Europe's energy wars: who is behind them?
Key Markets update for Monday, 6 January 2025
On the first day of this year, the 5-year contract for transit of the Russian natural gas across Ukraine to Russia expired and Ukraine's dictator Zelensky refused to renew it. Slovakia's President Robert Fico stated that Ukraine's actions were "absurd," and that the economic consequences for Slovakia will be disastrous. Before the war in Ukraine, 70% of Slovakia's natural gas was supplied from Russia. According to Fico, Zelensky proposed to continue the transit, but only on condition that Slovakia not pay Russia for the gas until after the Ukraine war. Another nation that will take the brunt of pain from this move is Hungary and to a lesser extent, Austria.
In a statement on this issue, Russia's president Putin stated that Russia does not refuse and at no point refused to supply gas to Europe and reminded that the Yamal-Europe pipeline is operational and available to supply large quantities of natural gas to Europe. However, Yamal-Europe, which transits across Poland, was already cut off by Poland on 3 October 2022. That was only days after some mysterious someone blew up the Nord Stream pipelines supplying Russian gas to Germany. At the time, Poland's current Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski famously posted a tweet with an aerial photo of the gas billowing to the Baltic Sea surface with the simple statement, "Thank you, USA."
Sikorski also saw fit recently to comment on Ukraine's blocking the transit of Russian gas to Europe. Sikorski thought that it is a good thing because, as he explained, it is finally depriving Russia from being able to use its energy exports to blackmail European economies.
The price, we believe, is worth it…
Thus, in the sinister mindset of Sikorski and his friends, destroying European economies is worth it so long as it hurts Russia. For context and perspective, back in October 2022, Credit Suisse analyst Zoltan Pozsar explained that $2 trillion of German value produced depended on $20 billion of Russian gas. In other words, jeopardizing $20 trillion of industrial output is somehow a price worth paying to deprive Russia of $20 billion in oil and gas revenues.
So what if millions of German families lose their livelihoods? So what if European economies find themselves with the world's highest costs of energy and other inputs like agricultural fertilizers. So long as we stick it to Putin, it's all good. Today, the same treatment is being inflicted on Slovakia and Hungary.
Of course, this is not merely president Zelensky's caprice. He doesn't even go to the toilet without his handlers' approval. And who are his handlers? It might appear that Zelensky's actions are directed by the swamp creatures from the Biden administration, but I don't believe that the blame is all in Washington: the hidden hand of London can't be ignored.
All roads lead to London
Again, it was Britain's then Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who gave a speech to the dignitaries at the City of London on 15 November 2021. In that speech, Johnson announced the coming war and stated that, "a choice," was "shortly coming between mainlining ever more Russian hydrocarbons in giant new pipelines and sticking up for Ukraine." It was then that same Boris Johnson who rushed off to Kiev in April 2022 to prevent the already finalized peace agreement between Ukraine and Russia from being signed. And what of Europe's biggest energy wars cheerleader, the above mentioned Radek Sikorski?
The smoke-filled rooms of the Bullingdon Club?
As it happens, Sikorski is BFFs with Boris Johnson and the high representative of the British oligarchy in Poland. Namely, Sikorski is an alumnus of Oxford's Pembroke College and a former British subject. He was also a member of the ultra-exclusive Bullingdon Club, which only accepts its members by invitation from very top ranks of the British "elites," and nobility from other nations. Among its former members, it counts individuals like Cecil Rhodes, Lord Halifax, Edward Gray, King Edward VIII, former Bank of England governor Robin Leigh Pemberton, several members of the Baring banking family, Lord Jacob Rothschild, his son Nathan and a few other familiar names like Lord David Cameron, Goerge Osborne as well as Boris Johnson. It was in fact this last "Buller" who personally invited Radoslav Sikorski into the exclusive club.
From Bullingdon to power
After his excellent adventures in Britain, Sikorski returned to Poland in 2005. Taking back Polish citizenship, his political career there took off like a rocket. His years at Oxford, partying with the rowdy Buller boys prepared him uniquely for leadership in Poland. That same year he became the Minister of National Defense and in 2007 he became Poland's foreign minister, the post he held until 2014. During that time, Sikorski transformed the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, turning it into a global institution with 4,500 employees and 100 foreign branches.
In 2014, Polish magazine Wprost leaked a secretly recorded conversation between Sikorski and the former Finance Minister Jacek Rostowski. Among other things in that conversation, Sikorski said that, "we're going to antagonize Germany and Russia." In addition, Sikorski was deeply involved in Ukraine's 2014 Euromaidan coup and personally arranged for the training of about 80 of Ukrainian neo-Nazis in Poland. Some of those same trainees were later implicated in the 20th February 2014 rooftop shootings that killed as many as 100 protesters and policemen and precipitated the coup in Ukraine.
The ultimate prize is Eurasia’s wealth
Today's energy war, fomented by the same conspirators, is deliberately inflicting economic devastation on Europe. Many believe that it's all the Americans' fault; that they're destroying Russian gas trade so that they could sell their own, much more expensive LNG gas to Europe. However, I believe that the game is much, much bigger than that. Selling LNG cargoes, even if they cost 4 times more than the Russian gas, is still only a very small prize.
The big prize is Eurasia and its economic resources, including an estimated $70 - $90 trillion of Russia's natural resource wealth. As collateral controlled by western banking institutions, this wealth would enable hundreds of trillions' worth of credit expansion. If all that credit became revenue-generating assets on western banks' balance sheets, that would be an extremely attractive prize to pursue. By comparison, the LNG sales are only a drop in the ocean.
Either way, immiserating Europe is part of the long game to capture all that wealth, and all the chaos and destruction is part of the ongoing process of Nazification and militarization of Europe. I will have to elaborate on that in another report, however, it's a longer story...
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