Anastasiia Lapatina: Finally, I don't need to be stressed about interviewing, like, a State Department official because this is someone I actually know and interact with and like.
Alexander Query: How dare you not be stressed when you talk to me?
Anastasiia Lapatina: Okay, I'll— [laughs]
Alexander Query: This is ridiculous. [laughs]
Anastasiia Lapatina: I'll go back into my stress mode. [laughs]
Alexander Query: All right, no, no, no, no. Don't worry.
Anastasiia Lapatina: Alexander Query is my colleague at The Kyiv Independent, and like most of us, he started off covering regular peacetime issues. Until February, 2022, that is.
Alexander Query: I began covering business, uh, for the Cuban Independent. But of course, when the full scale invasion happened, I sort of, well, like a lot of reporters, I sort of, you know, turned into covering the war and its effects on the country.
Anastasiia Lapatina: Alex recently did an interview for The Kyiv Independent with Yuriy Vitrenko, that's the CEO of Naftogaz, the largest national oil and gas company in Ukraine. You can find a link to it in the episode description.
Alexander Query: Formally, uh, formally starting, what are the preparations underway for this winter?
Yuriy Vitrenko: First of all, we're producing as much gas as possible, so our people, they work literally under bullets. Due to this hard work of our people, we are able to more or less maintain the same level of production, and it's very important for us despite the war. Uh, in the West, they…
Anastasiia Lapatina: So, they talked about Russia's deliberate missile attacks on Ukraine's energy infrastructure and the difficulty the company's having in continuing to distribute gas at home and abroad, given the war being waged around them.
I wanted to find out some more about their conversation and the role energy's playing in the war because the global energy crisis it has caused is already having some real tangible effects.
Alexander Query: Right now, natural gas, which is Ukraine's gas monopoly—they also have oil—it's facing, I would say, a historically gruelling winter when it comes to distributing gas to Ukraine and also outside Ukraine.
So it is an extremely challenging winter for the company delivering gas to everyone despite the war and despite, uh, refineries and despite most of the infrastructure being heavily shelled and basically being destroyed by Russia, because Russia does that. You also have to take into account that 50%, more than 50%, of Ukraine's natural resources when it comes to gas are in Eastern Ukraine at the moment.
So they are in territories that used to be captured by Russians, have been freshly liberated, or are still under Russian control. Right now, Naftogaz people are literally working under fire. And I had the– the– the chance, so to speak, to see that, because I recently went, uh, in some places which were recently liberated in the Kharkiv Oblast, and I literally saw these people actually working almost in, you know, military outfit to actually put in place the pipeline. To give gas back to population that needed, the entrance of the winter.
Anastasiia Lapatina: There is a reason why people in military uniforms are guarding this infrastructure. That's because Ukraine's vast network of pipelines distributing gas from Russia to Europe are some of the most pivotal on the continent. Russia has never, of course, liked paying transit fees to Ukraine for this, nor the bargaining power it gives to its neighbour.
So to bypass Ukraine in the last decade, Russia built two new gas pipelines. I'm sure you know them. They run under the Baltic Sea from northwest to Russia to northeast Germany, Nord Stream 1, and then later Nord Stream 2. They're now infamous as an example of a naive West becoming too reliant on cheap Russian energy.
Nord Stream 2 was never actually used, and Nord Stream 1 was indefinitely shut down this year because of the invasion, which made it all the more strange when on the 26th of September, this happened.
Newscaster: Gas bubbles churn the Baltic Sea. 70 metres below sea level, gases escaping from the Nord Stream pipelines. But researchers said they had detected possible explosions in the area where the leaks were observed.
Alexander Query: There were three explosions. The three explosions damaged, uh, three pipelines: the two pipelines on Nord Stream 1 and one pipeline on Nord Stream 2. So the only ones working right now is one pipeline on Nord Stream 2.
Anastasiia Lapatina: You've probably seen the pictures of gas bubbling up from these pipelines to the surface of the Baltic. They're pretty dramatic. At least 50 metres of the pipeline were ripped clean through, something that only an extremely powerful explosion could have caused. And as such, it immediately seemed suspicious. But no one is exactly sure what happened yet. It's currently under an international investigation by Denmark, Sweden, and Germany.
Alexander Query: Germany involved the navy, Denmark involved the navy too. But Sweden involved the counterintelligence, which is quite an interesting, uh, uh, detail, I believe. So the investigation is still ongoing.
There's little doubt about who did it. A lot of countries, including the US, including, uh— Well, most of, actually, uh, NATO allies were quick to actually point out at Russia because again, it does look like one of the many tools of Russia, blackmail over gas and over resources.
Anastasiia Lapatina: It is a really strange story. And a lot of people are understandably confused by it. I mean, why would Russia want to sabotage its own infrastructure? One it sees as pivotal to ensuring the lucrative transit of gas to Europe.
