Macron told journalists after an EU summit in Brussels that the Russian move “is not in line with what was signed, and I do not see why we would apply it.”

Putin made the demand this week as Moscow struggles to prop up its economy in the face of debilitating sanctions imposed by the West over his invasion of Ukraine.

Macron said that “we are continuing our analysis work” following the Kremlin’s maneuver.

But he insisted “all the texts signed are clear: it is prohibited. So European players who buy gas and who are on European soil must do so in euros.”

“It is therefore not possible today to do what is requested, and it is not contractual,” he said.

The French leader said he believed Moscow was using the step as “a mechanism to circumvent” EU sanctions against it for the assault on Ukraine.

Major gas buyer Germany has denounced the move and Chancellor Olaf Scholz on Friday reiterated that the contracts clearly stipulated how the gas should be paid for.

Europe is scrambling to reduce its reliance on Russian gas. It continues to funnel hundreds of millions of euros each day to Moscow in energy payments, which are currently outside the scope of the sanctions.

Some EU nations have called for the bloc to ban Moscow’s key energy exports, but the move has so far been stymied by countries including Germany that remain too wary of the cost of cutting the cord.

Source: https://www.voanews.com/a/macron-dismisses-putin-demand-for-gas-payments-in-rubles/6502528.html

The post Macron Dismisses Putin Demand for Gas Payments in Rubles first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

Vladimir Putin must be thrilled as he gears up for a week of high-stakes diplomacy between the Kremlin and Western powers. A series of conferences and summits is planned in Geneva, Brussels, Vienna and Brest, France that all aim to serve the same purpose: keeping the Russian president in a good mood and averting a feared Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The diplomatic flurry kicked off in December with two telephone conversations between the American and Russian presidents.

That was followed by a video conference of NATO foreign ministers on Friday, in which the “Western” position on Russia was hammered out.

United States President Joe Biden has promised to closely consult with the Europeans on this issue, and he has stuck to his word. On Monday, top US representatives are set to hold “strategic talks” with Russians delegates in Geneva.

NATO mulls way forward

On Wednesday, there will be a meeting in Brussels of the NATO-Russia Council, a consultation forum that hasn’t met in several years. At the same time, NATO’s military chiefs of staff will come together to consider troop reinforcements on the Black Sea or NATO’s eastern border.

On Thursday, talks will continue in the broader format of the Vienna-based Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which includes the US as well as Russia, Ukraine and other former Soviet states.

The European Union, too, is determined not to be left out. EU defense and foreign ministers will meet in the French town of Brest on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. As with all the other planned conferences, the main topic on the agenda will be Russian demands for security guarantees and possible reactions to an escalation by Putin in Ukraine.

EU sidelined on European security

The main takeaway is that the Russian president has managed to get the “West” scrambling, laying bare differing viewpoints in the opposing camp. When it comes to the relationship with Russia, there are clear differences within NATO and the EU, depending on the interests of the member states.

The EU’s foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, has even complained that the bloc has been left out — he said he wasn’t even asked — when it came to security in Europe and in Ukraine.

To date, the Europeans have not managed to agree on exactly which tough sanctions they want to use to threaten Russia. The only thing the EU has decided is that Moscow should have a high price to pay if it escalates its aggression against Ukraine.

Compromise for the Kremlin

The EU is understandably reluctant to target the sector that would really hurt Russia, namely energy supplies. Without oil and gas from Russia, several countries in Europe, including Germany, would be in serious trouble.

Putin will probably not have to reckon with any serious resolutions being taken during this intense week of diplomacy. It’s likely that we’ll simply see the same warnings that have been issued since 2014, when Russia first deployed its troops on Ukraine’s eastern border.

Neither the US nor other NATO states will be deploying their own military to assist Ukraine. And it remains out of the question that NATO will respond favorably to Moscow’s demand that NATO categorically deny membership to Ukraine and Georgia.

Western powers will not accept Russian blackmail, and Putin knows that very well. However, Biden has already assured the Kremlin that the accession of Georgia and Ukraine to NATO is not on the agenda for the foreseeable future. After all, this state of limbo has existed since the 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest.

Keeping the dialogue going
euvering, relying on diplomacy in a bid not to provoke military action by Russia. And Putin will keep the West on its toes with his deliberate provocations.

Putin will keep the conflicts in and around Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova and Armenia simmering in order to prevent these countries from moving closer to the West. For him, the West, which couldn’t even organize its own withdrawal from Afghanistan in August, seems militarily indecisive in the extreme.

