Azerbaijan will supply up to 20,000 million cubic meters of gas a year to the EU, they announced the other day from the European Comission. The head of said entity posted a tweet the other day, which seems very crude. She said: “The EU is turning towards trustworthy energy suppliers. And Azerbaijan is one of them”. It turns out that, according to the head of the European Commission, a reliable partner that will help the EU on its way to energy transition can have the following characteristics that I am going to list here:
-You can carry out invading wars in order to annex territories. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, please read what happened between Armenia and Azerbaijan in Nagorno-Karabakh just two years ago.
-You can carry out ethnic cleansing by substituting some peoples for others through forced displacement of the population in the annexed territories. Making sure, incidentally, to destroy any trace of the cultural or religious presence of the displaced people.
-You can use prohibited weapons during your wars and also resort to mercenaries from the Middle East.
-It can declare, permanently, that the State against which it carries out the war does not have the right to exist directly, because “its lands are our lands”.
-It can carry out a progressive occupation of the recognized territories of the neighboring State, always threatening with fire, and annexing piece by piece, parts of its territory.
-You can quietly worship a single irreplaceable leader who inherited the power of his father, another irreplaceable leader. He can also carry out political reprisals against adversaries, with arbitrary imprisonment, including torture.
And you understand perfectly what all this is about. That Europe needs to ensure resources for the winter and that makes it inevitable to agree with the occasional satrap as, on the other hand, he has always done. The problem is the language used to describe everything. Because the language goes as if it were an existential challenge, the fight between good and evil.
But it turns out that all those declared values, the bad, the good, the regular, are all empty words that only an idiot or someone who denies reality could believe, in order to sweeten the serious economic problems (which neither Ursulaneither Joseph they will have, but ordinary people will have because of their decisions). A kind of anesthesia. And the only thing that exists, the only thing that is worth is interest. And within the framework of those interests, it is perfectly possible to sit down to dinner with a dictator and toast the ecological transition. Again we return to that of our sons of bitches in front of the others, those who are not ours.
In other words, if you agree with Azerbaijan, please, don’t tell us stories about values and trust, it’s nice to listen to them.
Venezuela is considered as one of the options. Yes, the former Venezuelan ‘regime’ that was also a danger to our democracies, is no longer. And it is not that the usurper has resigned and the president in charge has taken office who will call transparent and free elections immediately, not at all.
Simply, EEUSA began to lift sanctions on the oil sector of the Caribbean country because the embargo on Russian oil has caused prices to skyrocket.
Over the years they have applied a whole series of sanctions to sink the Venezuelan oil sector: because it is not that they only prohibited Venezuela from trading in oil, no. They have cut off access to all technologies to destroy the entire sector. They made sure that Venezuelan oil production fell to historic lows and now this is the country that is supposed to come to the rescue.
A few months ago, Washington sent an entire delegation to meet with the government of Nicholas Maduronot with the Juan Guaidoand here we should review at what point our trusted media stopped talking about the Maduro regime, replacing it with a brief Maduro or Maduro government.
USA imposes the sanctions, we comply and impose the sanctions. The US raises them and we are already looking to see how we do it without dissimulation and without fear of success. This is like in the mythical Argentine movie, Waiting for the carriage: “I pout, she pouts. I make ravioli, she makes ravioli.”. Well, more or less that’s the dynamic.
At the time, the sanctions of USA to Venezuela they made Spain look for alternative suppliers (mainly the US, of course, we are not going to go crazy either) and that especially affected Repsol, which had business with the Venezuelan state company PDVSA.
But the situation has changed and it seems that business with the Venezuelan government is not as toxic as it used to be. Since Caracas They warned, in turn, that they have enough oil to supply Europe, but please pay for it in advance. Coming from a country that has had all its funds abroad blocked.
Going back to trusted partners, I did not start with the example of Saudi Arabia, because it is very easy and very worn. But partly because of that, it is very necessary. It doesn’t matter if he invades countries and bombs them for years, if we help him by providing weapons. It does not matter if he dissolves opponents in acid after dismembering them in an embassy in the heart of London. They will never stop being our trusted partners.
In fact, a few days ago the US president Joe Biden toured the Middle East and one of the main objectives has been to convince Saudi Arabia to increase oil production.
And there Biden has stayed with the prince Mohammed Bin Salman who has he been accusing, precisely, of the murder of dissident journalist Jamal Khasoggi. On the eve of that visit, Biden wrote a column in Washington Post in which he dropped the idea that well, our values are strong, I know they will criticize me for that visit, I sanctioned the prince for that murder, but hey, we have to stay strong, our safety comes first.
It is not very clear if they have reached a specific agreement on the increase in production, because at the end of the meeting Biden only came out to answer a few questions and limited himself to saying that in the coming weeks we will see a result. The next day, however, the Saudi prince said that the maximum amount that his country is capable of producing is about 13 million barrels a day. Only two million more than what he had already promised to produce in the framework of the OPEC.
Finally, we must talk about Russia. I already see a few coming telling me “So what then, do we have to finance this war, do we have to pay Putin?” .
Well, in fact they are doing it, they are paying Putin, and Ukraine also in passing, which continues to charge for the transit of gas through its territory.
But the point is that Russia More than 10,000 sanctions have been applied to him. There are some very painful ones, which in the long term will harm the country more than any oil or gas embargo. The oil or gas embargo harms Europe more than Russia. If the idea is to get cold, not put on washing machines, not turn on the air to harm Russia, and see if that way the money for the war runs out, I’ll tell you no, and I’ve already said it several times here: in a one way or another, the money will not run out.
The war costs Russia a lot of money: according to various estimates, about 120 billion dollars, 5% of its GDP. But Russia can tap into its domestic financial market: Russian banks are flush with liquidity, the country has very low domestic debt, and it can finance that war effort for a couple of years or more, regardless of whether Europe buys gas from it or not.
Sanctions on the energy sector, for the moment, only bring benefits to Russia: by raising prices, it sells less, but enters more. If we accept some estimates as true, Russia earned in the first 100 days of war 93 billion dollars from its energy exports. And that is not a Russian source, there are. But this is a report from Finnish Clean Air and Energy Research Center. A record figure, almost triple that of the same period last year. Remember that number when you want to speculate on the possibility that Russia will turn off the tap.
And also remember that in the times of the Cold War Western countries supplied weapons to the Afghan mujahideen or the Nicaraguan contras, the USSR shot down a Korean passenger plane and the US an Iranian one, the two superpowers were involved in wars on all continents, the amendment was in force jackson vanikbut Soviet oil and gas flowed to Western Europe through several pipelines (one of them was called Druzhba, Friendship) without interruptions.
So maybe for “do pedagogy and explain to people what we are up to”, It would be necessary to start with these data and by telling the citizens that some of the decisions that the EU makes are going basically wrong.
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