Dark winter of discontent looms

As winter approaches in Europe, Vladimir Putin has unleashed a strategy to drive up energy bills to cause public unrest and weaken resolute determination to enforce sanctions against Russia and provide military aid to Ukraine. That explains Friday’s announcement by Russian energy giant Gazprom that it is turning off the tap on the Nord Stream 1 pipeline, the main conduit for 40 per cent of Europe’s natural gas requirements. A three-day maintenance stoppage has become an indefinite halt.

European leaders must meet the challenge. Mr Putin, as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky says, “is trying to attack, by causing poverty and political chaos, what he cannot yet attack with missiles”. The strategic and economic problems will be some of the gravest Europe has faced since 1945. EU Council president Charles Michel is right when he says Russia’s gas supply blackmail must “not change the resolve of the EU” on Ukraine and must accelerate the path to energy independence. Given Europe’s addiction to Russian gas, that will be hard.

But there are alternatives to reliance on Moscow. France and Italy have lined up alternative supplies from Algeria. But infrastructure is a weakness. Germany, Russia’s biggest customer, lacks the liquefied natural gas terminals needed to import gas in large quantities from elsewhere. Three new terminals will take years to finish. Germany is particularly vulnerable, having halted the new Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline because of the war in Ukraine. It should focus on supplies from Britain, Denmark and The Netherlands. Norway, Europe’s second biggest gas supplier, is raising production.

The depth of the crisis is evident in Britain. It does not rely on Russian gas. But, as Bloomberg News reports, six in 10 British factories are facing going under because energy bills have doubled in a year. European states need to look at new nuclear power technologies such as small modular reactors. SMRs have production times of three to five years, while large nuclear reactors take six to 12 years to build. Europe’s addiction to Russian gas was built on the fiction that the Kremlin would always treat energy as a commercial matter. However and whenever the Ukraine war ends, Europe needs to end its dependence on Russian gas.