Forgive the phrase, but it is appropriate — Vladimir Putin has the European Union — Germany in particular — over a barrel.
Over several barrels come to think of it.
The virtue states went green, but contented themselves with getting the slack, the dirty oil and gas stuff they so deplored, from reliable Russia.
It’s a distinct possibility, though there are too many variables to predict it, that if the Republicans take the House there will be some sort of conclusion to the war in Ukraine.
This column has called for just that. Not in a shameful betrayal of the freedom-loving people who’ve fought by our side, like, for example, what the Democrats did to the South Vietnamese after an honorable peace was reached in Paris, but rather in a way that preserves our interests and keeps Joe Biden’s much-ballyhooed nuclear Armageddon away.
What is the end game?
“Europeans are absolutely committed to speeding up the green transition,” said Freeland.
“I think we can all understand why the rest of the world is looking at Europe and is saying, ‘let’s move as fast as we can to end our dependence on the petro tyrants.’”
Yea she was so scared she revealed the real agenda.
There are riots in the streets of France over the cost of fuel and heating, same as in Germany and those Dutch farmers aren’t protesting for more lunatic environmental restrictions.
Both sides have their tyrants and for us it’s Freeland and her ilk who abuse the goodwill of their fellow citizens towards Ukraine to advance a freedom robbing economically ruinous green-scam agenda.
Supermarkets are being left with empty shelves throughout Germany, as spiralling inflation renders the sale of a wide variety of products unprofitable.
Products ranging from Kellogg’s cornflakes to Coca Cola have disappeared from supermarkets throughout Germany, with many shops being left with empty shelves as products become simply unprofitable to sell due to differentials in inflation.
The pro-war consensus seems to be weakening
Even as “kamikaze” drones rain down on Kyiv, the mood over Ukraine is shifting in the US. Between May and September, the share of Americans who are extremely or very concerned about a Ukrainian defeat fell from 55% to 38%. Among Republicans and Republican-leaning independents, 32% say the US is providing too much support for the war — up from 9% in March.
But rifts are emerging within the American establishment as well. The list of high-profile media and policy figures who are starting to question the wisdom of the US strategy in the conflict grows longer every day.
Trudeau says Russian invasion of Ukraine ‘accelerated’ Canada’s move away from oil and gas
With the Ukraine war having helped to drive Canadian fuel prices to historic highs, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Tuesday that the conflict was helping to “accelerate” this country’s shift to renewable energy.
While Trudeau acknowledged that the Russian invasion had caused global demand to surge for Canadian sources of liquefied natural gas (LNG) and crude oil, he predicted that the net effect would be a faster phase-out of the Canadian oil and gas sector.
Hey Junior do you want to end support for Ukraine?
Because that’s how you end support for Ukraine.
The cost to Ukraine of downing the “kamikaze” drones being fired at its cities vastly exceeds the sums paid by Russia in sourcing and launching the cheap Iranian-made technology, analysis suggests.
A total of 161 Shahed-136 drones, one larger Shahed-129 and four even larger unmanned attack vehicles known as Mohajer-6s have been shot down by Ukrainian air defences in the last month.
With the price of the Iranian-made Shahed-136s standing at €20,000 to €50,000 for each vehicle, the total cost to Russia of the failed drone attacks unleashed on Ukraine in recent weeks is estimated by military analysts at the NGO Molfar to be between $11.66m (£10.36m) and $17.9m (£15.9m).
Russian missiles have destroyed a third of Ukraine’s power stations, President Zelensky said today as citizens were warned to brace for hardship this winter.
Zelensky said the damage had been done in only eight days and had led to “massive blackouts across the country”. On October 10, Russia launched its biggest salvo of missile attacks on Ukraine since the start of the war.
#Ukraine: A powerful Ukrainian 2S7 Pion 203mm self-propelled howitzer seen firing a rare 3O14 cluster projectile, each of which dispenses 24 1.3kg HE FRAG submunitions.