Alexander Query: It makes sense in– in the context of a false flag operation. It makes sense in the context of for the Kremlin to blame the West and basically to also say, 'Oh, we have this solution. We can fix it. If— If—', and that's an important 'if', 'you comply to our terms'. And actually, the whole point of it is indeed to sow chaos, when it comes to energy.
Anastasiia Lapatina: Is that working?
Alexander Query: To a certain extent, it's working. By sort of pointing out the weaknesses in energy in every European country, Russia is actually showing, uh, the fragilities of every energy policy in every European country.
Anastasiia Lapatina: Are there any other tools of Russian blackmail?
Alexander Query: Yes, it's– it is Russia's, uh, favourite blackmail tool, really, because it's actually one of the onl– only resources that Russia has left. Russia doesn't manufacture anything. They just export natural resources, and they play with the supply of it. And that's basically their main tool.
Anastasiia Lapatina: The case of the Nord Stream explosions is emblematic of one of Putin's favourite political strategies, using energy as a weapon. And across the globe, everyone is starting to feel the consequences.
The resource war and ensuing energy crisis that Russia has started is really going to make this winter a deadly one, for many in Ukraine and beyond. It speaks to the vast, tangled consequences of this war, but also the breathtakingly sinister lengths that Putin will go to as he tries to get an upper hand over Ukraine and its allies. Because control of the gas and energy that the West craves is one of the few cards that Russia still holds.
Anastasiia Lapatina: From Message Heard and The Kyiv Independent, you're listening to Power Lines: From Ukraine to the World.
Jakub Parusinski: In this series, we're going to be mapping the undercurrents and global consequences of the war in Ukraine, beginning in Kyiv and following the roads out wherever they may lead. I'm Jakub Parusinski.
Anastasiia Lapatina: and I am Anastasiia Lapatina.
Jakub Parusinski: This week, we're taking a look at what is arguably the most consequential global economic impact of the war: its effect on energy and resources.
Anastasiia Lapatina: Jakub, did you see the news coming out of Norway? I think they've arrested some Russian spies poking around the energy infrastructure, taking pictures or something like that.
Jakub Parusinski: I did. And to be frank, it was kind of scary. I don't know if you've ever seen the series Okkupert? Occupied?
Anastasiia Lapatina: No.
Jakub Parusinski: The story is that the Norwegian government is really about green initiatives, and they shut down the whole petroleum oil, gas, uh, industry and Russia invades and takes over Norway.
Anastasiia Lapatina: What?
Jakub Parusinski: And, sort of, the European Union just nods along and doesn't really do anything: condemns the situation, but basically allows for it.
Anastasiia Lapatina: Well, that sounds extremely familiar, you know? Wouldn't even be surprised if that actually happened.
Jakub Parusinski: Well, it's an excellent series, and to be frank, that was my first thought when I saw, you know, Russian agent photographing energy fields, infrastructure in Norway, caught on the border, my first thought was, 'Oh my goodness. We're basically living in Occupied.' Which, to some extent, is very much what the past year has been about. I mean, we're living in some kind of crazy series or movie. You'd never think this would happen, but it is.
Anastasiia Lapatina: So, Jakub, when people talk about energy and how important it is, what do they really mean by that? What are the types of energy we have at some basic level? What do we use it for? And, and why is the war in Ukraine so consequential for this resource?
Jakub Parusinski: So, I'm not really an energy expert, but I've spent quite a few years reporting on energy in Ukraine, which is a pretty important player. Taking a very simple look at it, I mean, on the one hand you have oil, and that's basically the stuff that you use to run your cars, to run trucks or, uh, for Elon Musk to shoot rockets up into space.
Anastasiia Lapatina: [laughs]
Jakub Parusinski: On the other side, I would say, is everything that you have that is integrated into a combination of the gas grid and the electricity grid, and the two of them kind of run into each other.
So, the electricity grid, whether it's a coal power plant, a nuclear plant, or for that matter, solar, wind, anything that's sort of generating a constant input of electricity, that's the stuff that you use to power your house, to have Internet.
Anastasiia Lapatina: Mm-hmm.
Jakub Parusinski: And then you have gas, which is sent across a network of pipelines that you use to essentially heat large parts of the city. Now, the area where the two of them run into each other is that you can also use gas to generate electricity.
Anastasiia Lapatina: Okay.
Jakub Parusinski: The same as you can use coal. And that's actually kind of important because renewables are great, but they're not stable. You need a sort of constant level of energy, and the way that you do that is usually you balance it with something that is, uh, fossil fuels. Those are the easiest ones to turn on and off, and mainly in Europe, especially in central and eastern Europe, that's either coal or, potentially, gas.
