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Ukraine’s partial gas cut to Europe could force activation of Nord Stream 2

Kiev attempts to blackmail Europe by partially halting gas flow from Russia

By Paul Antonopoulos | Aletho News | May 12, 2022

Ukraine’s decision to partially disable the flow of gas earmarked for Europe will be short-lived as it will not only cause major problems for the European economy, but it will also leave Kiev without billions of dollars in transit tax revenue – something it desperately needs as the economy is in ruin.

The Ukrainian gas transmission system operator (GTSOU) said it decided to suspend operations at a major transit point because of “interference by the occupying forces.” The decision to stop flows from Sokhranivka halts about a third of the Russian gas that arrives in Europe via Ukraine as the measuring station handles as much as 32.6 million cubic meters per day, according to GTSOU.

“As a result of the Russian Federation’s military aggression against Ukraine, several GTS facilities are located in territory temporarily controlled by Russian troops and the occupation administration,” the company said.

Kiev’s idea of transferring gas supplies from Sohranovka to the Suja gas station, which is in Ukrainian-controlled territory, has been dismissed by the Russian state gas company Gazprom as “technically impossible.” In addition, Gazprom said that it fulfills all its obligations to European consumers and delivers gas for transit in accordance with all contracts.

The disrupted transit of one-third of the gas that Europe needs would cause major damage to the continent’s economy. Europe already has less gas than it currently needs and the problem is not just that the price of gas will go up, but there will not be enough needed for industrial production.

If Russian gas does not arrive via Ukraine in the agreed quantity, Europe would have to consider extracting from reserves in underground storage facilities. The price of such gas will certainly be higher than in the case of gas arriving via Ukraine. Therefore, Kiev’s attempts to coax Europe into further involvement in the war with Russia will receive little accolade as it threatens Europe’s economy at a time when it is already suffering.

Kiev’s decision to reduce gas flows to European markets also means that it will suffer as it will lose transit fees that it desperately needs as its economy has stagnated. Another outcome that Ukraine did not consider is that it could force Europe to challenge the US’ opposition to the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. If Russian gas does not arrive via Ukraine, it could be the very catalyst needed to activate Nord Stream 2.

If Ukraine were to remain committed to reducing Russian gas flows to Europe, even at the expense of billions of dollars in transit fees, the question begs whether the EU would be willing to potentially run out of gas and/or see prices rise even further, or activate Nord Stream 2. Activating Nord Stream 2 would effectively mean the US’ failure after so much effort was made to prevent the pipeline from functioning.

For this reason, Ukraine’s decision to halt a third of Russian gas flows to Europe is likely a bluff as it needs all the money it can receive at the moment. At the same time, the Europeans hope to slowly wean themselves off Russian energy, understanding that an immediate cut is not sustainable and would collapse their economies.

Kiev’s incessant demand that Brussels put an embargo on Russian energy imports to the EU will be challenged so long as there are leaders, like Hungary’s Viktor Orban, who prioritize their state’s economy and people’s welfare, or entire major industries are threatened, such as Germany’s manufacturing and Greece’s shipping.

It is quite possible that this disunity and lack of consensus on the embargo in a situation where energy cannot be undermined, could force a rethink of Europe’s policies towards Moscow.

“We will have a peace to build tomorrow, let us never forget that,” Macron said in Strasbourg on May 9, adding: “We will have to do this with Ukraine and Russia around the table. The end of the discussion and the negotiation will be set by Ukraine and Russia. But it will not be done in denial, nor in exclusion of each other, nor even in humiliation.”

On the same day, he said in a tweet: “We are not at war with Russia. We work as Europeans for the preservation of the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine. For the return of peace to our continent. We will be there to rebuild Ukraine, as Europeans, always.”

However, despite the rhetoric of pan-Europeanism, Macron has already proven in deed that Europe’s elite are still very much under the orbit of Washington. If Ukraine are to partially halt the flow of Russian gas to Europe, the next test of Europe’s so-called “strategic autonomy” would be whether it activates Nord Stream 2 to protect their economic interests or continue following Washington’s demands on keeping the pipeline closed.

Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.

May 12, 2022 Posted by | Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | , , | 3 Comments

How many and who is dying for ‘our freedom’?

Free West Media | May 12, 2022

The Western propaganda machine never tires of claiming that a struggle for “Western values” and “democracy” is being waged against Russia in Ukraine. And the Zelensky regime, which has since become even more outright dictatorial, spreads the word that the West’s “freedom” is also being defended in the east and south of the country.

Whether the Ukrainian troops, who have been exposed to Russian attacks in their defensive positions for months now, see things the same way is open to debate. According to a number of reliable sources, they have suffered heavy losses of men and material.

Strangely enough, little or nothing is heard about this in the leading media outlets or from politicians. On the other hand, huge Russian losses are reported or speculated about with fervour, the Russian military leadership is alternately accused of incompetence or brutality, and every report from Kiev that signals a new Putin debacle is spread without hesitation. This has already aroused the mistaken hope among some contemporaries in the West that the Ukrainian comedian and his followers are well on the way to a victorious peace over the invaders.

There is a pronounced multimedia-supported lack of interest in Ukrainian military victims, even though they are supposedly allowing themselves to be shot dead or invalided for our “Western values”, for “freedom” and “democracy”. Therefore, not a word has been written about the latest bloody Kiev disaster in the failed recapture of the strategically important Snake Island in the Black Sea off Odessa. Or the fact that more and more completely inadequately militarily trained conscripted Ukrainians and mercenaries are being sent to the Eastern Front as cannon fodder to make up for the large crew losses there.

The total lack of empathy of the “value-based West” with the real suffering and dying Ukrainian soldiers is nothing short of scandalous and profoundly inhumane. As little as there was real interest in the West in the corrupt state of Ukraine before the war, so little interest is there now in the men who are now not only fighting for the independence of their country with weapons, but are supposed to weaken Russia and Putin to the maximum for the benefit of Joe Biden’s family and the tone-deaf clique in Brussels. It makes no sense for Ukrainian soldiers to risk their lives for this rag-tag bunch of deeply unpopular, self-anointed “leaders”. Their own people despise them.

The silence about the military victims of Ukraine results not least from the guilty conscience of those who unscrupulously let many young men die in supplying deadly weapons to “ruin” the much-maligned Vladimir Putin. Western “leaders” and their servants deserve only contempt and shame.

More young men face annihilation after Biden escalated the US proxy war with Russia by signing the Ukraine Democracy Defense Lend-Lease Act into law this week, aimed at providing Ukraine with weapons on demand. They now risk triggering a global nuclear demolition for “our values”. How demented is that?

And corporate elites and political puppets like Biden drone on about the threat of “disinformation” but what they actually fear is dissent, not disinformation. They happen to be the top conveyers of untruths, actually. Not long ago, the same people claimed that the fact that the vaccinated can still contract and die from Covid was called disinformation, for example. Biden’s new disinformation Gauleiter Nina Jankowicz thinks “trustworthy verified people” like herself who had recently brazenly lied about Hunter Biden’s laptop, be given the power to turn Twitter into another heavily-redacted Wikipedia.

At least Republican representative Marjorie Taylor Greene from Georgia is not buying this crap about “our values”: She tore into the bill to provide Ukraine with an astonishing $40 billion military and economic aid and called a spade a spade: “Stop funding regime change and money laundering scams!” She also pointed out that some pro-war US politicians were more interested in covering up their crimes in Ukraine than coming clean.

May 12, 2022 Posted by | Militarism | , , | Leave a comment

The Vaccine Cajolers, Part 2: Creating the demand

By Paula Jardine | TCW Defending Freedom | May 12, 2022

This is the second instalment of Paula Jardine’s five-part investigation into the planning behind ensuring vaccine acceptance and countering vaccine ‘hesitancy’. You can read Part 1, published yesterday, here. 

