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Comment by bboygravity | Hacker News Reader

Germany was bought by the Russians. There's no other logical way to explain what's happening IMO. Their decisions are worse than incompetence alone.

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I don’t understand why Germany wasn’t livid when their leader literally went to work for Russian oil interests [1]. That seems like blatant corruption, doesn’t it?

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerhard_Schr%C3%B6der#Criticis...

Same reason why we have ex-US generals working for foreigners like the Saudi govt and no one seems to care.

What I would do, if I wanted to increase Germany’s reliance on Russia, is use money to ensure the voices of real German people who oppose nuclear power were amplified.

In my opinion it's extremely likely that this happened:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-nuclear_movement_in_Germa...

All Russia had to do is use their unlimited money (from selling gas to Germany) to buy some influence in German news papers (difficulty level: easy) and maybe pay some people to organize protests.

Of course the fact that Russians bought Schroder isn't even speculation (unlike the above). To me the above is extremely likely to have happened (and probably still on-going).

How so? Germany completely got rid of Russian dependence in the energy sector. It’s France that is blocking sanctions on Russian nuclear industry.

Russia was the second largest provider of uranium to the EU.

Didn’t Germany shut down nuclear energy plants too? This problem seems to be entirely of their own making. Why would they do this?

Yes, the plan was set in motion many years earlier. But the reliance Russian energy (whether fossil or uranium fuel) would have been there in either case. Energy exports are a big lever for Russia in foreign affairs.

But the Russians didn’t use the energy leverage so far, did they? Germany seemingly decided to do the damage to themselves on their own. Wouldn’t it be better to take time and find alternative sources of energy first? This is what I don’t understand.

I think the idea is that Russia fosters interdependence on their natural resources as a way to limit retaliation for territorial expansion. It worked with Georgia and Crimea, but they may have miscalculated with Ukraine.

That's very recent isn't it?

Even in the early days of Putin's war Germany was still sponsoring Putin by buying many 100's of millions of EUR of gas from him.

They "got rid of Russian dependence in the energy sector" by reopening old German coal mines, firing up coal power plants and shifting gas imports from Russia to the US + importing tons of nuclear energy from France.

Germany only stopped buying Russian gas for > 50% of their energy needs AFTER a war started AFTER the pipelines to Russia got bombed and AFTER they had no other choice.

Paraphrasing Ford: "A customer can have clean energy from any source he wants as long as it’s gas from Russia."

They don't even use Russian gas anymore.

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