Anastasiia Lapatina: Okay.
Jakub Parusinski: So why does Ukraine matter in all of this, right?
Anastasiia Lapatina: Yeah.
Jakub Parusinski: ...and this is really important. Actually, when the whole gas industry sort of appears in Europe, and to some extent the oil industry, Ukraine is part of that story.
Anastasiia Lapatina: Yeah.
Jakub Parusinski: It turns out Ukraine, for a while, is actually one of the places that generates a lot of gas, and the Soviets build big pipelines that go through Ukraine into Russia.
Anastasiia Lapatina: And where geographically do we do that?
Jakub Parusinski: The parts that are being attacked are basically the ones that have the– the resources as well.
Anastasiia Lapatina: Okay.
Jakub Parusinski: And.those fields, they don't really have much gas anymore, but the pipelines that were built between Ukraine and Russia are now going the opposite direction.
Anastasiia Lapatina: Mm-hmm.
Jakub Parusinski: The pipelines that go from, sort of, Russia through Ukraine into Europe, that has been historically the biggest artery feeding Europe with natural gas over the past decades.
Last few years, situation changed. Through the Baltic, you've got capacity going through the Nord Stream. Under the Black Sea, you have TurkStream. There's also a pipeline that goes through Belarus, but Ukraine is still the big one, right? Like, this is the big vessel that carries gas from the East to the West.
Anastasiia Lapatina: So Jakub, who did you interview for this episode?
Jakub Parusinski: We were actually very lucky to be able to speak to one of the world's leading academics on all things energy, Helen Thompson. Helen is a professor of political economy at the University of Cambridge, where she has been studying, basically, the connections between historical developments and disruptions in the energy and commodity markets over the past three decades.
She has written and spoken about this in publications like The New Statesman and the now off-air podcast Talking Politics. Her recent book Disorder is also one of the most illuminating retrospectives on the last couple of decades and how the energy crisis has essentially been fuelling a political crisis as well.
Now, the whole topic of energy and geopolitics can get pretty confusing and nebulous…
Anastasiia Lapatina: Definitely.
Jakub Parusinski: ...so I first wanted Helen to explain how the world got into the crisis that we're currently in and where Ukraine fits into all of it.
Jakub Parusinski: Right now, Europe is facing an energy crisis, but that didn't start with the Russian-Ukrainian war. How do we get to this point? What are the big trends that have gotten us to where we essentially are today?
Helen Thompson: I think there are quite a few different trends in play. If we start with oil, I think that there's actually been some issues around the supply of oil in relation to demand that we could already see back in 2019.
So, the year before the pandemic started, and actually, total oil production in the world has still not hit the amount that was produced in 2018. If we talk about gas, I think we could definitely see that there was a gas crisis for Europe and a number of Asian countries last autumn. It was probably the omicron variation, you know, of COVID that stopped the energy crisis really accelerating from a already pretty precarious situation, I would say. You can see an enormous difference from that point in the prices being paid for natural gas in Europe and Asia compared to in the United States.
If we look in terms of nuclear power, which is obviously been part of the story of the energy year in Europe because of the French situation and the fact that the nuclear output has been really low in France, um, during the course of this year because of the maintenance issues. And then if we look at it in terms of the energy transition, we can see that that's been proving extremely difficult even in the electricity sector, which is where most progress has been made.
Even before we get to the 24th of February of this year, there were multiple energy problems piling up, I'd say most dramatically around gas.
Jakub Parusinski: So, I think we can dive into the political ramifications a little bit later, but in your book, you sort of mentioned this kind of tension between the, um, the exporters and the importers. Where does that tension come from?
Helen Thompson: Yeah, I mean, I think that the problem for countries that are pretty much entirely dependent upon imports of oil and gas in particular is that there's a permanent vulnerability around that in terms of supply. Obviously this is what's happened to European countries this year, is– is that a country which you are used to receiving a steady supply from at a reasonable price, suddenly decides to use your dependency on their exports as a geopolitical weapon against you.
So, I think it's always been well understood by governments that there are certain vulnerabilities, sometimes very acute vulnerabilities that come from having to import energy from abroad. And it's always been understood by those countries with an export capacity that if they choose their ability to export and to turn the exports on and off, so to speak, can be used as a geopolitical weapon, so I would say that energy has always been geopolitical through the whole course of the 20th century.
Jakub Parusinski: It's a very salient point regarding, sort of, perhaps the history in Europe as well as the policy of the US, but in Europe, I'm sure a lot of people were aware of the vulnerability, but did that awareness sort of surface? Did it really lead to much action?
Helen Thompson: I think it's true that European, um, governments were complacent in this respect. And, I'm gonna focus on Germany here because I think that Germany…
Jakub Parusinski: That's the big one.
