These days, the European Union contributed $1 billion toward Vladimir Putin’s war device. Tomorrow, the EU will contribute a further $1 billion to the Kremlin’s ongoing carnage of Ukrainian citizens. And $1 billion the upcoming working day as well.
The payments will carry on to pour into Russia right up until, we are assured, but barely comforted, the EU cuts that total by a 3rd by the conclusion of 2022. By the 12 months 2030, just eight quick yrs from now, the EU hopes to wean itself off of Russian energy sources.
By that date, if Europe has not ceded Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Ga, Finland and other nations to Russia, Putin will eventually be taught a lesson.
The billion-dollars-a-day per diem comes in the sort of coal, gas and oil that the EU purchases to maintain its financial state buzzing along even though educational facilities and maternity hospitals are currently being obliterated in Mariupol and Kyiv and the bodies of females and kids are piling up in morgues, although tens of millions of refugees with an uncertain future disperse all over Europe. (The United States, not as dependent on Russian strength sources, banned exports of Russian oil, liquefied normal gas and coal before this thirty day period.)
Calculate the long term expenditures of resettling these refugees or rebuilding Ukraine — that is, if the war and occupation conclude in Europe’s favor, which isn’t a positive wager at all. And undoubtedly not if the war spills into neighboring NATO nations.
In a revealing job interview with the BBC, Norway’s key minister, Jonas Gahr Stoere, carefully parsed Europe’s reasoning for continuing its addiction on Russia’s wide oil and gasoline reserves. Just after pointing to the financial sanctions it has imposed, and the military services and humanitarian support the EU is delivering, the key minister admitted: “Europe is also accountable for possessing functional economies.”
Practical economies often trump rescuing a democratic country.
BBC moderator Zeinab Badawi was not about to permit the prime minister off the hook. She mentioned: “You are hoping to struggle Russian tanks with the banking institutions, as it were being, and it is just not heading to be rapid adequate.”
Stoere, whose country is not a member of the EU, countered: “I never invest in your equation. Europe has to nevertheless fuel its economy, in just one way or the other. They are acquiring oil on the worldwide current market. … They are unable to consider down their individual economies and at the exact same time resist what Russia is executing.”
Stoere, the head of a single of the NATO nations that shares a border with Russia, ongoing with some pretzel logic about Europe’s dedication to renewable electricity sources these kinds of as wind, solar and the rather oxymoronic label for the source recognized as “safe nuclear.” He believes that the current higher expenses of fuel and oil will drive European nations to immediately changeover to renewables.
On the other hand, in the small expression, the reverse is using position. Europe is turning toward much less expensive, extra polluting varieties of strength these as coal. The United Kingdom is even thinking about lifting its 2019 ban on fracking for shale gas as a way to offset the spiraling electrical power fees to British families. The U.K. was on the verge of capping its fracking wells with concrete, but now there is strain to preserve them open.
As Russian bombs mercilessly hit civilian targets beneath Putin’s scorched earth approach, and as Europe pays for the drama of war by acquiring Russia’s wide electrical power reserves, it is unattainable to look past to any variety of potential for the tens of millions of innocent victims, killed, trapped and held hostage in Ukraine.
Stephen J. Lyons is the writer of five textbooks of essays and journalism.
