Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

European natural gas imports and storage reserves

bruegel.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 296 posts

Re: European natural gas imports and storage reserves

#71

Post by js8 »

iSnow wrote: post #28
roenxi wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There were a bunch of people making a deal about how we'd gone out and done piracy to Russian yachts, legal questions be damned. If there are any options people are not looking for them. There'll be something. > Western Europe just learned a painful lesson that you can't trust Russia. Do you recall what happened to people who trusted the British? A lot of them died. And they were almost the nice Europeans. Trusting t…

>We need serious attempts and ongoing discussion about how to stop military escalation. Bit late in the day, isn't it? The EU leaders were trying to talk to Putin till their eyes glassed over and Biden was willing to talk to Russia about legit security concerns. Yet, what did that get us? Military escalation. Looking back, maybe the West should have put a couple of tank divisions around Kyiv and Charkiv and tell Puti…

> Biden was willing to talk to Russia about legit security concerns

Jeffrey Sachs claimed on Democracy Now that USA refused the diplomatic talks with Russia in November 2021. France, Germany and NATO tried, but apparently Putin felt that US is a key player. Whether true or not, it was wrong for the US to act as if it's just Ukraine's (and Europe's) problem, because it isn't - US has been providing Ukraine with some military support.

Re: European natural gas imports and storage reserves

#72

Post by KptMarchewa »

roenxi wrote: post #25
KptMarchewa wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>We need serious attempts and ongoing discussion about how to stop military escalation. History has shown us that appeasement is the worst possible policy.

The future will show large nuclear arsenals are the worst policy. It is not the 1930s and Russia is not Germany. The borders of the USSR have retreated over most of our lifetime, Moscow controlled all of Ukraine as recently as 1990 and gave it up more-or-less voluntarily. If the US can invade the middle east and not be called an authoritarian regime, I don't think we need to draw a red line at the Ukraine border agai…

>The borders of the USSR have retreated over most of our lifetime, Moscow controlled all of Ukraine as recently as 1990 and gave it up more-or-less voluntarily.

The problem is you think they "own" them.

>If the US can invade the middle east

One nation they invaded was Iraq, and while catastrophic, they've created a democracy that later told US to fuck off: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S.%E2%80%93Iraq_Status_of_Fo...

You can very much argue against that, and I'd agree, but it's not comparable to colonial war of aggression to literally enslave and genocide free nation.

>I don't think we need to draw a red line at the Ukraine border against the other nuclear superpower.

They are far from anything super, as we've seen in Kharkiv Oblast last week.

Re: European natural gas imports and storage reserves

#73

Post by blub »

bhaak wrote: post #11
roenxi wrote: post #6

Economies, when left alone, are about as resilient as cockroaches and much more brutal about securing themselves. The situation is a serious blow to the pride of the European politicians who look like they've been mishandling energy policy for years (where are the nuclear reactors?). But realistically they'll probably survive in practice. It'll be painful. The issue is that somehow the West has taken Iraq 2.0 and is…

What diplomatic off ramp does Russia need? There is a simple first step towards redemption and that is get out of Ukraine right now. Better yesterday. Western Europe just learned a painful lesson that you can't trust Russia. Eastern Europe tried to hammer that point into the brains of the other European politicians but it didn't work until now.

There is no redemption for Russia, this is by now probably etched into their brains after Yugoslavia, two NATO expansions, Georgia and Ukraine.

The sanctions are also here to stay, so claiming that “getting out of Ukraine now” would make any sense or bring them any benefits is wishful thinking.

As far as lessons go, Europe didn’t really learn anything or drew the wrong conclusions based on their approach to China. Instead of staying on its own continent and minding its own business, the EU is playing wannabe-US.

Finally, we have Eastern Europe. Which have hammered the point so hard into the brains of Western Europe that they must have forgotten themselves what the point was. Or at least that would be the case given the dependency they have on Russia, sometimes carefully disguised by moralwashing the gas through another country.

Re: European natural gas imports and storage reserves

#74

Post by pydry »

distances wrote: post #51
roenxi wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

> We should all be lobbying for a large neutral buffer zone between US-aligned Europe and Russia As long as that buffer is inside Russia, I would be fine with it as I suppose most others would. It's not OK to suggest that countries can have a sphere of influence in 21st century. Each country chooses their alignment and alliance independently. Russia has repeatedly shown to be a poor neighbour, so it shouldn't be a su…

>It's not OK to suggest that countries can have a sphere of influence in 21st century

Ask your Congressman about pulling out of Guam and closing all overseas military bases.

>That kind of world order does not exist any more.

This is, ironically, enough, something that Putin started saying to us since he came into power. Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, etc. He lobbied the west to adhere to a rules based international order rather than couping or invading whomever we damn well pleased.

In 2003 he said "please respect Iraq's national sovereignty and international law". Oh how we laughed.

What did you think the result of ignoring that was gonna be?

For me it was fairly predictable. He treated it both as a threat and a precedent. That said, Im not in denial about America being an empire.

Re: European natural gas imports and storage reserves

#75

Post by phicoh »

js8 wrote: post #33
roenxi wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The future will show large nuclear arsenals are the worst policy. It is not the 1930s and Russia is not Germany. The borders of the USSR have retreated over most of our lifetime, Moscow controlled all of Ukraine as recently as 1990 and gave it up more-or-less voluntarily. If the US can invade the middle east and not be called an authoritarian regime, I don't think we need to draw a red line at the Ukraine border agai…

While I disagree with your other comments, I totally agree with denuclearization. Expanding NATO (founded on nuclear deterrence paradigm) as a reaction to Russia is wrong.

