russia destroying other nations for vested interests. I haven’t seen a son of Russian vice-president taking a seat on board of a German gas company. And they aren’t getting around persuading nations doing business with the US to ditch mutually profitable projects for politically charged unprofitable Russian projects.
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