Owen Matthews Owen Matthews

Wasted energy: Putin’s plan to freeze Europe has failed

The Kremlin propaganda channel RT recently produced a festive video message for its overseas audiences. Somewhere in ‘Europe, Christmas 2021’ a happy family gathers in a cosy, Ikea-furnished house. A young girl cradles her present: an adorable hamster. Fast forward to Christmas 2022: the family huddles, freezing, under a blanket in a room illuminated only by the feeble glow of fairy lights powered by a tiny generator hooked up to the hamster’s exercise wheel. By Christmas 2023 the luckless Europeans, starving and shivering, celebrate with a thin soup made of… you got it. ‘Merry anti-Russian Christmas!’ trolls the final caption. ‘If your media doesn’t tell you where this is all going, RT is available via VPN.’

In one sense, the advert is perfectly accurate. Threatening Europe with a freezing winter without Russian gas was precisely the Kremlin’s plan to prevent Nato from coming to the aid of Ukraine. But instead of rolling power cuts, factory shutdowns, mass protests and economic collapse, Europe’s midwinter gas prices last week fell to pre-war levels. Germany’s gas storage facilities – by far the largest on the continent – were more than 90 per cent full, a near historical high for the time of year. The US now supplies 30 per cent of the continent’s gas via liquefied natural gas (LNG) shipments. And Robert Habeck, deputy head of Germany’s government and minister for the economy, announced that Russia’s share of Germany’s energy supplies would be reduced to practically zero in 2023.

‘The German problem, or the central European problem, was that half of our eggs were in the basket of Putin,’ said Habeck during a visit to Norway, now Germany’s biggest European gas supplier, last week. ‘And he destroyed them.’ Instead of bringing Europe to its knees and forcing Berlin to do his bidding, Putin’s clumsy attempt at weaponising energy has blown up in his face.

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