There is a ~90 meter kill radius for uncovered standing targets, at ranges of up to 30km. pic.twitter.com/fJepbGZ4rL
— 🇺🇦 Ukraine Weapons Tracker (@UAWeapons) October 18, 2022
Ukrainian forces have recently retaken much of the ground that was captured by Russia in the first months of this year, and the Russian government and military response has looked increasingly panicked. Hundreds of thousands of civilian men have been drafted, with large numbers fleeing the country to avoid conscription, and dozens of cruise missiles fired at civilian targets in Ukrainian cities, killing at least 11 people.
Most alarmingly, perhaps, Vladimir Putin has discussed the possibility of using nuclear weapons and his subordinate, the Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, has called for the use of a “tactical” nuclear weapon on the battlefield in Ukraine.
There’s been little backsliding so far but a serious energy crisis looms
Can Ukraine sustain a war effort that is proceeding far better than most military analysts ever expected? Part of that answer, of course, depends on the extent to which the Ukrainian army can keep their troops in the field equipped, supplied, and motivated. That challenge comes as the Russian military increasingly relies on so-called “kamikaze drones” to strike deep into Ukrainian territory (on October 17, a Russian drone attack killed four people in Kyiv during the morning rush hour).
A top official with Siemens Canada defended the energy company’s handling of sanctions involving repair work on turbines belonging to the Russian Nord Stream 1 pipeline before a parliamentary committee on Monday.
Arne Wohlschlegel, Siemens Canada’s managing director, testified that the moment Canada imposed sanctions on Gazprom, the Russian natural gas provider, it immediately halted work on the multi-million-dollar turbine compressor, stored the unit at its Montreal facility and informed the RCMP.
Justin sucking and blowing at the same time.
Extraordinary first images of a mangled Nord Stream pipeline have emerged, three weeks after it was blown up ‘with extreme force’ in a suspected act of sabotage.
Footage, released on Tuesday, showed at least 165 feet of the Nord Stream 1 pipeline was destroyed or buried under the seabed, following an explosion on September 26 – assumed by many to have been a Russian attack.
Release of the images came as Danish police said ‘powerful explosions’ were behind damage to the two gas pipelines (Nord Stream 1 and 2) in the Danish part of the Baltic Sea. On October 6, Swedish investigators said their own initial investigations had come to a similar conclusion.
History may well judge Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine to be a great gift to Western civilization. That is not to say that Russia’s invasion of that sovereign country was not unwarranted and a crime against humanity. Clearly, it has been both of those things. But how is it that the West, and the rest of the world by extension, will benefit from Mr. Putin’s heinous acts? It is related to the law of unintended consequences, which I will simply define as the following: “for every act intended to produce a specific outcome, there is a set of one or more unintended consequences that result.”
The worst nightmares of Europe’s sleeping giant are coming true all at once
Being a Germany watcher in the early 21st century can often feel like being an expert on ancient Greece: You kind of missed all the exciting bits. Alas, that seems to be changing. At the same time an economic cyclone is threatening to wreck one of the world’s more deceptively combustible societies, Germany is also emerging as the fulcrum of Vladimir Putin’s strategy to salvage his war in Ukraine by breaking Western solidarity—a gambit that now involves a credible nuclear weapons threat. For a country with an almost uniquely pathological fear of inflationary shocks, populist politics, and nuclear technology, the winter of 2022 is shaping up to be a horror show.
Russia has hit Ukraine with a wave of attacks, dive-bombing the capital, Kyiv, with what appear to be Iranian-made “kamikaze” drones.
Critical infrastructure was hit in the Kyiv, Dnipro and Sumy regions, with electricity cut in hundreds of towns and villages, the government says.
At least eight people were killed, four in Kyiv and four in Sumy.
Calls have mounted for sanctions on Iran, which continues to deny supplying drones to the Russian military.
Look how #russia carries out a strike by Iran-made kamikaze drones this morning. Several buildings are damaged. #Rescuers are pulling civillians out of the rubble.
This is 🇷🇺 another terrorist attack on the capital.#StandWithUkraine pic.twitter.com/TKOiu9hr1w— Emine Dzheppar (@EmineDzheppar) October 17, 2022
