Did you notice how for the last few months the noise from the online doom prophets has silenced entirely. When natural gas prices were at 350 EUR/MWh everyone was an economics expert. Europe was finished! Russia was winning! Europe will freezeeee! Oh no!
Take a look at todays prices. Ill bet anything that you probably had no idea that the MWH prices were at pre-war prices. The discussion about the collapse of society simply fizzled out, everyone forgot about it and pointed their outrage elsewhere. The contrarian extremist influencers got their engagement and the people got to yell at something.
That is extremism for you.
When its going their way for a short amount of time they yell really, really hard.
...and when they are ultimately wrong they just kind of sneak away in silence. Hope no one noticed so they can do more idiotic yelling when the moment suits them again.
Extremism is easy as you dont really need to care about accountability, the truth, objectivity. I mean, youre already an extremist, by definition you dont care about those things otherwise you would not be one.
Due to Russias invasion of Ukraine, Europe is slowly but surely getting off of Russian energy. Germany replaced almost all of it with gas from Netherlands, Norway and USA.
Russians have played their hand and their energy blackmail has lost all its potency.
As it stands now, Russia simply has no way to replace the export going towards EU nations. I know people might say:
Well, they will just sell it to a country that will sell it to EU. Derp
See, thats not how anything works. Natural gas isnt a cryptocurrency that you can just send it across the planet at will in amounts you wish. You need to have infrastructure in place, you need capacity. There is a reason there are so many of those black lines on the map above going from Russia to Europe.
The Russians simply do not have adequate infrastructure to move the gas elsewhere. The same pipelines from their main gas field that supplied Europe will probably take 20+ years to build towards China and China already prefers to get its gas from Central Asia and Australia.
To move that amount via LNG Russia would need more LNG ships then exist on the planet.
Russia is basically fucked. It will enter isolation for at least 5-15 years curtesy of their dictator extraordinaire.
Russia accounts for about 2-3% of Worlds GDP. The collective "West" contributes more than 50% of the worlds GDP.
This was never a fight Russia was going to win.
Only the collective delusion of the extreme rightwingers, leftists and faux-libertarian grifters in Europe and USA combined with the corruption driven lies and Putins misplaced hopes of restoring the USSR are why we are even here in the first place.
Extremism in all forms only leads to bad and stupid decisions that eventually bite you in the ass.