Most EU member states on Tuesday agreed on a plan to reduce natural gas consumption by 15% to prepare for the coming winter and potential further cuts of Russian gas supplies.
The plan was agreed upon with some exemptions as Spain, Portugal, and France rejected the initial proposal because they are not as reliant on Russian gas as other EU members. Spain and Portugal also don’t see the benefit of them rationing gas because their energy infrastructure is barely linked to the rest of Europe.
Addressing these concerns, the draft law passed on Tuesday allows exemptions for countries not as connected to other EU members’ gas networks or nations that have high storage levels.
Under the draft law, EU members would voluntarily reduce gas consumption by 15% from August through March. If the voluntary cuts don’t provide the expected savings, the rationing would then be mandatory. But Hungary, the only EU member to vote against the deal, rejected the plan and said it was “unenforceable.”
“This is an unjustifiable, useless, unenforceable and harmful proposal,” Hungary’s Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto said. “We were the only ones to signal that we are voting no … given that this decree completely ignores the interests of Hungarian people.”
Hungary is highly reliant on Russian gas and is looking to purchase more to prepare for the winter. Last week, Szijjarto traveled to Moscow to negotiate a deal as the Hungarian government is looking to buy 700 million cubic meters of Russian gas.
Every EU country on their own. They rattle a hornets nest and expect every country to get stung equally.
It’s hilarious.
Yes, this is a further step on the road to the end of the EU and its Eurodollar.
You don’t “voluntarily” do anything under a law. And while the Europeans are huddling around their burning furniture the Russians will be mopping up in Ukraine. Maybe the European masses will finally get a game changing WTF out of this.
Gas rationing eh? What a First World problem that is.
EU leaders really reaping what they sowed for throwing their lot in with Biden and Johnson.
Germany is at war with Russia again. By cutting gas to 30% Russia is sending Germany right into recession, and rightly so. The German globalist regime won’t survive this winter.
German support for the Ukraine War won’t survive the winter. Nor that of others who are important to Biden’s War.
If you are anti war then you have to be pro sanctioning Putin’s war against Ukraine. If there are no sanctions then the wider world will conclude that wars for territorial annexation and/or control over natural resources is good for their economies.
The result will be far more wars across the globe – and military expenditures going up everywhere – and hence les growth and more poverty.
This war didn’t spring from a vacuum and it didn’t start last February. “If you are anti war” you shouldn’t have remained silent when a war making machine like NATO doubled in size, when the INF and ABM treaties were abrogated, when a coup was staged in Kiev, and when thousands were killed in Donbass. If you’re going to remain silent while the fires of war are stoked, don’t get shrill at the flames.
Sure it started in 2014.
NATO grew in size because countries were fearing Russian invasion – none of the new NATO countries joined to be in an aggressive alliance.
Yes indeed this needed to be spoken out against as indeed it was by many of us.
If it was a coup, which you might argue – it was since redeemed in several democratic votes where by the extremists progressively lost power until they were no longer represented in parliament in 2019.
They were killed because Putin supported a military insurrection – only in the first year was it actually thousands and that on both sides – had these people not enjoyed support from Putin then they would not still have been in ‘business’.
Well as I did not remain silent I do not face any issues – and as I point out only if you are pro war would you ever think that a full scale military invasion was ever justified, and even then not applying sanctions will lead to far more wars and more deaths than keeping the sanctions on.
NATO grew in size because Lockheed Martin needed the money and politicians are power hungry, hate mongering trash. NATO deterred the entire Warsaw Pact at half its present size. And ask Serbia, Libya, and Afghanistan if NATO is a defensive alliance.
If the extremists lost power in the Ukrainian parliament they never let go of it in Donbass where it mattered. The Minsk accords were ignored. The US was going to gouge that wound until it spurted, by which time Russia would be facing all of NATO, like as not with nukes in Ukraine in the hands of people bred to hate Russians. It was some multiple of the Cuban Missile Crises. The Russians couldn’t wait until they were in that hole.
Good on you if you raise your voice against war, it should be the norm, and I share your confliction over the SMO but Russia was absolutely and deliberately pushed into escalation and if I were Putin I might have done it sooner. He faced a choice of evils and chose what seemed the lesser. And sanctions will kill more people than they save, which will be zero, as they will certainly not produce a Russian withdrawal. Economies should be integrated and the war should be ended, by negotiation, now.
