Europe without Russian gas
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Europe without Russian gas is John Kiriakou's illustration of an asymmetry he treats as decisive in the war: that the pain of the rupture falls on the European side.

The cold hall

"When I was in the UK just a few weeks ago, I was giving a speech in Nottingham ... a gorgeous historic place, big round event centre. It was so freezing cold in there that literally everybody was complaining. And finally the manager told us: we're just not getting Russian gas and we can't afford to heat the place. That's it." The auto-caption records him naming the venue as the Royal Albert Hall; the round concert hall in Nottingham is the Royal Concert Hall.

Not only the venue

He generalises from it without qualification: "that's most of the homes in the UK and Germany and Greece. I was in Greece this winter and it was freezing everywhere you went, because they're not getting Russian gas any more and it's just too expensive to buy it from the United States or elsewhere."

What he draws from it

"So yeah, I've come to the conclusion that the Russians don't need Europe anywhere near how Europe needs Russia." He extends the same asymmetry to China, whose exports of rare earth metals to the United States he says he cannot account for at all, "I don't know why they sell us rare earth metals", and treats both as instances of a West that has lost the leverage it still believes it holds.

See also

- Ukraine as a proxy war
- Nuclear war is winnable
- Kiriakou's Ukraine settlement prediction
