25 - "Pull the Plug: Don't be an Accomplice"
So advises Gabrielius Landbergis, foreign minister of Lithuania. Earlier this week his small country, with fewer than 3 million residents, did in fact pull the plug. But it is going to be much harder in the short term for the larger nations of Europe, even nearby Estonia and Latvia, to follow Lithuania’s lead. Extricating the rest of Europe, and North America, from reliance on energy and related imports from Russia is going to be difficult, complicated, and costly. But, as earlier columns in this Newsletter have suggested, Ukrainians are being butchered. The rest of us can at least sacrifice some accustomed comforts and bear even unexpectedly heavy financial penalties.
Following the discovery of wanton Russian raping, torture, and killing of hundreds of innocent civilians in towns near Kyiv -- with many more atrocities to be discovered as Ukrainian forces regain ground scorched by retreating Russians -- Landbergis declared that “Buying Russian oil and gas [was] financing war crimes.” A good case can be made indirectly and directly that supports his claims.
Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany and his defense minister joined Landbergis, at least rhetorically. Germany expelled a clutch of Russian diplomats (and so did France). In a much more effective move, it also took control of Gazprom, Russia’s state-owned natural gas exporting monopoly, in Germany. That means Germany decides what happens regarding Europe’s largest underground natural gas storage facility, and an array of critical pipelines within Germany. Gazprom has let German reserves run down, presumably on Putin’s orders. Now Germany can begin to fill up the nearly empty storage tanks with liquefied gas imports from the United States, Qatar, and other suppliers, potentially such odd bedfellows as Israel and Azerbaijan.
But because 55 percent of Germany’s residences are heated with Russian gas and because the world’s largest chemical manufacturing operation in Ludwigshafen and many other German factories depend on Russian gas, pulling the plug immediately or conclusively is going to be a deliberative more than an immediate process.
Germany, the European country that, along with Italy, is most fully dependent on Russian energy supplies, will find it easier to deprive itself and its industries of hard coal (used to make steel and, in turn, weapons) from Russia, and of imports of petroleum. Germany this week took decisive actions that will cut its imports of those fuels by 50 percent from customary levels. Germany also seems poised to reverse previous decisions to shut its three remaining nuclear-powered electricity-generating plants. Despite environmental concerns, coal burning electricity producers may also have to remain on line. Indeed, Germany and Europe are now responsible for powering Ukraine, which very recently managed to connect its grid to Europe, cutting it from previous ties to Russia. Keeping everyone’s lights will be critical even though the ideal, more power from solar and wind sources, cannot be assured in the near term.
European Union President Ursula van der Leyen Tuesday announced an import ban on Russian coal, presumably to start immediately and to affect all of Europe’s twenty-seven nations. But how depriving Europe as a whole of Russian coal will work is not immediately evident. There will doubtless be immense transitional problems, all worth solving on behalf of Ukraine’s struggle, but difficult at the factory and product level.
The United Kingdom is less reliant on Russian oil and gas than continental Europe, but it announced plans to snip remaining ties. Ports in Britain and Europe will no longer allow Russian tankers and other ships to dock and unload. Private American buyers have turned incoming Russian petroleum and gas tankers around in mid-ocean, redirecting their contents to more needy European harbors and away from the U.S,, where they are banned.
Washington needs to wean the Tennessee Valley Authority of its reliance on imports of Russian crafted uranium pellets. Apparently, the Russians enrich those reactor supplies to the level that the atomic plants in Tennessee and Georgia prefer. There is abundant raw uranium in Canada and even in closed mines in the United States. We just have to find a way as soon as possible to upgrade those and other available supplies without relying on Russia.
Effective, too, will be Washington’s attempt to prevent the export from the United States to Russia of any equipment or machine parts that help to continue its war, its cyber disinformation endeavors, or any equipment of conceivable use in conflicts.
President Biden’s best response to Foreign Minister Landbergis’ challenge has been to block Russia from accessing dollars in American banks, thus making Russian debt re-payments problematical and helping in a material way to deplete Russian currency holdings. This move may not so much checkmate but could conceivably check Russia’s war-fighting capacity.
Washington and Brussels may be able to find effective ways to influence Budapest and Belgrade, the remaining pro-Putin capitals in Europe. As this column indicated yesterday, both Hungary and Serbia remain more sympathetic to Russia’s needs than to Ukraine’s. But now that both Prime Ministers Viktor Orban in Hungary and Aleksandar Vucic in Serbia have been endorsed by their electorates, conceivably they can be turned diplomatically to cease purchases of gas and consumer goods from Russia and, in Hungary’s case, to allow war materiel to transit to Ukraine. Slovakia is ready to lend Ukraine antiaircraft batteries and Poland older MIG fighters.
The object of these and a host of other logical and obvious bans, boycotts, and rebuffs of products Russian is -- as we wrote last week – to tighten the sanctions noose around Russia in order to slow (or a least harass) its war machine. Further, this global effort wants to add discomfort to Russian consumers sufficiently harsh to cause an unlikely internal militant revolt against the war from within Russia.
On Monday, this newsletter also advocated a range of contributions that citizens everywhere could make individually -- lowering thermostats, driving less, reducing speed limits, turning out lights, and so on. Possibly those ideas will soon resonate with publics everywhere, and politicians will act.
It is time, too, to re-evaluate the nature of the nuclear threat from Russia and to give more weapons and support to the Ukrainians who are defending their country and the free world. “If we don’t have heavy weapons,” President Volodymyr Zelensky asked Tuesday, “how can we defend ourselves?” Even more relevant, given the shifting quality of the war, how can Zelensky and his fighters pursue retreating Russians and cope with Russian air and missile attacks without the kinds of anti-aircraft weapons and modern airplanes that will enable them to regain control of the skies?