For now, Putin won’t expand the war against Ukraine, which he started back in 2014 with the annexation of Crimea. After all, the unpredictable Russian president has basically achieved what he wants.

The US, NATO and the EU will want to keep talking, counting on the fact that Putin cannot afford a full-blown war on the domestic front and at a time when he is busy consolidating his influence in Kazakhstan.

This upcoming week of intense diplomacy is unlikely to be the last. And that is hugely valuable in itself: People who talk to each other usually don’t shoot at each other.

This opinion piece was originally written in German.

Source: https://www.dw.com/en/opinion-putin-gets-his-way-as-west-scrambles/a-60368080

The post Opinion: Putin gets his way as West scrambles first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

They see the pivot as a geopolitical project and one that could mean trouble for Europe.

Known as Power of Siberia 2, the mega-pipeline traversing Mongolia will be able to deliver 50 billion cubic meters of Russian gas to China annually. It was given the go-ahead in March by Russian President Vladimir Putin, and when finished it will complement another massive pipeline, Power of Siberia 1, that transports gas from Russia’s Chayandinskoye field to northern China.

Power of Siberia 2 will supply gas from Siberia’s Yamal Peninsula, the source of the gas exported to Europe. Western officials worry that the project could have serious geopolitical implications for energy-hungry European nations before they embark in earnest on a long transition to renewables and away from fossil fuels.

For months Western leaders and officials have been accusing Russia of worsening an energy crunch that’s hit Europe this year and threatens to deepen during the northern hemisphere winter. Gazprom has shrugged off urgent European requests for more natural gas. In the past few weeks Gazprom has at times even reduced exports, say industry monitors.

The energy giant maintains it has been meeting the volumes of gas it agreed to in contracts, but Gazprom has been accused by the International Energy Agency and European lawmakers of deliberately not doing enough to boost supplies to Europe as the continent struggles with unprecedented price hikes and the increasing risk of power rationing and plant stoppages.

The new Sino-Russian energy project, which Putin discussed with his Chinese counterpart, President Xi Jinping, during a December 18 video conference, will give Moscow even more leverage when price bargaining with Europe and boost China as an alternative market for gas, according to Filip Medunic, an analyst with the European Council on Foreign Relations.

“Russia remains Europe’s main gas supplier, but Europeans urgently need to understand the changes it is currently making to its energy transport infrastructure—as these changes could leave Europe even more at Moscow’s mercy,” he outlined in a study earlier this year.

Speaking after his conference call with Xi Jinping, the Russian president told reporters that the pipeline’s route, length and other parameters have been agreed to, and a feasibility study will be completed in the next several weeks.

The Kremlin has been eager to expand its energy market in China, which will need more gas in coming years to substitute for an eventual phasing down of coal, according to Vita Spivak, an energy analyst at Control Risks, a global consulting firm. Spivak told a discussion forum earlier this month that Kremlin officials are anxious to “exploit the opportunity” especially “considering there is a good working relationship between the two capitals.”

The Power of Siberia 2 pipeline has been championed by Putin, she said.

McKinsey, the strategic management consulting firm, estimates Chinese demand for gas will double by 2035. That will be a godsend for Russia. European governments are already setting out plans on how to transform their energy markets—how they will generate, import and distribute energy and shift to renewables and, in some cases, nuclear power. Russia needs to diversify into Asia to prolong its profits from its vast natural gas resources as Europe slowly weans itself off Gazprom supplies.

But Europe will remain dependent on Russian gas in the near future and Moscow has been busy re-ordering its complex network of pipelines, shaping them for wider economic and political purposes, say energy and national security analysts. Currently it supplies Europe through several pipelines—Nord Stream I, TurkStream and another from Yamal that terminates in Germany after transiting Belarus and Poland.

And it has just completed the controversial Nord Stream 2 underwater pipeline, which connects Russia to Germany via the Baltic Sea, circumventing older land routes through Ukraine. Nord Stream 2 has yet to receive final approval by German authorities.

Washington has long warned of the risk of Nord Stream 2 making the EU in the short term even more dependent for its energy needs on Russia and potentially vulnerable to economic coercion by the Kremlin. The planned Power of Siberia 2 pipeline will be able to pump into China around the same amount that Nord Stream 2 would be able to transport to Europe, giving the Kremlin more options about who gets the gas and at what price.

