I never knew until recently how tied up Russia's oil strategy was to their military / political thinking.
If others are interested, this video has a great overview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=If61baWF4GE
If others are interested, this video has a great overview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=If61baWF4GE
Map:
https://www.nationalgeographic.org/photo/europe-map/
It's a bit misleading since it doesn't show Nordstream 1 which runs under the Baltic sea to Germany.
EDIT: Here's a better map. The above is outdated
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d7/Major_ru...
That would only hurt Ukraine's allies. Russia is probably going to end up pivoting to exporting energy to China, anyway.
Russia's going to see this invasion through. It's clear that there's not some "one weird [economic] trick" that will get them to turn around and go home. The only way that's going to happen is if they're defeated militarily.
That doesn't appear to be correct. It apparently has a pipeline, also ships LNG, and is building an even bigger pipeline to come online in a couple years:
https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/exclusive-russia-...
> Feb 4 (Reuters) - Russia has agreed a 30-year contract to supply gas to China via a new pipeline and will settle the new gas sales in euros, bolstering an energy alliance with Beijing amid Moscow's strained ties with the West over Ukraine and other issues.
> Gazprom , which has a monopoly on Russian gas exports by pipeline, agreed to supply Chinese state energy major CNPC with 10 billion cubic metres of gas a year, the Russian firm and a Beijing-based industry official said.
> First flows through the pipeline, which will connect Russia's Far East region with northeast China, were due to start in two to three years, the source said in comments that were later followed by an announcement of the deal by Gazprom.
> Russia already sends gas to China via its Power of Siberia pipeline, which began pumping supplies in 2019, and by shipping liquefied natural gas (LNG). It exported 16.5 billion cubic metres (bcm) of gas to China in 2021.
The sanctions have conveniently carved out exceptions for settling energy, wheat, barley, and other commodity contracts, and it's these contract settlements that have prevented the Ruble's 50% collapse from becoming a 90% collapse.
Starving the West of energy and food would definitely be a fun bargaining chip and/or tit-for-tat escalation play, but I don't think the Russian economy has the stomach for it.
Russia sells gas in Europe for a profit. In China, not so much. Turning off the gas to Europe means turning off the majority of its income, it's not going to happen.
Would it?
Surely a few days of gas exports aren't that important to their economy, just because they can average the losses over many many more days of gas exports.
Now europe has a reason to let russia win, and repair the pipeline. A few days without heating would damage europe (though I'm unsure how many days worth of gas europe has stored).
I guess I could see it hurting Russia, because they lose a valuable resource and the threat to cut it off, but I could also see it helping them.
Harming the pipeline would harm Ukraine financially.
Maybe Ukraine has refused since 2014 to allow eastern Ukraine (ethnic Russian) to vote on leaving due to oil wealth in that area?
Oil strategy is tied to everyone's military/political thinking. Especially the top oil producers like Russia, US, etc. US was the top oil producer from 1850s to 1950s. It's one of the reasons we became a world power. We aren't maintaining military bases in saudi arabia because we are fans of islam. We didn't invade iraq because of freedom or democracy. We've been trying to topple venezuela for 2 decades because they have the largest oil reserves in the world. Some even think we are suddenly concerned about muslims in xinjiang because the chinese found oil there.
Germany invaded the soviet to take the baku oil fields. Oil has been central to most major world invents the last 150 years. What do you think our issue with iran is? Their huge oil and gas fields. You could argue the ukraine war is about oil and gas too.
If we ever got fusion energy or anything like that, one of the major sources of war would be gone.
Now people may begin to understand why Biden's son was installed in 2014 on board of directors of a Ukraine oil producer at 50,000 USD per month. It was not by happenstance nor for knowledge of oil & gas. https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27403003
Freshwater is typically the object of hypothetical water wars, and in this case Russia wants warm (salt) water for naval power projection.
This is probably more of a coastline/harbour war.
It's understandable that there are a ton of chemical refineries near the mouth of the Mississippi because it allows for easier transport of refined goods to other countries. Less understandable when they're everywhere else in the state, except for the part where local governments give quarter-century and longer sweetheart tax break deals for these companies to come in, pollute the local environment, and pay no taxes on the real estate they're operating on. One of the main reasons that the education and social services systems in the state are so horrendously poor is because there's no tax revenue.
And even by those standards, Russia is a kleptocrat's wet dream.
Since new investment into fossil fuel projects will go to nearly zero from here (and old equipment becomes defunct unless it is replaced), expect there gas/oil exports to decline significantly in the next years/decades. Putin didn't only mess up Ukraine now, he also wrecked his own country for at least a generation to come.
What Putin has done to Russia is like if an American president had invaded a neighbour and the result was simultaneously $4 trillion central bank assets held abroad getting frozen, most of the billionaires becoming personae non grata in half the planet, a lot of smart people leaving the country as quickly as possible, the stock markets crashing about as hard as the Great Depression, direct refusal by major shipping companies to deal with the nation, and the currency halving relative to everything else, while also finding the hard way that all the military hardware had been “maintained” with cheap lookalike products and the cost difference pocketed by corruption at an unknown part of the chain.
They can’t bear to consider that this is something of a last hurrah as Europe tries to wean themselves from the petro drug. There’s plenty of non-petroleum-related business going on in Texas, but the semi-rural power base relies on oil to stay rich.
Update: I just saw he's published a newer book as well, https://www.amazon.com/New-Map-Energy-Climate-Nations/dp/159... "The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations" which I haven't read, but probably just updates the story as it evolved over the past 10 years.