As we can clearly see now, NATO does not need nuclear deterrence again Russia's conventional weapons.

What protects, for example, the Baltic countries is not the threat that the US might take initiative to drop a nuclear bomb on Russia, no it is the vast conventional capabilities of the US.

Just supplying a relatively small amount of weapons to Ukraine is enough to destroy most of the Russian army.

Re: European natural gas imports and storage reserves

#76

Post by The_Colonel »

js8 wrote: post #47
Bayart wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has it ? What's the data point, beyond Hitler ? Because History has shown repeatedly and consistently that escalation is reckless and extremely costly.

I agree, and even Hitler is dubious. I am Czech, and the Munich Agreement is very emotionally painful for us. However, objectively, I don't think Czechs defending (like the Ukraine chose to) would save more human lives. (Nor would fighting against Russian invasion in 1968, btw.) And arguably in the case of Ukraine the appeasement already happened after 2014 Donetsk war. I also heard that appeasement was backreaction…

> However, objectively, I don't think Czechs defending (like the Ukraine chose to) would save more human lives.

That's actually very uncertain. If the war broke out, Hitler might get overthrown: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oster_conspiracy

Hitler's position was shaky at the time, but his success in Czechoslovakia made any opposition impossible and increased hunger for more.

Re: European natural gas imports and storage reserves

#77

Post by distances »

pydry wrote: post #74
distances wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We should all be lobbying for a large neutral buffer zone between US-aligned Europe and Russia As long as that buffer is inside Russia, I would be fine with it as I suppose most others would. It's not OK to suggest that countries can have a sphere of influence in 21st century. Each country chooses their alignment and alliance independently. Russia has repeatedly shown to be a poor neighbour, so it shouldn't be a su…

>It's not OK to suggest that countries can have a sphere of influence in 21st century Ask your Congressman about pulling out of Guam and closing all overseas military bases. >That kind of world order does not exist any more. This is, ironically, enough, something that Putin started saying to us since he came into power. Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, etc. He lobbied the west to adhere to a rules based international order…

> Ask your Congressman about pulling out of Guam and closing all overseas military bases.

I'm from a small country by the Russian northern border, so I don't have anything to do with Guam but of course do have pretty strong opinions about who should be able to dictate our future.

Re: European natural gas imports and storage reserves

#78

Post by arcbyte »

gdy wrote: post #34
bhaak wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What diplomatic off ramp does Russia need? There is a simple first step towards redemption and that is get out of Ukraine right now. Better yesterday. Western Europe just learned a painful lesson that you can't trust Russia. Eastern Europe tried to hammer that point into the brains of the other European politicians but it didn't work until now.

"Western Europe just learned a painful lesson that you can't trust Russia. " Russia learnt that it cannot trust West when NATO started expanding into Eastern Europe and ex-USSR not too long after Warsaw pact and the USSR dissolved. Quite strange to say that West 'trusted' Russia after it betrayed Russia.

There was a real hope Russia would join NATO at one point. That it has devolved back into the primary threat was never a foregone or even straightforward conclusion.

Re: European natural gas imports and storage reserves

#79

Post by chimprich »

roenxi wrote: post #44
stoltzmann wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US has not been marching NATO towards Russia. It's ex-eastern bloc countries willingly joining the alliance to be protected from Russian aggression. If Russia did not have a long history of invading their neighbors, there would be no need or will to join the alliance.

If, say, Cuba joined a Russian military alliance of their own free will and started setting up a military installation with a couple of Russian missiles of uncertain providence, would the US tut-tut quietly or would it be a war situation? Because as I recall it was considered a major crisis that nearly doomed us all. And Cuba is further from the US than Ukraine is from Russia. Those countries should have been vetoed…

> And Cuba is further from the US than Ukraine is from Russia.

Not a great analogy. Ukraine had not joined NATO, and there seemed to be no prospect of it.

The countries that actually did join NATO appear to be safe from Russian invasion. If the Baltic states hadn't been allowed to join NATO then Russia might already have a land bridge to Kaliningrad and we'd have lost some more liberal democracies.

Re: European natural gas imports and storage reserves

#80

Post by blub »

stoltzmann wrote: post #59
gdy wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are justifying an action by the reaction to it. It's like saying that Russia's invasion of Ukraine is justified by the Ukrainian drones and rockets attacking Russian cities [0] and villages near Ukrainian border. [0] https://t.me/zhest_belgorod/16230

Russia has been invading it's neighbors for centuries. Eastern Europeans do remember that. Joining NATO is not only about the conflict today, it's due to pretty much all generations in the area suffering due to their aggressive neighbor further to the east.

Nearly every country in Europe has been invading its neighbors for centuries, that’s what normal looks like in Europe. In fact some countries liked invasions so much, that they invaded countries all over the world.

Joining NATO is not at all only up to the countries which apply. The US is more or less the game maker, with big countries like Germany, France, the UK etc. also having an important voice.

It’s not unexpected that the former Warsaw Pact countries would want to join. It is surprising to see the US being so short-sighted to allow these expansions considering that several of its own diplomats and foreign policy experts were warning against it.

Post reply on HN