A senior European diplomat told VOA that Gazprom’s refusal to come up with additional supplies during the current energy crunch already “demonstrates Russia’s questionable motives about how ready it is to use the energy market for purely political purposes.” He added, “As it diversifies to China, it will give the Kremlin more opportunities to turn off and on supplies to Europe but reduce considerably any financial risks for Russia.”

Source: https://www.voanews.com/a/russia-gas-pivot-to-china-poses-challenge-for-europe/6375859.html

The post Russia’s ‘Gas Pivot’ to China Poses Challenge for Europe first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

Here’s What You Need to Remember: The Warsaw Pact plan makes clear two things. First, in a surprise attack, the most important forces are the ground forces. The quicker they can advance, the sooner they can overrun NATO—and that includes airbases and naval facilities. The faster they can force West Germany to surrender, the sooner the rest of NATO runs out of reasons to continue fighting—and the specter of all-out nuclear war recedes.

Last month in the National Interest we discussed NATO’s plan for World War III in Europe. The scenario, set in the late 1980s, assumed that the forces of the Soviet Union and the rest of the Warsaw Pact—namely East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary—steamrollered West Germany to defeat NATO. The plan assumed the western alliance would defend as far forward as possible while avoiding the use of tactical nuclear weapons.

But what about the Warsaw Pact? After the Cold War ended, the Polish government made public classified Soviet documents that revealed the likely war plan. The plan, known as “Seven Days to the Rhine,” was the basis of 1979 military exercise that assumed NATO as the aggressor, having nuked a series of twenty-five targets in Poland, including Warsaw and the port of Gdansk. The cover story of countering aggression was a mere fig leaf for the true nature of the anticipated conflict: a bolt-from-the-blue Soviet attack against NATO.

(This first appeared in 2016.)

By the 1980s NATO had shifted to a “Flexible Response” nuclear doctrine: the alliance was prepared to use nuclear weapons but would seek to win the war conventionally. This is in stark contrast to the Warsaw Pact, which saw their use as inevitable and planned to use them from the outset. Such early would confer the pact an enormous strategic advantage over NATO.

In “Seven Days to the Rhine,” Soviet nuclear forces would destroy Hamburg, Dusseldorf, Cologne, Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Munich, and the West German capital of Bonn. NATO headquarters in Brussels would be annihilated, as would the Belgian port of Antwerp. The Dutch capital and port of Amsterdam would also be destroyed. Denmark would suffer two nuclear strikes.

The result would be a headless NATO and the destruction or demoralization of civilian governments in West Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Denmark—precisely the countries likely to be occupied at the end of the seven days. The elimination of the port cities of Hamburg, Antwerp, and Amsterdam would severely curtail NATO’s ability to flow reinforcements from the United Kingdom and North America.

Curiously, France and the United Kingdom were to be spared nuclear strikes. This is probably because both had independent nuclear arsenals not tied to the United States. The United States might have hesitated to retaliate for fear of escalating to strategic nuclear warfare, but for France and the UK the European atomic battlefield was much closer and the dividing line between tactical and strategic not so clear-cut. The Soviet leadership probably had no intention of continuing war with either one on the eighth day.

After the Warsaw Pact had launched nuclear strikes, conventional forces would be sent in to conquer. Seven Days to the Rhine assumed a radioactive zone that used to be called Poland, dividing the Soviet Union from its forces in East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. Those forces, along with their East German, Czechoslovak, and Hungarian counterparts, would need to suffice to carry out the attack. While Polish forces were theoretically available, by 1979 the Soviets would have reason to suspect their political reliability.

As a result, total forces committed would be roughly the same number of forces the pact would have in a no-notice attack on NATO. Planning with the assumption of a radioactive curtain severing forward pact forces from the Soviet Union itself is also a reasonable model for assuming a quick war without a prewar buildup of ammunition and fuel from the Soviet Union.

Leading the spearhead aimed at the heart of NATO would be the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany. The GSFG was comprised of five armies, each with three or four tank and motor-rifle (mechanized infantry) divisions.

In the North, the Soviet and East German attack force would consist of the Soviet Second Guards Tank Army, Twentieth Guards Army, and Third Shock Army, consisting of seven tank divisions and five motor rifle divisions. East Germany’s National People’s Army, considered the best of the non-Soviet pact forces, would contribute two tank and four mechanized-infantry divisions.

This combined northern force of eighteen combat divisions, plus artillery, air assault, and special forces, would smash into the combined Danish, Dutch, West German, British, and Belgian forces facing them. The battle would take place on the so-called North German Plain, a stretch of relatively flat, rolling country from the inner German border to the Low Countries. This was considered the quickest, most direct way to knock out the largest number of NATO countries.

