Feeble EU lets Russia get away with murder. Moscow has been tightening its grip on critics, neighbours and the European gas market

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  1. Article text:

    A spy falls to his death in Berlin. Border violations in Poland. Troops mass on the Ukrainian border. And the CIA director pays a hurried visit to Moscow. Not the stage-setter for an airport thriller but just another week in the geopolitical drama swirling across the continent of Europe.

    The death of Kirill Zhalo is the murkiest twist. News leaked out last week that the diplomat, named by German sources as an undercover officer of Russia’s FSB security service, was found dead on October 19 on the pavement outside the embassy and hurriedly repatriated, without an autopsy. Had he blabbed or blundered? We don’t know. Russian spies get away with murder, literally and metaphorically, in countries such as Germany. But “windows downloads”, as they are known, are an occupational hazard for those working for (or in trouble with) the Kremlin.

    Much clearer is the message on the Polish frontier. The Belarusian regime is ratcheting up pressure on Poland by shipping in thousands of migrants on spurious promises of transit to the EU. The tragic plight of these people — cold, hungry and ill, with at least eight deaths so far — is collateral damage. The aim is to distract, to provoke and to intimidate. The Polish defence ministry complains of flare guns and other firearms being brandished, threats to open fire, attempts to breach the border fence and an incursion 300 metres into Polish territory.

    If the Poles respond with force they look brutal and reckless. If they don’t, they look weak. A former special forces commander and counter-intelligence chief, General Roman Polko, likens the tactic to the early days of Russia’s attack on Crimea in 2014, with its use of anonymous, unbadged “little green men”.

    Belarus’s backer, Russia, has broader divide-and-rule plans. Its biggest weapon is energy. Russian politicians are boasting about how they have Europe over a barrel. Gazprom (notionally independent but in reality the gas division of Kremlin Inc) ran down its storage in Europe this year. Now, with markets tight, gas prices are rocketing to record levels, up more than sixfold this year. We in Britain suffer from that too: though only one twentieth of our gas comes from Russia, the supply squeeze in Europe means greater competition for imports from countries we do buy from, such as Norway.

    This week Russia cut gas transit through Ukraine and suspended supplies to Romania, Serbia and Hungary. That followed an unexplained pipeline explosion that hit supplies to Bulgaria. The Bulgarians begged Russian for extra gas over another route to make up the shortfall and speedily won new supplies. Bulgaria’s Kremlin-friendly politicians make it a Russian favourite. Other countries are less lucky.

    “It is a totally Moscow-made crisis,” says Margarita Assenova, an energy analyst with the Jamestown Foundation, a think tank. The Kremlin is trying to “stoke fears of energy shortages, fuel criticism of EU green energy policies, and incite political and social unrest”. The immediate aim is to make European leaders give the go-ahead to Nord Stream 2, Russia’s new gas pipeline that runs through the Baltic Sea, allowing it to ship gas direct to Germany. Poland and Ukraine are fighting a last-ditch battle against the project, in the hope that the new coalition government in Germany will take a tougher line: perhaps applying strict market rules to any gas that flows through it. Russia’s long-term aim is to bust Europe’s liberalised gas market and return to an era of long-term contracts. These offer greater stability — but entrench Russian influence.

    Another target is Ukraine. Russia has halved gas transit volumes and stopped selling thermal coal (used for power stations) to its rebellious neighbour. It has also blocked its coal supplies from Kazakhstan. Ukraine is surviving, for now, on precarious gas shipments from Europe, mostly consisting of Russian gas taking a roundabout route through Germany and Poland. All this seems more visible from Washington than from European capitals. The CIA director, Bill Burns, who in the Biden administration is responsible for relations with Putin’s Kremlin, flew into Moscow this week with a blunt message. He told his hosts that the US disliked their menacing military build-up — nearly 90,000 troops — on Ukraine’s northern border. The US is also trying to prevent Bosnian Serbs (another Russian client) from demolishing that country’s peace deal by forming their own army.

    All this is really Europe’s job, but the continent’s decision-makers are failing badly. The EU is leaderless. France and Germany are big on grandstanding and short on grit. Last week they criticised Ukraine for a successful drone strike against Russian-backed separatists. Yet these are the forces who have seized territory in the east of the country and regularly kill and maim Ukrainian soldiers. Amid blistering rhetoric, the Kremlin has just closed the Nato office in Moscow. But the alliance, crippled by its divisions, still cannot bring itself to describe Russia as an adversary and yearns vainly for dialogue. It merely muttered its regrets.

    This is not a kaleidoscope but a mosaic. Russia is probing our weaknesses on all fronts with stunts, bluff and bullying. It targets public sensitivities to migration and high energy prices as well as soft spots in our alliances. We need a systematic, co-ordinated response, boosting our resilience and developing counter-measures that will deter any future provocations. We are a lot bigger and richer than Russia. From our timorous response, you wouldn’t know that.

  3. > Russian spies get away with murder, literally and metaphorically, in countries such as Germany.

    Litvinenko, Skripal, Markov, Gorbuntsov, Perepilichnyy, Berezovsky anyone? Seems like the UK is a country “such as Germany”

  5. Are you telling me appeasement policy doesn’t work? We have to learn from our past or something….wtf is this shit?

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