Helen Thompson: ...in European terms, is a central country at issue here. Is it the case that the German government, German politicians, and the big industrial German firms had a pretty, let's say, clear-sighted view of the geopolitical risks around energy dependency upon Russia. I would say the answer to that is no, that they didn't. They kind of, for a long time—right, I'd say really until maybe the latter part of this last year, early part of this year—had a kind of mantra, which went essentially, look, the Soviets were a reliable exporter during the Cold War years, so why wouldn't they be a reliable exporter now the Cold War is over.
In some sense, you know, if they could be trusted and delivered during the Cold War, why can't we trust that they will deliver now? I think that that was geopolitically naive for, like, a number of reasons, which we can come to, perhaps.
If you say, on the other hand, over the last 20-odd years, let's even just say during the period in which Putin has been in power, were European politicians regularly worried about dependency upon Russia? I think the answer is yes, that they were, and I think that at various points that a number of countries—not always Germany, it must be said—tried to diversify their energy supply, and they were looking for alternatives.Clearly, a number of North and East European countries saw the United States as an alternative years before the war began.
So from the point around 2017 when the US could start having capacity to export liquid natural gas, so a country like Poland was building liquid natural gas ports and taking, you know, imports from the United States and was doing it quite deliberately to try to escape having to import so much from Russia. So, was the question of energy security around in European governments' thinking for the last two decades? I think that yes, it was.
How much it was in Berlin may be a different question, but even there, I would say that it wasn't really until the 2010s, when the US shale gas boom took off, that it was really clear that there was a– a potentially serious alternative that a lot of European countries could embrace. And even then, I'd still say, you know, there's still limits to that claim.
Jakub Parusinski: Yeah.
Helen Thompson: Because we can see from the kind of competition that now exists between European countries and Asian countries, that the world's existing liquid natural gas suppliers cannot take care of all the gas demand that there is now in the world.
Jakub Parusinski: So, Anastasiia, what's the problem with Germany?
Anastasiia Lapatina: Yeah, I mean, when I was reading about the historical relationship between Germany and Russia after the Cold War, it was fascinating because basically what happened is that after Germany was unified, they had to develop, you know, a new foreign policy for independent Russia. And what they did is they were driven by this idea that the closer we get to Russia, the more we engage in trade, especially in terms of, you know, such important energy resources, the less likely we are to have an adversary relationship.
Jakub Parusinski: So you are referring to this famous German phrase, 'Wandel durch Handel', which is 'change through trade', right?
Anastasiia Lapatina: Yeah. So, for the last three decades, Germany did exactly this. That was their whole core of their, you know, energy politics and foreign policy towards Russia, is that the closer we get to them, the friendlier we are to them, the better things are, generally. And that didn't change even after 2014 when they invaded Crimea, invaded Eastern Ukraine, annexed Crimea, and occupied huge swaths of the country, Germany didn't really care.
The core of this is that for, like, the last three decades, Germany and Russia had this very close economic relationship, and now the German government is like, 'oh, we're screwed'. And they basically openly accept that they've been doing this wrong all along, or am I wrong, Jakub, what do you think?
Jakub Parusinski: What really shocks me is how little room there is to change energy in the short and medium term, right? So when you're faced with a situation that you've got winter coming in a couple of months, or you need to develop some kind of industry or something like that, like, energy has this huge lead time. If you wanna build a nuclear power plant, like, it's a decade of planning and building, et cetera, right?
Anastasiia Lapatina: And then voting on it too.
Jakub Parusinski: Right, absolutely. But what's kind of crazy is, like, okay, that's really, really difficult in the short term. But over a period of 20, 30 years, there's actually a lot you can do on energy. And, you know, um, Germans have a reputation for being organised and planning and, you know…
Anastasiia Lapatina: Meticulous with their work.
Jakub Parusinski: None of that happened. They just kicked this can down the road every single year. Like, it's crazy.
Anastasiia Lapatina: You know, I'm thinking about this as a young person, because there are a lot of these conversations that are happening among my peers. Our generation is really trying to coincide ethics and– and economics, and we're really wondering, is that even something that is possible?
Can we be in a way where we make ethical decisions first and economical later? Because it's not like relying on Russian energy is the only way to go. Like, there are alternatives. Are they gonna take a lot of– a long– a long time to develop? Yes. Are they gonna take a lot of money? Yes. Is that gonna— Like, are you gonna need a lot of political will in certain countries? Yes. But those are possibilities. So the calculation here is only, are you willing to make those sacrifices for what's good and what's ethical.
Jakub Parusinski: I think your generation has been the most idealistic, but also, uh, consequential on this.
Anastasiia Lapatina: Mm-hmm.