Somewhere in the endless stream of combat vehicles headed west would be what was known as the Operational Maneuver Group, or OMG. Anywhere from two brigades to two divisions large, the OMG would be held in reserve until a breakthrough was achieved. Once committed, the OMG would lunge deep behind enemy lines, cutting off NATO forces as it did so.

In southern Germany, the spearhead would be the Soviet Eighth Guards Army and the First Guards Tank Army, totaling three tank divisions and three motor rifle divisions. The Soviet Central Group of Forces, based in Czechoslovakia, would add two tank and three motor rifle divisions; the Czechoslovak People’s Army would also add three tank and five motor rifle divisions. Czechoslovak forces were formidable in theory, but the Soviets likely still considered them politically suspect twenty years after the Prague Spring of 1968.

This southern force of nineteen divisions would enjoy the shortest route to the Rhine River, only 120 miles as the crow flies, but faced serious military and geographical obstacles. The ten West German and American divisions facing them were among the best-equipped in NATO, and the correlation of forces, to use a Soviet Army phrase, did not favor the attacker. The terrain was a mixture of hills, mountains, and connecting valleys, all of which strongly favored the defender.

In the meantime, Soviet airborne and air assault forces would fan out and occupy key bridges, particularly over the Weser and Rhine Rivers. Seizing river crossings would be essential for maintaining the momentum of the ground offensive. Airfields, military headquarters, and known alternate seats of government would also be targets. Soviet spetsnaz special forces would also target NATO tactical nuclear weapons, seeking to neutralize Pershing II, Ground Launched Cruise Missiles, and nuclear gravity bombs before they could be used.

At sea, the Soviet Navy would immediately go on the offensive. The Soviet Navy would, like the German Navy before it, try to sever the naval supply line from North America to Europe. The Soviet Navy would also immediately try to destroy American aircraft carriers, which with their airborne nuclear weapons were a wild card, capable of delivering nuclear strikes against a variety of targets over vast ranges.

The most important goal of the Soviet Navy would be to safeguard its ballistic missile submarines hiding in the Barents Sea bastion. Whether or not Moscow won or lost in the conventional realm, this would preserve a second-strike strategic capability against the United States. If the Americans were successful in wiping out Soviet boomers, that could embolden them to launch a nuclear first strike.

Warsaw Pact aviation was to be very busy. Assuming a short seven-day war, there would not be time to execute a proper air-defense suppression campaign. Much of NATO’s leadership would have been killed during the nuclear attacks, and as a result, NATO air defenses would be disorganized. Pact air forces might simply press on without attempting to destroy NATO air defenses.

Assuming a no-notice war, most combat missions would be preplanned counter-air missions and airstrikes against known airfields, army bases, and NATO ground positions. Prepositioned stocks of U.S. Army equipment in Germany and the Netherlands would be particularly vulnerable, allowing the pact to knock out entire divisions without fighting them.

The Warsaw Pact plan makes clear two things. First, in a surprise attack, the most important forces are the ground forces. The quicker they can advance, the sooner they can overrun NATO—and that includes airbases and naval facilities. The faster they can force West Germany to surrender, the sooner the rest of NATO runs out of reasons to continue fighting—and the specter of all-out nuclear war recedes.

Second, NATO would have lost the war. NATO’s assumption that the war would gradually escalate to nuclear weapons would have been fatal against an adversary that planned to use them on Day One. The use of nukes in Western Europe would devolve the decision to employ them away from NATO as a collective body to heads of the United States, France, and the UK. All three would be forced to use battlefield nukes to save their troops—and risk escalation that would devastate their homelands—or walk away from the rest of NATO.

While the World War III scenario in Europe was always unlikely, it was also the most dangerous. We now know that, instead of an escalation to nuclear war being a possibility, it was virtually guaranteed. The only question would have been to what extent—and whether or not human civilization would have survived it.

Kyle Mizokami is a defense and national-security writer based in San Francisco who has appeared in the Diplomat, Foreign Policy, War is Boring and the Daily Beast. In 2009 he cofounded the defense and security blog Japan Security Watch. You can follow him on Twitter: @KyleMizokami.

This article was published earlier and is being reposted due to reader interest. 

Image: Flickr

Source: https://nationalinterest.org/blog/reboot/recipe-world-war-iii-russia-plan-crush-nato-and-possibly-end-world-186507

The post A Recipe for World War III: Russia Plan to Crush NATO And Possibly End the World first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.