Russland

Putin’s Gas Strategy Gives Germany Only Bad and Worse Choices

Chancellor Olaf Scholz must either pay for Russian gas on Vladimir Putin’s terms or face the painful economic fallout of a cutoff.

In 2018, German government officials war-gamed  a massive natural-gas shortage. With the real thing looming, the lessons are sobering. Some hospitals, nursing homes and jails were forced to close; companies shut; livestock was left to die; hundreds of thousands of jobs vanished; rationing for households was imposed, according to the official account of the crisis-management exercise.
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By now, Putin has essentially written off its gas business with Germany. Either in four weeks or in 24 months, Russia knows that it will not sell energy to Berlin.....
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Germany – and France and Italy — never intended to impose an embargo on Russian gas now. The sanctions on the central bank were about stopping Putin accessing billions of dollars in hard-currency reserves, not about stopping gas payments......

If Berlin, Paris and Rome allow the payments to continue, they would be showing their own hypocrisy, opening a crack that would advance the Kremlin’s divide-and-conquer political strategy. They will also show that the EU is prepared to continue paying billions of euros each week to Russia, supporting the ruble -- and subsidizing his military — in the process. Worse, it won’t be the last concession. Putin will exploit the gas weakness for more. Now is ruble payments; tomorrow may be about rolling back sanctions or military aid to Ukraine.

If Berlin and other capitals follow the letter of their own sanctions, payments can’t continue. But that means accepting gas sanctions they didn’t intend to impose – at least, not yet. It will mean enormous economic and social costs and could cause European public support for Ukraine to wilt......

It’s not just a short-term problem, either. If Germany manages over time to find replacements for the gas, it will be at a much higher price. The era of cheap-Russian gas fueling the German economy is over. German energy-intensive companies, like its chemical giants, could not compete in the global market. Germany will face painful choices about the future of its industrial economy.
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https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articl...se-options