Jakub Parusinski: I think that the current—you know, Gen Z—I think it is doing it the most consequentially and the most radically. But is it possible to change everything at the same time? Well, here's where I think you end up making difficult and pragmatic compromises.
So, take energy. Is it possible to wean yourself off of Russia for most European countries? Probably, yes. It's difficult. It takes money, political will, et cetera. Some countries are in more difficult situation than others, but where do you cover the gap from?
Anastasiia Lapatina: Okay, so what did you get into next with Helen?
Jakub Parusinski: So, basically I wanted to bring it into the now to see how Putin has utilized energy as a geopolitical weapon and used it to put pressure on countries supporting Ukraine.
Jakub Parusinski: Fast-forward to the 24th of February and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, all the events that have happened since. Are we currently in an energy war in Europe?
Helen Thompson: Yeah, I think that we are. I think that you can say that that's true in two— Well, maybe it's now true in several– more than two respects. But let's start with the first two respects. The first would be that the European Union countries, and obviously the United States as well, put in place a set of energy sanctions on Russia.
So, either you can think of that as retribution, or you can think of it as an attempt to try to change the calculus facing Putin about the war itself. And since then, we've obviously seen a willingness of the Russian government to terminate gas supplies through particular pipelines to European customers.
Indeed, I would argue that actually you could see evidence of Putin's energy war last year in 2021. So, if you look at the amount of gas that was coming through the pipelines and through the course of 2021, certainly from about the spring onwards, then the only stuff that was coming through was the absolutely the contracted stuff. So in that sense, you could say, I think that Putin started the energy war last year.
Jakub Parusinski: Why would today's Russia be ready to take measures that the Soviet Union hesitated to implement for so many years?
Helen Thompson: That's a good question. First of all, I would say that exports of energy, particularly the gas exports that began in, like, the late '60s—it began going to Austria, I think in 1968 or early 1969—they were crucial for the Soviet Union economically from the '70s onwards because the Soviet Union had become dependent upon agricultural imports from abroad, and it had to pay for them in hard currency. And the energy exports were the corollary of that. Obviously, Putin's Russia is now actually an agricultural exporter, or it was before the war, anyway. So, in that sense, Russia is a more self-sufficient state.
The second thing I think that's important to see, and I think this is something that the– the Germans both understood and didn't understand the full implications of, is that from the point of view of Russia, the dissolution of the Soviet Union created a major energy problem, and that was transit. Because the pipelines that had been constructed to deliver Soviet export– energy exports to Europe went through a bunch of countries, obviously, most importantly, consequentially Ukraine, that post-1991 were now independent states with which the Soviet Union had to manage a transit relationship with and indeed had to pay fees to use the pipelines that ran through those countries.
So, from the point of view of Russia, energy exports in the post-1991 world was a lot more complicated geopolitically, far more geopolitically complicated, than it had been to the Soviet Union.
And that created a set of risks for the European countries that were evident, I'd say, going back to the 1990s, let alone the 2000s, which was if there were conflicts over transit between Russia and Ukraine, then there were risks for European countries that they wouldn't get the gas that they thought was being delivered to them.
So, in that sense, I would say that the geopolitics of Russia selling into the European market was just a lot more complicated from the start, post-1991, than it had been during the– the Soviet period, and I'm not sure the German government in particular perhaps understood all the ramifications of that.
Jakub Parusinski: Mm-hmm. So, is there maybe a personal angle here? I mean much has been made, at least amongst journalists, of Vladimir Putin's doctoral dissertation on the geopolitical applications of resources, energy in particular. This is a tool that's comfortable for him.
Helen Thompson: I think so, yes. I mean, I think that, if you go back to the beginning of Putin's ascendancy within, um, Russia, and you think about what– what he was trying to do in geopolitical terms and in the way in which he organised the Russian state itself, I think it's pretty clear that he saw that– the means, in his mind, by which Russia could be a great power again—and I'm using his language there, not what I would necessarily use, myself—was to turn Russia back into being a really important energy power, and that he was fortunate in this respect that the early 2000s, particularly from two-thousand sort of two onwards, was a period in which oil prices started to go up very rapidly, reaching their highest ever level in June of 2008. Took gas prices with them, uh, and that obviously provided a great deal of revenue for the Russian state.
And that was, I would say, the basis in which Putin went about reinventing Russian power in the post-Soviet world. And he also realized pretty quickly that he could use energy issues as a weapon against post-Soviet states like Ukraine, Belarus, Moldavia, and not to say there wasn't any of that went on in the 1990s, there was, but I think it went on to another level under Putin, and that he saw from the beginning that energy was Russia's most effective geopolitical weapon. And he set about, I think, trying to use it. And I think, in some sense, he went about trying to trap European countries in dependency upon Russian gas in particular, controlling which pipelines, et cetera, the gas was coming through in preparation, I would say, for a moment, like the one that then arrived.
