Putin is fighting two wars, only one of them with bullets

Putin is fighting two wars, only one of them with bullets

Other major European nations maintained a better spread in their domestic sources of energy supply. France kept its nuclear power generation capacity, while developing renewables. The UK developed its renewables sector even more aggressively, in particular with offshore wind farms, while also having access to North Sea oil. Germany, however, although growing its renewables sector, substituted nuclear energy primarily with Russian hydrocarbons.


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Merkel cannot have been unaware of the strategic dependency upon Russia that this created. She was all too familiar with Putin’s vision of reclaiming for “Greater Russia” the territories which had been “lost” with the collapse of the Soviet Union – Ukraine foremost among them. When Merkel visited Australia in 2014 for the G20 summit, I remember her describing Putin’s ambitions during the cabinet dinner Tony Abbott hosted for her at Admiralty House.


Merkel’s willingness to make Germany a Russian energy hostage assumed two things: first, that Russia would never again turn against it; secondly, that Putin’s imperial dreams would remain just that, so that Germany and other European nations would never face being punished by the loss of Russian energy supply as the price for solidarity with a victim of Russian invasion. The first assumption was right (at least so far). The second was catastrophically wrong. The historic recasting of German foreign and defence policy announced by her successor Olaf Scholz in his speech to the Bundestag three days after the invasion – Zeitenwende (turning point) – is the clearest possible admission of the failure of Merkel’s policy.


The problem is not only a German one. Most of the nations of Europe rely, to a greater or lesser degree, on Russian hydrocarbons. For some of the smaller nations, such as Bulgaria, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, the dependency approache ..

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