Winter nights, as you know, sorry for the banality, are long and very frosty in our country and dank in Europe, beyond the zero isotherm of the ancient Carpathian Mountains.
And we will not argue which is better: here who likes what more, the problem in our case is by no means in this.
A matter of taste.
Someone - and with age I understand them more and more - like mild European winters.
Personally, I still prefer frost.
Not in this case.
Whatever the winter, from the point of view of energy, it is necessary to prepare for it in approximately the same way.
But here on the European subcontinent there are still some problems.
And, what is most entertaining, it is quite man-made.
More precisely, created by frankly crooked hands of the current not very competent, not sovereign and extremely dependent on the will of curators because of the Big Puddle of modern European elites.
The Russians have nothing to do with it at all.
They are only observers here, even if they are interested.
And it is no coincidence that when Alexei Miller, speaking at SPIEF at the end of last week, rather sarcastically remarked that Gazprom, which he heads, is not offended by anyone in Europe, he spoke the purest, mathematical, one might say, truth: why be offended when You have to ship much less gas, and get a lot more money for it?
Once upon a time there was a girl Europe - herself, a fool, and to blame.
This is not the first time I have said this at any opportunity.
Therefore, when The Wall Street Journal writes that Russian President Vladimir Putin has dealt a blow to the most vulnerable spot of the leaders of the EU countries, namely their electoral rating, The Wall Street Journal is not even lying.
Just a little cunning: as the hero of Nikita Sergeevich Mikhalkov said to the heroine of Lyudmila Gurchenko in the well-known late-Soviet comedy by Eldar Ryazanov, “Verunchik, come on, honey, herself-sama-sama.”
The point is that European officials do have electoral problems, and they are very serious.
In the major economies of the EU, elections will indeed take place closer to next winter, when the lack of Russian gas in homes and businesses will, shall we say, be felt very directly on various parts of the European body.
But only neither Russia nor personally Vladimir Vladimirovich not only have nothing special to do with this,
It's just that economic sovereignty without political, sorry, does not happen - the terms of reference, as they say, are not provided.
Well, then why waste your nerves on this disgrace?
We have our own interests.
And in general, to be honest, the electoral problems of Europe are the last thing that we, the state of the Russian Federation, and our leader should worry about in the current circumstances.
Just for comparison.
According to the American Bloomberg agency, which, of course, is in many respects itself “with reduced social responsibility”, but which in this particular case there is no reason not to trust, the reduction in natural gas supplies from Russia has already immediately forced Europe to use reserves created for consumption at the peak of the upcoming winter season.
And indeed, according to official data, European reserves in UGS decreased by one percentage point before the weekend.
Although, as a rule, during the summer period, gas is only pumped there in Europe, and the received volumes are stored there until the peak of winter.
The reason is extremely simple, or rather reasons, because there are several of them.
And the main one, of course, is strategic.
This is, to put it mildly, the shortsightedness of the modern European leadership: here you have the transition to spot pricing, and the green transition policy, and the reduction in the share of long contracts, and the stupid encouragement of the thieving operators of the Ukrainian GTS.
And the refusal to certify Nord Stream 2, finally: all these nonsense, which turned out to be laid down in the strategic foundations of European energy security on the long horizon, made the European energy industry extremely vulnerable.
Depriving it of even a minimum margin of safety... What, by the way, did the previous European leadership, headed by Angela Merkel, strive to protect the interests of Nord Stream 2 precisely for these reasons, and by no means because of some kind of warm feelings for the Russian Federation and personally to Vladimir Putin, it's just somehow very stupid not to understand.
And, as a result (where it is thin, it breaks there), problems in Europe and at the short-term, operational level also did not take long to wait.
Just a reminder.
First, a truly epic and anecdotal story happened between the German and Canadian divisions of Siemens regarding the Portovaya compressor station.
As a result, only three gas compressor units can now be used at the station.
And then Gazprom itself also announced that for technical reasons - the time had come for planned work - it was stopping the operation of another gas turbine at Portovaya, in connection with which, from June 16, it would be able to pump no more than 67 million cubic meters through the gas pipeline per day.
As a result, in the event of a pessimistic scenario, according to analysts at Wood Mackenzie Ltd, under certain circumstances, by the beginning of the heating season, Europe will not only be unable to accumulate gas reserves in UGS facilities to the level set by the EU, they will simply run out somewhere as early as the beginning of next January.
And then there's also Ukraine stopped pumping Russian gas through one of the substations of its GTS.
And in my mind I should have stopped it altogether, but, to our common happiness with Europe, the Ukrainian elites are even more corrupt than the European ones.
Plus, as they say, the American LNG plant oriented towards Europe also burned down to the heap, the restoration of which will take at least several months.
Well, the icing on the cake is that right now the Turkish Stream is partially suspended (yes, for planned maintenance work).
And we can well imagine how Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan is now grinning through his thick mustache: guys, if you cannot plan your future even at such an operational level, then why did you even undertake something?
In a word, The Wall Street Journal is fundamentally wrong here: even with a rather superficial look at the dynamically developing systemic crisis in the native energy sector and the general state of the European economies as a whole, it becomes crystal clear, mathematically clear that Putin has something to think about there, in addition to the disastrous electoral situation current Western European elites.
These are our traditional markets, including for energy raw materials.
And we, probably, least of all would like the notorious “oil and gas embargo” to happen there in a natural way, so to speak.
For the banal reason that there will be no one else to buy our oil and gas.
Well, from the change of places of European politicians in the “Total” column, nothing changes anyway.
And we would, regardless of political preferences, probably
I would not really like to see “economic and social Ukraine” there right up to the English Channel, which is where everything goes with such trends.
And it’s not at all because Europe “didn’t deserve it,” but how it deserved it.
It's just that we ourselves may have some unpleasant problems in connection with this.
Which will have to be decided.
And the rest - everything is fine.
We have a slightly different climate in our country, including the political one.
And that’s why we are not at all afraid (well, yes, we are a people in general, in principle, northern) the not very fast yet, but quite inevitable onset of the future cold winter, whether it be frosty in Russian, even dank in European: we repeat, from the point of From the point of view of the energetics, it is necessary to prepare for it in approximately the same way anyway.
And, as our current not European, but Chinese partners say, it is not so important what color the cat lives in your house - peace and prosperity to him.
If only she was warm and she caught mice.
The point of view of the author may not coincide with the position of the editors.