“The European Union is dependent on Russia for almost half of its natural gas and a quarter of its oil. Germany alone imports 55 percent of the gas it consumes from Putin’s petro-state. As part of its invasion strategy, Russia thought it could use its natural gas and oil to blackmail Europe into passivity. Europe is belatedly beginning to shut off the Russian spigot, but it will pay a heavy economic price for the delay.
And for Europe’s energy switch to succeed, the United States must step up.
Just as we were the Arsenal of Democracy when fascism threatened Europe 80 years ago, today we must become the Arsenal of Clean Energy. That means we should finance and export clean energy to Europe in large quantities as quickly as possible. This approach would help protect our own security and economic interests, as well as the sovereignty, democracies, and economies of Europe, all while working to combat climate change.
Our goals should be: 1) make European energy secure; 2) help shift European countries to cleaner energy; and 3) create a massive clean energy market that strengthens supply chains and job creation in the U.S.”
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“starts with an energy version of the “Candy Bombers” who supplied Berlin during the Soviet Union’s blockade in 1948. In this case, we could provide a temporary natural gas lifeline to Europe as they wean themselves off Russian energy. America has some additional capacity, and more coming online very soon, to send liquefied natural gas to Europe. We should combine a near-term increase in U.S. gas production and exports to Europe with assistance for European countries to, over the medium-term, reduce their reliance on natural gas by switching to other, lower-carbon fuels and increased energy efficiency.
Second, to ensure this lifeline leads Europe to a safe and sustainable future, the United States needs to create an American clean energy sovereignty fund. We should commit to $10 billion per year for the next decade to finance the export of U.S. hydrogen, nuclear, and carbon capture technology that can be deployed across Europe. The new technologies should be supported by both U.S. and European supply chains and workers to ensure economic growth across both continents. This government-backed entity would provide a significant cost-share for countries importing U.S. clean energy, particularly technologies that will be primarily made in and exported from the U.S.
As we are seeing now with Germany’s reconsideration of its decision to close its nuclear plants, even renewable-heavy countries need firm clean energy provided by technologies like nuclear power. This is even more important in industrial areas of Eastern Europe that need both the steady electricity and high heat that nuclear, or hydrogen, can provide.
Finally, as all of Washington knows by now, personnel is policy. To underscore the urgency of this mission, the Biden administration should create a new, senior position at the National Security Council to manage clean, firm energy and coordinate the alphabet soup of agencies involved. This position would oversee a new “Team Energy” of public and private sector experts who can cut through the bureaucracy.”
“Russia controls 4 percent of global cobalt production, for example, and 11 percent of nickel production. Following the sanctions package dropped on Russia, cobalt’s price increased from $74,000 per ton to $82,000 per ton and has now more than doubled since the start of 2021. Nickel’s price, meanwhile, has zoomed since the beginning of March, rising from $25,000 per ton on March 1 to a high above $45,000 briefly before settling at $32,000. Since 2019, the price of nickel has nearly tripled.
Shortages and price rises in those commodities will stymie any transition from carbon-emitting combustion engines to electric cars, since the average electric car battery contains 80 pounds of nickel and 15 to 30 pounds of cobalt. Increased gas prices due to a Russian oil collapse would not necessarily increase the adoption of green energy programs because electric cars, solar panels, and wind turbines all use nickel and cobalt to varying degrees. The rising costs of nickel and other inputs will very likely cause electric vehicle batteries, which were growing rapidly less expensive over the last decade, to stop getting more affordable until at least 2024.
Reduced access to Russian commodities will drive up the cost of renewables and electric vehicles as gas prices also increase. It’s easier to increase oil production than it is to increase nickel or cobalt production; America has at least 35 billion barrels of proven oil reserves and OPEC can increase oil production whenever it wants. Pumping more oil is a faster and less arduous process than building a new nickel mine.
But the U.S. has another available source of nickel and cobalt that could be counted on when countries on the other side of the world have production difficulties due to war or internal strife, and it’s a scant 90 nautical miles off the coast of Florida.
Unfortunately, this source happens to be Cuba, and American companies have been forbidden by law to do business with Cuba for most of the last 60 years.”