No countries have to apply to join – hence unless you are claiming that Lockheed Martin could persuade the electorates of joining countries this explanation is not working.
Only from attacking NATO members – ask Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Afghanistan Georgia and Ukraine if in doubt.
Of those only Serbia was attacked by NATO – you could argue that the Afghans were attacked but the US was the attacking force and they had been attacked by a group housed by the Afghans.
If there were extremists in power in the Donbas then they were among the separatists, as the Ukrainian side did not have a local government and were thus under Kyiv control.
So they were indeed the separatist were the first to do so, as they were supposed to hand over the control of the external border to the Ukrainian government forces and hold elections according to Ukrainian law – they did neither.
There are no NATO nukes in any of the countries east of Germany – it would make NATO less safe if that was the case – mind you the Russians can have a nuclear armed sub less than 60 miles from Washington and that has not led to war yet.
The Ukrainians are not bred to hate Russians and they had a very deep economic relationship to Russia before 2014 and a fairly deep one even after 2014 with many people working on the other side of the border both in Russia and Ukraine.
Only the US actually did not invade Cuba – and the Ukrainians were not about to become a NATO member so not the reason for the timing.
Had Putin done this in 2014 I would have been more convinced – as for the threat of Ukraine entering NATO or NATO nukes in Ukraine it is not justified.
Indeed Putin himself have argued that Finland (and Sweden) joining NATO is not a problem – so in reality he is not scared about having NATO right next to one of their largest cities and Latvia is closer to Moscow than any part of Ukraine.
The purpose of sanctions is not to make Russia withdraw but to exact a cost that make any other would be aggressor think twice about starting a war of territorial conquest – that the sanctions might bring about a Russian economic collapse and a rethink on the value of occupying parts of Ukraine is a side issue.
If a war of territorial conquest is not met with higher costs than benefits then you will see much more wars of that kind all over the world. This is why there can’t be any lifting of sanctions if you are at all against war – that is unless Russia completely withdraws.
If you think NATO enlargement is a result of electoral pressure you’re naive. NATO got bigger because weapon companies like money and politicians are power hungry, hate mongering trash.
And if NATO was actually about the security of its members then why after providing 100% security to its original members for decades would those original members add more members that only exposed the alliance to additional and unnecessary risk, particularly in the case of small new members? In fact, why wasn’t NATO disbanded when the Warsaw Pact dissolved? When have vast entangling military alliances ever promoted peace? Google “NATO Afghanistan” and “NATO Libya” and note the number of pages. The notion that NATO is defensive is farcical.
The US staged a violent coup in Kiev in 2014, Donbas and Crimea opted out, and the US pushed it downhill from there.
If you don’t think there’s some fomented Ukrainian enmity against the Russians then you should read about it. Ethnic hatred is kind of the national pastime of eastern Europe anyway.
The US didn’t invade Cuba because the naval blockade worked and the Soviet missiles were withdrawn. But for the US having instigated the present war, its response to it would be startlingly hypocritical. Zelensky openly advocated acquiring nuclear weapons days before the invasion. Russia couldn’t impose a naval blockade on Ukraine, and a C-17 loaded with thermonuclear Tomahawks could have landed in Kiev and Ukraine could have gone nuclear literally overnight, and if you think that’s too crazy for the US government try imagining them stomping around the Middle East for twenty useless years. Add in the possibility of boost phase intercept and the use of dispersed IRBMs. The situation was going to go from bad to worse, the US would see to that. Russia was going to have to act, it was only a question of when, and they chose sooner rather than later.
You think the Russians wanted to be in this situation? Absolutely not. They were deliberately put into it by our government, which openly pursues “full spectrum military dominance” of the entire planet and all the space around it, a transparently psychotic aspiration. And the reason the US unleashed this whole mess is because neither the American government nor the American people has ever paid a high enough price for such acts. That might be about to change.
Sanctions will not compel Russian withdrawal from Donbas of Crimea, and Russia has no other territorial ambitions to deter. The only thing sanctions do is enrich China and India, and actually Russia to some degree, and impoverish the US and Europe, and create the conditions for more war.