Hacker News Reader

Europe imports around 30% of its oil and gas from Russia. The pipelines between the east and west were originally setup during Soviet times.

Given how stable that has been it seems unlikely that a small African country, who will be getting a big chunk of cash from Europe, would do anything stupid.

They haven't been perfectly stable, though. We've seen since 2005 a few cases of oil and gas prices surging upwards as part of the Russia-Ukraine dispute (in 2005, 80% of all gas from Russia to the EU went through Ukraine).

Europe is currently highly dependent on Russia's natural gas for their electricity; I don't see this as worse. Indeed, better to diversify your power imports.

(Better still to generate locally, but not every country has the land available to do so).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia_in_the_European_energy_...

So we resolve all regional conflicts and unify the world under one country. It's not hard.