“When the Cold War ended in the ’90s, the United States possessed unrivaled economic and military power. Scholar Francis Fukuyama claimed the “End of History” and former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright asserted the centrality of American exceptionalism in her coinage, “the indispensable nation.”
Some argue that that unipolar moment was overstated. “Look, the Americans suffered from hubris after the end of the Soviet Union,” said Joseph Nye, a Harvard professor who has written widely about American power. “The unipolar moment, I think, was always illusory.”
At the end of the Cold War, the US did continue to hold itself out as the guarantor of security. “The United States appointed itself as responsible for peace, security, and democracy in Europe,” Stephen Wertheim, a historian of US foreign policy at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told me. In response to ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, the United States, through NATO, took military action against Serbia. The intervention was relatively limited, and the outcome of it was a successful projection of US might.
But that unilateral moment, real or imagined, was short-lived.
The terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, were not what challenged that global supremacy, argues Wertheim. Rather, it was the 20 disastrous years of overreach in America’s response. The invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan exposed the limits of US power.”
“While the exodus of about 2.7 million Ukrainians from their war-torn country has focused the world on a burgeoning humanitarian crisis, the descent of Russia into new depths of authoritarianism has many Russians despairing of their future. That has created a flight — though much smaller than in Ukraine”
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“Some who have fled are bloggers, journalists or activists who feared arrest under Russia’s draconian new law criminalizing what the state deems “false information” about the war.
Others are musicians and artists who see no future for their crafts in Russia. And there are workers in tech, law and other industries who saw the prospect of comfortable, middle-class lives — let alone any possibility for moral acceptance of their government — dissipate overnight.
They left behind jobs and family and money stuck in Russian bank accounts that they can no longer access. They fear being tarred as Russians abroad as the West isolates the country for its deadly invasion, and they reel over the loss of a positive Russian identity.
“They didn’t just take away our future,” Polina Borodina, a Moscow playwright, said of her government’s war in Ukraine. “They took away our past.”
The speed and scale of the flight reflect the tectonic shift the invasion touched off inside Russia. For all of President Vladimir Putin’s repression, Russia until last month remained a place with extensive travel connections to the rest of the world, a mostly uncensored internet giving a platform to independent media, a thriving tech industry and a world-class arts scene. Slices of Western middle-class life — Ikea, Starbucks, affordable foreign cars — were widely available.
But when they woke up Feb. 24, many Russians knew that all that was over. Dmitry Aleshkovsky, a journalist who spent years promoting Russia’s emerging culture of charitable giving, got in his car the next day and drove to Latvia.”
“Expanding road, rail and river links between the EU and Ukraine won’t be enough to stave off an economic and humanitarian crisis, Ukraine’s Deputy Economy Minister Taras Kachka told POLITICO.
“We cannot ensure the same volume of exports as via seaports by other means of transportation in forthcoming weeks or even months,” Kachka said. “The only way to ensure proper reinstallment of export is to unblock sea ports. This is the only solution.”
The comments were in part a response to European Agriculture Commissioner Janusz Wojciechowski, who said last week that he was “ready” to establish fast-track trade routes to and from Ukraine to bring fuel to the country’s desperate farmers, and help take their produce out while maritime trade is frozen due to its ports being under Russian fire.”
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“Some of Ukraine’s cargo has shifted to Izmail, Reni or Kiliya — smaller ports on the bank of the Danube, in the southwest of the country. But those have limited capacity.”
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“The logistical challenge is immense. Before the war, Ukraine shipped over 70 percent of its exports. In 2021, 99 percent of Ukraine’s 24.6 million tons of corn exports were shipped out.”
“it’s important to call out the bad U.S. foreign policy moves that helped get us here. And even though no one did this but Putin, the U.S.’s failed approach to Russia for the last 30 years—a bipartisan effort that includes mistakes by Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden—deserves criticism as well.”
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“Clinton could have completely revamped NATO now that its purpose—defending member nations against the expansion of the Soviet Union—was no longer applicable. Instead, Clinton, with the Republican Party’s support, oversaw an expansion of NATO. Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Poland all joined. Years later, Putin would cite this enlargement of NATO as one of the West’s “broken promises” that justified his Ukraine policy.”
