The dreaded winter: Russian missiles are already hitting the West

The gas cut in Berlin last Monday with which Russia began a new week of war against Ukraine, is the first trace of an inexorable dark prophecy.

Extortion with energy and lack of food is the nightmare which awaits the Western capitals but which disrupts the less favored regions even more. The resignation for now rejected of the Prime Minister Mario Draghi in Italy it is a dimensional consequence of that drift. Before it was the collapse of Boris Johnson. And there will be more.

Aside from the argument that this disruption of service would be partial or short and due to a technical problem, what nests is there a political decision.

These missiles without splinters that Russia launches in the West intend to accelerate the definitions that can be agreed at a peace table. Vladimir Putin aspires to set the conditions for victory in that eventual meeting.

It has a relative advantage. Although Germany has reduced its gas purchases from the Kremlin from 55 to 35%, this gap is offset in Russian portfolios by the soaring fuel price. The price of gas is 700% more expensive than at the beginning of last year, says Fareed Zakaria Washington Post.

Therefore, Russia has unceremoniously amputated the service to other countries such as Poland, Bulgaria or the Netherlands which have refused the payment conditions requested by Russia. Not selling doesn’t hurt him. This increase in values ​​is an axis of the current strategy.

Dirty game

Moscow on Monday cut off the veteran Nord Stream 1 pipeline that reaches Germany and spreads the fluid through Italy, Austria and much of the heart of Central Europe. France has already warned that the episode is a preview of a “probable” definitive closure of the taps.

This dirty game aims not only to consolidate worst european winter in almost a century, but in blocking industries, and in that link with national economies. However, there is a point of risk for the Russian tsar himself.

According to Bloombergin a report a few days ago, the price of oil would have plummeted $ 65 from its current high levels if the recession hits the demand. In the medium to long term, that value it would drop to $ 45 by the end of 2023.

The unprecedented parity of the euro with the dollar is another sign that confirms both the impending recession and the distrust of the future, including the escalation of inflation in the United States.

In a way, the Kremlin has another Blitkrieg, the blitzkrieg that attempted and failed at the beginning of the conflict when it decided to take Kiev within hours. All pressures on the enemy outside Ukraine’s borders should be developed before the crisis reaches such extremes that the economic attack becomes abstract.

Putin knows that his country will lose the European clientele it has gathered in three decades. This too is inevitable. Their times are also short..

famines

Energy isn’t the only incendiary weapon Moscow revolves around. War is strangling the food system already hit by the coronavirus crisis. They explain Russia and Ukraine a large share of the food calories sold on the planet.

Both are equivalent to 28% of the wheat traded in the world; 29% from barley; 15% from corn and 75% from sunflower oil. Data of The Economist They warn that wheat, for example, whose price has risen by more than 50% since the beginning of the year, has not stopped advancing. The same is true for many other cereals.

“The high cost of staple foods has already increased the number of people who can’t be sure they have enough to eat From 440 million to 1.6 billion. Nearly 250 million are on the brink of famine, “the report said.

A prolonged war will add more masses to poverty, which will result in a social volcano. The rebellion in Sri Lanka, a country overflowing with corruption and institutional anarchy, with crowds taking over the government building and ousting the president, is just part of a large decaying scenario.

Egypt, with half of its more than 80 million people in poverty, receives two-thirds of all its food from the Russian-Ukrainian duo. There is a time bomb very close by.

Joe Biden’s current visit to Saudi Arabia, a castor shake for the American leader, seeks mitigate the other energy threat before the litter overflows.

The urgency forces the American to bury the interrogation of Prince Mohammed bin Salman, a strongman of the absolutist kingdom that Biden himself has indicated as the killer of the Arab American journalist Jamal Khashoggi, dismembered in Istanbul in 2018.

The president wants Riyadh and OPEC to increase crude oil production to lower the cost of living and give some signs of calm to the pumps. The trip included Israel, an ally that coincides with Riyadh in tolerance of the Russian war movementsin his case in exchange for the Kremlin’s green light to attack Iranian targets in Syria.

Note to the file: a few days after the meeting of Israeli Prime Minister Neftali Bennett with Putin in Moscow in March after the start of the war, Israel assassinated two senior Iranian Revolutionary Guards officers on the outskirts of Damascus.

Russian expert Kirill Semenov of Russia’s Council for International Affairs notes that recent Israeli attacks on the Iranian-controlled port of Latakia would also be based on covert Russian-Israeli cooperation in Syria. The world is complicated.

The Triumvirate of Astana

Biden’s trip to the region coincides with another one Putin will make the following week in Tehran a notification with the presidents of that country, the conservative Ebrahim Raisi, and that of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. At the time of the revival of Tsarism, the Russian autocrat also seeks to restore the Astana trio.

That triumvirate shaped postwar Syria in the Kazakh capital, a conflagration that Russia transformed in 2015 in favor of the regime in Damascus, an Iranian satellite. Turkey, which had tried by all means to overthrow that dictatorship and close the road to Persian power, he soon adjusted to the circumstances.

But the relationship was short-lived or it seemed that way. Partly because Moscow has tried to contain Iran’s political growth, slowing down its nuclear development or preventing it from associating with the United States, also because of its mistrust of Turkey, a prominent member of NATO, and of a satellite country like the United States. Azerbaijan with a smooth connection. with Israel, relations that they still irritate Tehran today.

The return of the triumvirate has a number of backstories. One of them is the unconfirmed US claim Iran would provide kamikaze drones, equivalent to the North American Switchblade and training for Russian forces. Iranian Foreign Minister Nasser Kanaani has not so far denied these versions.

But the stick could be elsewhere. “Iranians have a lot of experience and channels they are used to evade sanctions, and they can provide corridors for Russian products to travel across Iran to other places, “explains Ali Vaez, director of Iranian projects at the International Crisis Group.” All of this is beneficial to Russia. “

In return, Iran should be added to a dissolved multilateral security group, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which already includes Russia and China.

But the interesting thing is what happens between Moscow and Ankara. Erdogan justifies the meeting as he seeks to lead the release of 20 million tons of wheat. Your country holds the keys to the strait that connects the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. There had already been a previous meeting between Kiev and Moscow in Istanbul. But the back room of these movements is gaseous.

The Turkish leader had a zigzag action with Russia. He approached when it suited him, devouring a part of Syria at a time when the Kurds of the Arab country could no longer be contained by the terrorist mercenary group ISIS. He then distanced himself from Russia to become a military ally of kiev to which it delivered its highly efficient Bayraktar drones, among other military aid.

With those games, Erdogan is one of the big winners of this mess. And he’s got the calculator in his hand. Like Putin, with tsarism, the Turkish leader intends to restore the Ottoman empire and in particular its dominions,

In the Nagorno-Karavakh war in the southern Caucasus, Azerbaijan, which is the same as Turkey, invaded much of that territory of ancient Armenian history last year. Armenia, a key ally of Iran, is a satellite of Moscow, but Putin rstrengthened the Azerbaijani regime and forced Yerevan into a humiliating peace. The gift for an essential ally.

Azerbaijan, let us remember, is the point of the largest functioning oil pipeline in the world, the Baku, Tbilisi, Ceyhan (BTC), which continues in the Mediterranean and has always been a threat to Moscow. That regional war was the first time that Turkey advanced unhindered in the Russian courtyard. As we are seeing, perhaps it was just the first step.
© Copyright Clarin 2020