What price oil?

Faceless Bureaucrat

Let’s not put too much faith in the UN to calm things down here – and the chances of NATO deciding to deploy to Georgia are non-existent (always a different matter when your opponent has an Air Force and also out-guns you on the ground – things were so much easier when attacking the Serbs…).

If this plays out in a way that the pipeline actually does get shut-down, events will move far too quickly for the hopelessly ineffective UN to do anything useful.

The utter folly of the UK ceasing to be self-sufficient in energy generation (not to mention food production) begins to dawn on the supporters of greater EU integration. Can anyone really imagine the French selling some of their nuclear-generated surplus energy to the UK as the lights start going out across Europe?

Time to buy some candles and a wood-burning stove…

juliano

bastard anglo saxon .the russian are defending their population

Faceless Bureaucrat

Juliano [5.50pm]

I think that was the same excuse Hitler used...

From Ukraine

The Russia is an agressor. Shame to you, European nations and USA! Your ally, Georgia, is in danger, but you are blind and deaf!

Austin Barry

For Israel this could be a good time to move on Iran. Not quite all of the IDF's ducks are on the pond - ideally it needs another 11 F161s and two more German Dolphin class subs, all of which are on order - but the current Caucasus problem would diffuse reaction to such a strike. I suspect that Israeli defence minister Ehud Barak will be thinking long and hard this evening.

TrevorH

The Russians are fermenting unrest as an excuse to 'protect their population' -- we are not all as daft as you Mr juliano.

Where are the 'its all about oil' brigade when it really is all about oil. This is Russian hegemony at its worst.

Its also a massive failure of EU appeasement of Russia. They should be ejected from the G8 forthwith.

A big wake up call all round for Europe. The TV pictures of the blatant bombing of civilian targets is shattering, devastating, for apologists for Russia. Putin is a cold blooded murderer, but then we always knew that. Here is proof.

Tanuki

Tanuki's Consideration #1: how many nukes do the Georgians command?

Business is business, and I'll put my money 101% behind the Russian oligarchs when it comes to speculating in oil futures....

David Lindsay

We need lots and lots of nuclear power. Then Georgia, Abkhazia and South Ossetia will be of no more interest to us than Northern Ireland, the Basque Country or the deteriorating situation in Belgium is of any interest to the Georgians, the Abkhazians or the South Ossetians.
But first and foremost, we should stay out of this whole business.

Thank God that Georgia has not actually joined NATO, or we would already be at war with Russia. NATO should have been disbanded in 1991, when it ceased to have anything to do.

But instead, it has been extended to within a few hundred miles of Moscow and Saint Petersburg, and it has gone about looking for conflicts from Kosovo to Afghanistan.

Let the realisation that we were one treaty signature away from World War Three, a global nuclear war, finally kill off NATO.

Georgia has withdrawn entirely from Iraq in order to fight this war. Perhaps Russia should invade the United Kingdom.

Odd how every microscopic entity in the Balkans that decides to declare itself independent is indulged, even to the point of military force, by the West, whereas those who seek to do the same thing in the Caucuses, objecting to the arbitrary borders imposed by Stalin rather than insisting on the arbitrary borders imposed by Tito, receives exactly the opposite response, possibly even to the point of military force.

If they will submit to the closely connected forces of European federalism, American hegemony and global capital, then even smack-smuggling, women-trafficking Wahhabi who wear black shirts in deference to their SS fathers and grandfathers can declare any bit of soil they like to be their state. But no one who will not so submit can expect anything other than scorn.

mckenzie

just read an interesting article: Ian McEwan: The day of judgment

"If this possibility of a willed nuclear catastrophe appears too pessimistic or extravagant, or hilarious, consider the case of another individual, remote from Pat Boone - President Ahmadinejad of Iran. His much reported remark about wiping Israel off the face of the earth may have been mere bluster of the kind you could hear any Friday in a thousand mosques around the world. But this posturing, coupled with his nuclear ambitions, becomes more worrying when set in the context of his end-time beliefs. In Jamkaran, a village not far from the holy city of Qum, a small mosque is undergoing a $20m-expansion, driven forward by Ahmadinejad's office. Within the Shi'ite apocalyptic tradition, the Twelfth Imam, the Mahdi, who disappeared in the ninth century, is expected to reappear in a well behind the mosque. His re-emergence will signify the beginning of the end days. He will lead the battle against the Dajjal, the Islamic version of the anti-Christ, and with Jesus as his follower, will establish the global Dar el Salaam, the dominion of peace, under Islam. Ahmadinejad is extending the mosque to receive the Mahdi, and already pilgrims by the thousands are visiting the shrine, for the president has reportedly told his cabinet that he expects the visitation within two years."

I will be surprised if it even takes two years.

Ray

I suppose the Russians could argue they are only doing in South Ossetia what NATO has already done in Kosovo.

Austin Barry

Ray, spot on: Russia has realised the perfect symmetry of payback, as well as delivering a none too subtle warning to the Ukraine about its proposed membership of NATO. Also, I suspect all of this kills Obama's election hopes stone dead.

Max Kaye

What we sowed in Kosovo, we reap in Georgia.

Faceless Bureaucrat is right: we have been criminally negligent on the subject of Energy Security. If I was 'in power' I'd divert all resources to building nuclear power stations whilst building a massive strategic reserve of oil and coal for the short/medium term.

(Ditching the 2012 Olympic games and 90% of quangos would be an added bonus)

Wilfred

The Russians violently stamp on the secessionist Chechnya, but then refuse to allow the Georgians to prevent the secession of South Ossetia (which they appeared to be doing without the extravagant brutality of the Chechnya campaign).

All of which makes it impossible for any straight dealing with Russia.

Oh to be free of these wretches.

seb

Georgia is getting Uncle Vlad's Chechnya Treatment as punishment for flirting with Uncle Sam. If the West, fearful for its oil and gas supplies, does nothing, the result will be ruination for Georgia, with Tbilisi, possibly, flattened to resemble Grozny 'pour encourager les autres'. The solution is another stalemate, like the Cold War. Putin thinks, as do many Russians, that wicked foreigners dismantled his beloved soviet empire. The truth is that Russians are not good at winning friends and influencing people outside of Russia. The USSR just collapsed. Whereas the Soviet Union could claim to be imposing a form of government that, in the long run, was in humanity's interests, Putin's very nasty Russian nationalism of course cannot be touted as a progressive internationalist ideology. The Cold War was a relatively good thing. Dead and injured - close to nil. Bring one Cold War II.

William Norton

Don't worry chaps. The EU's rapid reaction force will save us. Won't it?