NEO – Putin puts Ukraine gas payments on Europe’s back

Putin puts Ukraine’s gas payments on Europe’s back

… by  Jim W. Dean, VT Editor,    … with  New Eastern Outlook, Moscow

“In the long run, global politics are bound to become increasingly uncongenial to the concentration of hegemonic power in the hands of a single state. Hence, America is not only the first, as well as the only, truly global superpower, but it is also likely to be the very last.” – Zbigniew Brzezinski

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–  First published April 14, 2014  –

The Geo-political war going on over Ukraine has been short on bullets and bombs, and long with lies and disinformation.

In fact the latter seem to be the current weapons of choice because the more you use them the more advantage you can gain at a reasonable cost.

But there has been just one problem with that strategy. Some of the policy and PR geniuses seem to have forgotten that we have a lot of talented people out here in alternative media, and we actually have computers and Internet hookups where we can put research teams together to check out the veracity, or lack thereof on their claims.

So far, the West is flunking miserably in the diplomacy arena, to the point where it should be resignation time for many of the policy people.

The Big Con in all of this Ukraine controversy is what we old hands can only describe as an hysterical attempt to paint contemporary Russia onto an old Soviet era canvas. Our Western spinmeisters, being short on material, gave their hand away early by over doing the name calling.

I have not seen the term “Reds” used since… ahhh… I can’t even remember. But it’s back. And the dummies don’t seem to know that when they try doing somebody in with the old Hitler smear, that is a dead giveaway that they are lying.

When we saw the Hitler number getting bipartisan use from the likes of John McCain and Hillary Clinton, we knew that even AIPAC had joined the fray, offering their services. Politicians are impossible to embarrass about anything, they say.

You can ask any criminal psychologist who is it that can routinely beat lie detector test, and they will instantly telling you serial killers and many successful politicians. No, I am not kidding.

Why?… because they are both sociopaths. They don’t have the have any of the physiology that the rest of us have when lying. So we have not wasted our Ukraine story ammo on the politicians.

We are going after the much more vulnerable military brass and the staff of the high government officials who are supposed to have experts checking their stuff, like accountants and technical specialists.

We saw the “Gas Wars” clouds on the horizon early. With the West edging the Russians out of the Ukraine, the gas subsidies were surely not going to continue and any debt refinancing funding would have strings attached to it that “none of this goes to the Russians.”

Putin and Gazprom have acted with their usual cool, the direct opposite of the always threatening West. The Russians made no threats for demand payments of back debts because it was known that Ukraine was broke. But they did draw a line in the sand that current deliveries would have to be paid.

Apparently Kiev was instructed to commit to paying nothing so the option of the Russians cutting off supplies could then be spun as the Russian bear using their energy weapon to extort Europe. This reflects the contempt that Western elites have over thinking all the rest of us are just morons. Even the White house jumped on this line thinking they could pull a domestic constituency behind the scam as some kind of a economic revival. What we are seeing in action here folks are snake oil salesmen.

With the usual help of the Rupert Murdoch media, buzz terms like “European energy security” all began appearing at the same time, the usual manufactured hysteria that our Western gangsters like to head trip us with. The White house and Congress were quick to pose that the US could supply all European gas needs.

Left out of the bragging, besides that being a lie, is that Europe already supplies most of it’s own gas, the Russians only around 26%, although that varies from country to country.

This week John Kerry was spinning Russia’s ending the gas discount to Ukraine’s post illegal coup government as a political weapon, when everybody knows Russia has no obligation to continue it, as no one would under the same circumstances.

Kerry played the “energy security” card, code for trying to use the Ukraine crisis to somehow get a big chunk of the Russian gas business to Europe.

It did not take long for the fraud to be unveiled. Despite the long lead time to build facilities on both sides of the Atlantic, even the current and near term gas export production of the US is already contracted to Asia. And then there is the little matter of the cost.

Russia’s Energy Minister Alexandre Novak estimated an increase of 50% in gas cost for European customers of America’s make believe gas security. And unlike the West, Novak was not making the numbers up. The highly respected firm of Bernstein Research estimated $215 billion in conversion expenses and $37 billion annually in higher bills.

The American dummies that put this silly “energy security” nonsense out just took their credibility lower than it already is. There are certainly those in the EU who are working with the US NeoCon scaremongers, but let’s listen to what some of the cooler heads have to say about this attempted “energy security” scam. Reiner Hartmann, Chairman of the Association of European Businesses has said European gas business will continue.

“And during the past 40 years not one cubic meter of gas was not delivered according to contracts.” …Russia also never used gas as a weapon in political issues, etc. And, we believe, this will not be the case in the future.”

The talk of European sanctions on Russia due to Ukraine is bogus, and a high school home economics student could tell you why. It took me a whole two minutes to Google up the numbers.

The EU exports $264 billion and Russians $152, leaving the EU with a huge $112 billion trade surplus. You haven’t heard much about that in the Western media, have you?

But there is more. Of the $152 billion that the EU buys from Russia, 76% of that is for gas and oil… $115 billion. So what we have here is the EU getting all the money it is spending on energy returned to them in the trade surplus and the jobs associated with it. And the US expects these countries to sanction Russia? Not hardly.

I will close with the brilliant diplomatic move that Putin made with a letter to Russia’s 18 EU gas customers. He put the Ukraine’s not paying its gas bills as a monkey on their backs. He put squarely on the table that Russia has subsidized Ukraine for $35.4 billion when Europe did nothing. And let’s not forget that Victoria Nuland tells us the US spent $5 billion trying to overthrow the country. Putin wrote:

“I would underline – nobody except Russia has done this,”… “And what about [our] European partners? Instead of real support for Ukraine – declarations about intentions. Promises without real action.” …“Russia should not and cannot any longer bear the brunt of supporting the Ukrainian economy alone, giving it gas discounts and forgiving debts. In fact, with these subsidies Russia pays for a deficit in trade between Ukraine and the EU member states.”

So Putin was telling them all that the contact provision for default on the current deliveries, that payment in advance will now have to be received for all future deliveries, and that Russia is not going to be the goat that subsidizes an illegal and violent coup.

Most of the EU countries have recognized the coup-meisters, so it is upon them to put their weight behind getting current gas deliveries paid for.

There were no threats, unlike what would be coming from Kerry and NATO, just a cool-headed observation that Russia is way ahead of all of them on carrying Ukraine while they were trying to subvert it. It is now a broken country, much of that due to EU and US coup support.

Russia is not going to be a financial buffer for them, especially when NATO is banging the war drums and the US thinks it is taking over their European gas business. So once again we have the Russians on the diplomatic stage who are the only grownups. The rest are all acting like teenagers who think they know everything, the world is their oyster, and someone else must pay their bills.

Jim W. Dean, managing editor for Veteranstoday.com, producer/host of Heritage TV Atlanta, specially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.”

Editing: Erica P. Wissinger

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Jim W. Dean

Jim W. Dean was an active editor on VT from 2010-2022.  He was involved in operations, development, and writing, plus an active schedule of TV and radio interviews.

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