Jakub Parusinski: Yeah.
Helen Thompson: Where he wanted to do something that would be completely unacceptable to the European governments, and he hoped that their energy dependency on Russia would constrain the way in which they would be able to respond to that.
Jakub Parusinski: So, Anastasiia, do you think that Putin has basically been playing Europe for a while? Is this part of a big evil plan?
Anastasiia Lapatina: I mean, I don't know how helpful it is to try to get into his head, because as you remember, people have been doing this before the invasion, and many people misunderstood what was happening, right? Like, I believed he wasn't gonna invade because it didn't make sense to me, but Putin operates in a whole different set of assumptions.
But, I do remember—and– and I think you and Helen got into this, actually—Putin has had this fascination with energy and energy as a– as a geopolitical matter and as a geopolitical weapon, in fact. So, you mentioned his doctoral thesis. Do you wanna– do you wanna tell the listeners what that whole thing was about?
Jakub Parusinski: Yeah, so, supposedly you could call the politicisation of energy or– or actually using energy as a geopolitical weapon, as almost an academic interest of Putin's, um, because he wrote his dissertation about precisely this, uh, this topic.
And, look, it's really something that you can dive into. I agree that it probably doesn't make that much sense to try to, you know, guess what Putin's mood is on any given day, but the other instruments are much more delicate and I would say powerful 'cause when you sell a lot of energy to lots of people, well there are a question about who gets special licences, who actually does the importing, who sits on the board of a, you know, highly profitable energy company, and how they deal with each other.
And I think when we look at Russia and specifically sort of the games that it's been playing, the geopolitical games with energy over the past decades, that's been a huge part of it. Handing out and punishing. So how are people feeling in Ukraine?
Anastasiia Lapatina: I mean, I think that the feeling about the upcoming winter and energy and, you know, and not having enough heating, of course the Kremlin is trying to scare us and subdue us. I mean, that's– that's the reason why they– they hit civilian targets and kill people. That's also the reason—one of the reasons, one of the many reasons—why they disrupt our energy infrastructure.
But among the civil society, and of course I recognize that that's not entirely representative of the overall mood of the population, but certainly among the youth and among the civil society, people are not necessarily worried, because we're now kind of playing this game of, you know, Putin is trying so hard to– to get us to panic, and he's trying to, you know, get us to be worried and lost, but he's failing.
And we're almost like playing this game of like, okay, what are you gonna try to do next? Like, you are gonna fail again. You know, in my circles, that's the mood. What do you think the broader mood is? Are people really worried?
Jakub Parusinski: No, I think you're right. A lot of people are— It's really important to not let Russia essentially break your spirit. So I think that's sort of the first thing and the first reaction. Everyone is very adamant that look, like, this is not going to change anyone's mind. At the same time. I think there's a lot of people who are starting to think about winter and preparing about winter.
You know, just over the last week, I've had several conversations and we're now planning to help, um, deliver power generators, um, you know arctic level, almost, sleeping bags. Winter in Ukraine is– can be brutal. That is basically what is happening.
On the one hand, I mean, people– they're resilient. They're angry. They're not gonna let this sort of break them. Um, but I think they also, you know, they've been through similar situations before. And right now there's a lot of, let's organise ourselves, let's prepare ourselves. You know, winter is coming, but let's be ready.
Jakub Parusinski: It seems by all accounts, very credible that the plan from the beginning, and to a large extent still today, was to take over the entirety of Ukraine. What would have been the fallout in terms of strengthening Russia as a geopolitical energy player?
Helen Thompson: This is a very interesting question. I mean, I find it easier to see that there was a resource motive for expanding, or attempting to expand, Russian control in the Black Sea in Donbas, that obviously the Donbas region is a resource rich part of Ukraine. So I think you can say it's not difficult to see that there could be a resource agenda, a clear resource agenda, in Putin's mind about the Black Sea and Donbas.
The pipeline issue, though, I think is harder to think about in these terms and to say that okay, it was really worth from his point of view in trying to engage in this, you know, absurd, you know, project of regime change in Ukraine in order to control the pipeline, because he was a long way to cutting Ukraine out of the transit system.
Jakub Parusinski: Yeah.
Helen Thompson: As I recall, he signed an agreement with France, Germany, Ukrainian government in late 2019 which extended Ukraine's gas transit until I think it was 2024. But if Nord Stream 2 had come online, which obviously there was a reasonable chance it would've done without him engaging in this war of conquest, I would've thought he would've achieved his aim, which had been– obviously engaged him for, you know, years and years of trying to cut Ukraine out of transit without having to contemplate, you know, such an absurd project as regime change. So I find it hard to think that the transit issue was part of his motivation.
