Russian gas light

There is a famous urban legend according to which the American newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst, the American newspaper tycoon, told Frederic Remington, the photo correspondent stationed in Cuba, to be patient with the lack of war action on the Caribbean island, assuring him that he would provide him with a war to photograph. The rest ('remember the Maine, to hell with Spain!') is history.

This sort of thing is a bit like the story of that fanciful shepherd boy, who, after so much fudging about the arrival of the wolf, eventually managed to ensure that no one believed him when the moment of truth came. Given the more recent precedents of Nayirah's testimony before the first Gulf War and Colin Powell's before the second, it seems advisable to adopt a certain scepticism when it comes to assuming the verisimilitude of casus belli as they come out of the presses.

The particular news feature of this faltering year that is coming to an end is that, in the absence of one occasion for war, we apparently have two, one in Taiwan and the other in Ukraine. The fact that both China and Russia are probably as eager to go to war with the United States as Spain was in 1898 does not prevent detailed reports of the imminent occupation of Ukraine by the Russian army, published by tabloids such as Bild, from being reproduced everywhere, while news of a similar nature regarding a Chinese invasion of Taiwan is published day in and day out.

Of course, this is no coincidence, as both issues are intertwined with current US foreign policy, which in turn is prompting the Russians and Chinese to make moves, albeit more in the geo-economic than in the military sphere. And given that since the 1973 oil crisis there has been no factor with greater weight in the economy than energy, the supply of Russian hydrocarbons is at the centre of the game board, without this a priori representing an Achilles' heel for Moscow. On the contrary, despite the characteristic gas light in the debate over the Nord Stream 2 pipeline.

Thus, the most orthodox position in Europe advocates cancelling the entry into operation of this energy infrastructure, on the assumption that merely feigning this would act as a deterrent to Russian activity in its former sphere of influence.  However, such a postulate is only tenable if two crucial factors are omitted: on the one hand, it is the Russian state-owned Gazprom itself that has carried out the engineering work on the project, the cost of which has amounted to some 9 billion euros, half of which is in the region of EUR 9 billion. 9 billion, half of which has been borne by European investors, who would irretrievably lose their investment if the pipeline does not start operating, while Gazprom has already more than covered its costs for Nord Stream 2 thanks to additional revenues of 35 billion euros from the price hikes resulting from the high energy market, without having to increase its gas exports one iota.

On the other hand, the harmony between Moscow and Beijing has facilitated the agreement for the start-up of the Power of Siberia 2 project, a 2,600 km gas pipeline between Yamalia-Nenetsia and Mongolia, operated by Gazprom and owned by state-owned companies from both countries. Once it comes into operation in 2030 - after an investment of close to 1 billion euros - the pipeline will bring some 40 billion m³ of gas per year to China, coming from the same fields destined to supply Nord Stream 2.

This understanding between Putin and Xi, new travelling companions, not only relativises the geopolitical effectiveness of cancelling Nord Stream 2, but also mitigates the geostrategic risk for China posed by the future presence in its neighbourhood of Australian nuclear submarines, with the capacity to block the Strait of Malacca, the artery through which oil tankers from the Persian Gulf sail, without whose supply China's industry would be paralysed.

However, the EU does not seem to have any real tools at its disposal to oppose Russia's twin claims - as set out in the proposed security pact put forward by Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei A. Ryabkov - to take back the Persian Gulf's oil reserves. Ryabkov - to restore the Minsk II agreements of 2015, in terms of the stipulations for Ukraine to carry out the constitutional changes necessary to grant autonomy to the Donbas region, on the one hand; and to establish a de facto, if not de jure 'Finlandisation' of Ukraine, on the other, whereby the country would be free to choose its own internal political system and to associate economically and politically with the European Union, but refrain from NATO membership. In other words, aligning its foreign policy with that of Russia.

All the more so if the leaders of Russia, India and China are reportedly to formalise at the Winter Olympics in Beijing the joint adoption of a fully operational substitute for the Belgian-based system for electronic transmission of transactions between financial institutions, known as SWIFT, which is central to the imposition of economic sanctions and embargoes by the United States and the European Union against third countries.

In this context, it is hardly surprising that NATO has approached the Russian foreign ministry with a proposal for formal talks on the disputes opened on 12 January 2022, and that Moscow is considering participating in them. From Putin's perspective, the West has been the first to blink.