Huge pro-EU rally grips Ukraine

[TarJak]

Originally Posted by Betonov

Women don't like me. When I think travel I only think scenery

Yes but I think about what a Russian sailor might be thinking...

[Skybird]

According to the Financial Times, Russia threatens the EU openly with reducing gas exports, to a degree that the planned gas re-exports by the EU to the Ukraine could no longer be done.

I am curious whether that includes their deals with Germany to whom Russia still maintains very special relations. Germany's gas reserves would hold out for 5-6 months. I think that Putin still holds his contracts and deals with Germany in slightl yhigher esteem, than his deals with the EU in general or other EU countries. Also he maintains quite some close and personal ties with some German key figures, namely former chancellor Gerhard Schröder, but also others. If he is willing to let all this collapse and to destroy the trust expressded int hese special relations, then this at the latest really should serve as the last, final and loudest warning call for the West that times have irreversibly changed.

The latest delay of several days for the new EU sanctions could be linked to these threats.

Moscow has cancelled the superbargain price for gas to the ukraine already some time ago, and no longer accepts Kiev's demands for price rabates of 65% and more, but insists on market prices being paid that are in the usual range of gas prices.

Russia also threaten to close its airspace for Western airline's overflights. While using transit fees that way, the damage done to Western airlines is greater than the Russian losses.

A chief correspondent quite well known in Germany, Fritz Pleitgen for the ARD, who was former chief of the ARD's Moscow studio for many years, said that it was a big mistake to provoke Russia over the Ukraine that much, and that the Russian reaction was fully forseeable and not differently to be expected.

Personally I wonder if maybe in Washington one knew very well what one was doing when starting to move over the Ukraine and pushing the EU again last year. I have started to doubt that one was really surprised by the Russian reaction - it was so very obvious to be expected - , but that the Russian reaction was exactly what one was aiming for: calculating that the longer the conflict lasts, the greater the final geostrategic gain would be for Washington.

That could have been a miscalculation, then.

And Herrfried Münkler, a politologist and historian whom I appreciate and whose books I have read, writes in this GERMAN essay

http://www.focus.de/politik/ausland/...html?drucken=1

that wars are paying off again and that this is the alarming message to be learned from IS's terror and the Ukrainian conflict, becasue the peace order of the past decades only lasted because the costs of war were higher than their gains. Iraq and afghanistan showed that clearly. IS and Russia today show how to move borders and rewrite maps with far more money-efficient tools and tactics. Münkler predicted such a shift in the international order between peace and war already in his book on the new wars 13 years ago.

[Betonov]

Originally Posted by TarJak

Yes but I think about what a Russian sailor might be thinking...

[Oberon]

[TarJak]

[Jimbuna]

[TarJak]

So are the sanctions starting to bite on the Russian economy yet?

http://www.mni-indicators.com/index.php?article_id=50

Consumer confidence indicates possibly. I'd be interested to hear from our Russian's whether they are seeing anything different economically since sanctions started?

[Jimbuna]

I'm wondering if and when the gas supply to Germany for example will be turned off....or can they afford to do so?

[Betonov]

Originally Posted by TarJak

So are the sanctions starting to bite on the Russian economy yet?

More like biting back
https://translate.google.com/transla...-text=&act=url

[Skybird]

Originally Posted by Jimbuna

I'm wondering if and when the gas supply to Germany for example will be turned off....or can they afford to do so?

They probably will not cut it completely, and that also is not what they threatened. They threatened to limit gas exports into the EU to a degree where the EU can no longer afford to re-export them to the Ukraine. They want to prevent the EU to ease the pressure they try to concentrate on the Ukraine. The Ukraine until recently paid only a third of globally used market prices for Russian gas, Moscow has scratched all those special benefits and rabates, and demands them to pay the same like everyone else. If there will be rabates in the future, Kiev will have to pay for that by... cooperating...

In the medium turn, I expect them to shift focusses towards Asia, especially China. Several large callibre partnerships just had been signed, including gas and oil. The building of the needed infrastructure also has been started. Once it is in place, Europe better has its homework done somehow and be less dependent on Russian gas.

The charm of delivering China not goods and knowhow like Europe does, but resources, is that China cannot just change the deal and expropriate the foreign partner, like they now use to do so openly with several business branches, for example cars. If they try that with Russian gas, there simply will be no gas flowing anymore, period. The Western way of doing business in and with China, is extremely shortsighted, and strategically disadvantageous.

[ikalugin]

The food prices have increased, but this is about it for your average consumer. For industrial people it is more complex, but it is too early to say, especially considering the state programs and the shift to buying stuff from Asia.

The party who were hit the worst are the financial dudes, but then they are the only major pro western group we have, so maybe it was not the best choice to weaken them.

As to the popular opinion stuff - we have more or less mobilised the population for a war, or so it would appear to me. While this precludes popular unrest should Russia continue supporting the separatists it also precludes Russia from giving up.

[Skybird]

http://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/unt...-a-990894.html

Poland and Germany report that the gas delivery reduction seems to have begun. While German energy provider E.On just says that they get less gas per day now then would be usual, Polish PGNiG marks the decline at 20-24% since Monday, compared to the delivery volumes fixed in the contracts.

Due to well-filled reserve tanks in Germany (70-80% full, I think I read some days ago), the issue is said to be no issue currently. How it is with Poland, I don't know. The German reserves are said to be sufficient to last for 5-6 months, if all gas import breaks down.

---

If it is no intentional reduction by the Russians, then it must be a "loss" during the transfer through Ukraine. Kiev had threatened to do so, if it sees the need to do so, means if it cannot get the gas it wants form Russia at the demanded special low prices. Stealing gas from the transfer pipelines to the EU is nothing new in the Ukraine, it has happened repeatedly in past years.

Also, there also was a sanction law passed by the Ukrainian Parliament in mid-August that gives the premier the power to block 65 Russian companies linked to the gas sector in a retaliatory step of sanctions against Russia, if the premier wants that. Parliament however refused to pass an addendum to that law that would have blocked all national and foreign media to research and report about that.

[Oberon]

You poor sods get E.on too?

Isn't this about the point that the US said it will step in with its gas supplies?

Tick tock...

[Jimbuna]

E.ON is a major investor-owned energy supplier. At facilities across Europe, Russia, and North America,

http://www.eon.com/en/about-us/profi...d-figures.html

[Onkel Neal]

Originally Posted by Skybird

Leaves Germany alone. Germany pays, but not for too long anymore, i fear. Germany bends under too many false assumptions about its own economic situation and financial maneuvering spaces. The economy stutters, the Euro bites more and more menacing, and infrastructre and demography with all their follow-on consequences point downwards. Pillars of Europe? There are none. Just the cleptomanic EUcracy with a political self-underdtandsing that is no no way different than that of feudal lords owning their peasants in the medieval. A Kindergarten, and the more members there were added, the weaker and more meaningless it became on the stage of global politics...

Leave Germany alone? Leave America out of this too. We really need to go back to being isolationist. If a 2016 presidential candidate says he will pull our troops out of the Middle East Europe and Asia, that's my man, be he democrat, Republican or libertarian. it's time for America to stop trying to fix the worlds problems