Jakub Parusinski: Yeah, I fully agree. I don't think that this could have been the motive. The thing that is a more intriguing hypothesis is the question of food. As you mentioned, Russia not only went from sort of the Soviet Union's deficit in food to a country that is actually a– an agricultural exporter in a lot of goods, but it's neighbouring Ukraine, which is also, compared to its size, at least a middle agricultural power, is the combined force of agricultural output of Ukraine and Russia enough to sort of weaponise food?
Helen Thompson: Oh, very much so. I think very much so. Uh, and particularly I would say that it isn't just a question of, like, the volume of exports. It's the question of Black Sea itself and the ability, effectively, that Russia had really to blockade exports out from Ukraine via the– the Black Sea.
So you have two, as you say, really consequential agricultural exporters that are exporting through a body of water that has been, shall we just say, geopolitically fraught now for centuries and centuries. And in a context in which Russia is now, post-2014, the kind of agricultural exporter that it is, it's clear that there was a potential for a lot of really, I would, you know, like systemic pain being inflicted, uh, upon certain countries.
Particularly I would say in the Mediterranean Basin, you know, that those countries that were most dependent upon wheat imports in particular, from Ukraine and Russia. And then if you throw in all the other things that have been going on in food markets this year, uh, independently of the war—like drought problems—and generated by the war itself—fertiliser problems because of the gas crisis—that's a pretty, you know, like, heady mix of things that we're– we're– we're putting in there. So, I would say food security is definitely part of this war.
Jakub Parusinski: Look, back in– in sort of in February and March, there was a lot of concern about food security.as one of the elements of the commodity war. And, you know, there were questions about is the Middle East, is North Africa, is sort of South Asia going to be affected? Are we going to see widespread hunger? Do you think that's still an issue? Has it calmed down since then?
Anastasiia Lapatina: So, this is actually fascinating because, of course, food security was, you know, one of the main global concerns about Russia's war in Ukraine. And now, it's sort of no longer making the headlines, because, um, Russia and Ukraine got into this deal that was brokered by the UN in Turkey– in Istanbul, I think it was called the Black Sea Grain Initiative, which essentially allowed Ukraine to continue exporting, you know, its grain out of three ports in Southern Ukraine, in the city of Odessa.
So that started working in, and suddenly the UN is, like, preaching this initiative saying that, you know, we're basically back to normal, all good, diplomacy wins. But the point is that that initiative was actually only signed for 120 days. And that initiative, the document, you know, like the agreement, is ending and it's gonna end, I'm pretty sure, on November 19th, and it's gonna have to be signed again if you wanna continue exporting grain.
Jakub Parusinski: And every time it's gonna be a problem.
Anastasiia Lapatina: Yes, because now also we are doing very well, like comparatively to previous times, and so what some experts are saying is that Putin very well may use, of course, this agreement again as blackmail.
But a whole other avenue of this is that the grain that we've been exporting via these ports, that's grain from last year. So the reason why we had that, it's because, you know, we've already planted it, we've already harvested it this summer, and now we're gonna sell it for this winter. But what's gonna happen next winter?
Because now in the fall we have to, you know, plant new agricultural products, and I'm pretty sure that, if not the majority, but at least a big part, like something like half of Ukraine's agriculture is situated in the south and in the east, so exactly where that land corridor is, right, between occupied Crimea and occupied parts of Donbas, all of those are areas where we would harvest wheat and other types of grain. Now all of that's occupied. So for the next year, it's not only the transporting of grain is gonna be the problem, it's the amount of grain that we have.
Jakub Parusinski: So this is a huge question. You know, um, a lot of the times when you look at sort of the ap– apocalyptic kind of predictions, a lot of people will point out that most of the world operates on a 90-day food cycle. And I think what happened this year is there was a lot of expectation that food will be weaponized
I think there were some ideas. But in order to weaponize it effectively, you know that you need to have a shortfall somewhere, right? And I think to some extent there were positive surprises. There was more crops than expected in different parts of the world, and other ones, you know, demand didn't– wasn't quite as high, so there were a lot of reasons why the crisis didn't manifest itself. But I think— You know, thinking that, one, a food crisis isn't coming in the next couple of years, especially with climate changes destroying, you know…
Anastasiia Lapatina: Definitely.
Jakub Parusinski: soil in huge parts of the world and expecting that the Russians will not use this as a weapon is absolutely crazy. I mean, Simonyan, the, sort of– who's a, let's say, a state propagandist. She's the Editor-in-chief of, um, Russia Today. You know, she had a famous speech this summer saying that hunger is our ally, right? Like, we want to weaponize hunger.
Anastasiia Lapatina: I mean, they literally say this openly. Like, we're not making this up because we're sad and emotional about the war. Like, this is a fact.