IN 2010, as GAVI, the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisations (now called The Vaccine Alliance) was setting out on its ambitious ten-year strategic plan called the Decade of the Vaccine, Dr Heidi Larson, a professor of anthropology, risk and decision science, set up the ‘Vaccine Confidence Project’ at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. It was funded by vaccine manufacturers and their European lobby group in conjunction with the European Commission, UNICEF and University College London. The ubiquitous Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is unusually absent from this list. The project’s purpose was to challenge vaccine scepticism.

Larson explained: ‘I have a pretty mixed group – my team includes psychologists, anthropologists, social media analysts, mathematical modellers, and they all ask different kinds of questions. What we have in common is that we’re all working on the same challenge of trying to understand why people are questioning and refusing vaccines more than they used to.’

With the number of approved vaccines on national immunisation schedules increasing and with dozens of new vaccines in the pipeline, GAVI’s game plan had become ‘demand generation’, in other words getting people actively to seek out vaccination (the intention being for people to create bottom-up pressure on their governments). Strategic Objective 2 of the Global Vaccine Action Plan (GVAP), the implementation plan for the Decade of the Vaccine, which remains today, is that ‘individuals and communities understand the value of vaccines and demand immunisation as both their right and responsibility.’

The GVAP reframing of vaccination in terms of rights and responsibilities transforms vaccination from an individual (private) medical choice (even in the context of a national public health programme) into a civic rights issue, pitting choice against a (spurious) socio-political ordinance. Writing on her blog, Larson explains, ‘Immunisation, since its beginning, has always walked a tense line between individual rights to choice and societal rights to health. A tense line between rights and responsibilities – the right to choose, with the caveat that it does not injure those around you.’

The principal value of this utilitarian collectivist perspective is that it displaces, for ‘the greater good’ (as defined by certain elites), the well-established medical ethics principle that the benefit of a procedure to each individual recipient must outweigh the risk. The assumption here is that for an act to be morally right it has to be judged only on its consequences for the majority. And since vaccines are supposed to induce immunity and consequently prevent transmission of infectious diseases, mass vaccination in pursuit of disease eradication must be for the greater good. As the utilitarians say, the end justifies the means.

Winning confidence in vaccines, which means winning trust in their safety and efficacy, is therefore imperative. From the health system administering them to the motives of the policy makers, this is the requisite of demand generation. When and where this fails has been dubbed ‘hesitancy’, the reluctance or refusal to be vaccinated despite the availability of vaccines (as though vaccines were, per se and in all circumstances, an unquestionable good regardless of the chequered history of many). According to a World Health Organisation working group report, ‘As hesitancy undermines demand, to achieve the GVAP defined vaccine demand goal, countries will need to address hesitancy. High rates of hesitancy mean low demand.’

Vaccines have been recognised by courts in the US, including its Supreme Court, as unavoidably unsafe products. However, based on the precedent of smallpox eradication, public health agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) remain determined to use vaccination to eradicate diseases and therefore argue that the overall value of vaccines to the community outweighs the risk to any single individual.

Diseases are no longer just diseases, we’re told they’re vaccine preventable diseases. Evidence in the medical literature of people who fail to respond to vaccination (primary failure) or of waning protection following vaccination (secondary failure) is simply ignored. The single greater good concept has provided the justification for mandatory vaccination and, in Covid times, for restricting the freedoms of those who exercise their right to bodily autonomy by refusing a medical procedure. Those unlucky enough to be injured or die from vaccine administration are what the American bioethicist Dr Leroy Walters has called ‘injured recruits in the war on infectious disease’.

Despite the rationale that society benefits from universal vaccination, the burden of vaccine injury is largely borne by individuals. It’s now standard practice for vaccine manufacturers to bear no liability for their products. The precedent of indemnification was set by the ill-fated 1976 US swine flu vaccination campaign when the US government stepped in because insurers balked. It paid out almost as much in compensation for vaccine injuries as it spent on the programme, thanks to an active surveillance reporting system for vaccine injuries. Active surveillance has never been repeated. Today only 27 countries have compensation programmes for vaccine injuries, a small improvement on the dozen that had them when GAVI was created in 1999. As for the rest, their injured citizens are collateral damage in the Rockefeller-conceived War on Microbes.

May 12, 2022 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

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