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“With the Clinton administration’s backing, NATO also intervened in Yugoslavia in 1999 to ensure an independent Kosovo. That military action never had the backing of the United Nations; it was a violation of international law, just like Putin’s attack on Ukraine.”
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“At a 2008 NATO summit—one attended by Putin—Bush staunchly supported Ukraine’s eventual admittance to NATO, over the objections of France, the U.K., and Germany.
The Obama administration, of course, inflamed tensions with Russia when the U.S. took sides in the 2014 Ukrainian revolution. And then came Donald Trump. Democrats and their allies in the mainstream media ceaselessly accused Trump of being a Russian stooge, even a pro-Putin plant, installed by Russia as president of the U.S. due to a subtle influence campaign on Facebook. This was of course ridiculous—and as evidence of how ridiculous the claims are, Trump’s actual administration was just as foolishly tough on Russia as his predecessors. In 2017, Vice President Mike Pence even reiterated the 2008 Bucharest declaration.
The Biden administration maintained that same fiction. A clear declaration that the Ukraine would not be joining NATO might have deprived Putin of the intellectual ammo he required to move forward with this invasion. We don’t know for sure. But it was incumbent on the U.S. to try. NATO is a means to an end—a more safe and secure Europe—not an end unto itself. If expansion is creating the very conditions that NATO’s existence is supposed to prevent, it’s not working. Yet every single U.S. president since the end of the Cold War has misunderstood this. And now here we are.”
“dictators are often victims of the information bubbles they create around themselves. The sorts of errors that are easily avoidable in democratic systems (thanks to various checks) become commonplace in autocracies, and that leads to profound missteps by leaders.”
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“It’s a mistake that dictators make where they become the victim of their own lies. To be more specific, it’s what happens when authoritarian leaders make catastrophic short-term errors because they start to believe in the fake realities they’ve constructed around themselves.”
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“it’s the story of 22 years of consolidating authority in a place where crossing the dictator is potentially a death sentence. Putin has been in charge for a very long time, and he’s grown increasingly impatient with people who cross him. The effect of getting increasingly isolated and increasingly repressive is that you get increasingly bad information. If independent media is shut down and you can’t freely discuss things, if people are afraid of telling pollsters what they actually think, if propaganda is so rooted in the regime’s survival that it becomes really what you believe to be true, you’re going to make massive mistakes.
I think what happened with Putin is basically the combination of being surrounded by yes-men and being surrounded by propaganda. When you have both of those things, and you’re trying to invade a country that people around you probably think will go badly but they’re afraid to say so, it’s understandable that eventually you start to think, “Maybe it’ll go really well,” because that’s all you’re hearing.”
“The electric drones have a 7.5-foot wingspan and can fly for hours at 1,300ft and need only the coordinates of their target so they can carry out their mission automatically, Bulatsev said.
A smaller reconnaissance drone called Spectre flies alongside to identify targets before the Punisher strikes.
After the fighting started in eastern Ukraine in 2014, a group of veterans launched the drone-making company, UA-Dynamics, according to an Haaretz report, last month.
“Three-quarters of the company’s employees are veterans with experience in special operations deep in enemy territory,” Maxim Subbotin, a marketing expert and an unofficial spokesman for UA-Dynamics, told the newspaper.
Bulatsev said that the main targets were stationary, including fuel and ammunition storage, electronic and counter-electronic warfare stations, and anti-air systems.
Different units in the Ukrainian military are using the drones, but the number of how many and the locations where the Punisher drones are being deployed is classified, Bulatsev said.
Bulatsev previously told The Sun that stealthy Punisher drones had been “causing havoc behind pro-Russian lines on Donbas for years because the enemy has no idea what has hit them.”
He told the outlet that the drone is relatively small and light and is undetectable to radars.
“What’s more, it can drop three bombs at a time or hit three separate targets then return to base to be reloaded and sent back into battle within minutes,” Bulatsev told The Sun.”