Jakub Parusinski: And, look, I don't know to what extent this is something that can be verified these days, maybe someday we'll know, but my gut tells me that a big part of invading Ukraine for Putin was actually about taking control of some of the world's most fertile land. Ukraine is a third of chernozem, that's sort of the black earth, the most fertile land. And if you take the fertile land that is in Ukraine, in Russia, and in Kazakhstan, you become more than the Saudi Arabia of food. You are essentially the, um, the OPEC of food by yourself.
Anastasiia Lapatina: Okay, so, Jakub, what did you wanna end on?
Jakub Parusinski: Look, the situation with the energy war, the commodity shortages are one of the big repercussions of the current war. You know, they're affecting people from Beijing to DC, and I wanted to ask Helen about the implications for, basically, the world and the coming resource wars.
Jakub Parusinski: Looking forward, we have a– a Russia that is substantially weakened, at the very least, by a very failing campaign to take over Ukraine. I think its previous power, especially across the Eurasian region, has been impacted. On the flip side, Russia does still benefit from high commodity prices. It does have levers to impact countries in the Middle East.
Do you see sort of energy being a vector for further chaos down the line, especially when we look at, sort of, the Eurasian kind of region around Russia?
Helen Thompson: I do. I mean, I think that one of the things that's really both striking and destabilising in the situation we've now reached is– is that Russia's military weaknesses have been exposed, and yet I think on balance it's more winning the energy war than it's losing the energy war.
That isn't to say he hasn't got some energy problems that have brought upon itself as a consequence of the war that it has pursued both in military terms and in energy terms, but clearly the problems that are being caused elsewhere in the world as a result of the energy war in energy terms are harder for the rest of the world than they are for Russia.
Jakub Parusinski: That's very interesting and quite worrying to be– to be honest. How do you see this impacting, let's say, the West's relationship with such countries as China and India? Is this something that is setting up additional antagonism between, let's say, India, China, and the West?
Helen Thompson: Yeah, I mean, I think there's a quite a lot of different things going on here.
Obviously, as a starting place, there's the fact that, you know, India and China are not gonna engage in energy sanctions– have not been willing to engage in energy sanctions against Russia, and that they're not– they're not going to. And some of this is actually fortuitous from European point of view because it allows for indirect purchases of Russian oil and gas.
So, you know, you don't buy Russian crude yourself, but Russian crude goes to India and gets refined into petroleum products and gets them bought back into– you know, by European countries. And obviously, that resupplying Russian oil wouldn't be possible if India were also engaged in energy sanctions against– against Russia.
So that's one aspect of it, I think. Then there's the question of climate diplomacy and what the consequences of that have been. Because I think that, pretty clear, if you look at the, you know, the COP in Glasgow last autumn, you know, there was very acute tensions between US and European countries on the one side, China and India on the other, about commitments to phase out coal, which India and China were very reluctant to make, and the European countries and the United States were saying, 'you need to do this'. And I think it's very difficult for European governments to pursue that argument without, in some sense being laughed at– at now because they've shown that in the emergency when it comes to electricity generation, that coal is, if you like, the energy source of last resort.
So I then think there's the question of how China, really, reacts to OPEC+'s moves. OPEC+ is basically the world's oil producer cartel. China doesn't want high oil prices any more than the United States or the European countries do. In one sense, that there's a kind of paradox here because China has actually been helping keeping oil prices lower than they would otherwise be because of China's economic problems. So there's still a quite complicated geopolitics around oil, I think, in which the US and China actually do have some shared interests.
Jakub Parusinski: Thank you so much. This was a really fascinating discussion.
Helen Thompson: That was really interesting. Thank you for asking me.
Jakub Parusinski: I just wanted to say that, to be honest, all of this sounds quite depressing. If we look at how this is gonna play out over the next 10 years, and I'm sort of thinking, like, are we in the new normal now?
Helen Thompson: Yeah, I think that this is the new— I mean, I'm leaving the war itself out of that. I mean, that's a– that's a separate question.
Jakub Parusinski: Yeah.
Helen Thompson: On the energy side, I think this is the new normal, yes.
Anastasiia Lapatina: In two weeks on Power Lines, we'll be looking into Russia and its surrounding countries as we take a deep dive into Eurasia with Fiona Hill, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute, former official at the US National Security Council, and one of the world's leading experts on Russia and Putin.
Jakub Parusinski: If you want to further support us, you can subscribe to our ad-free feed on Apple and by looking up Power Lines + on Spotify.
You can also support The Kyiv Independent by finding us on our Patreon. To get behind the scenes content, go to patreon.com/kyivindependent to continue helping us report on the most important stories in Ukraine.
Anastasiia Lapatina: Look up Message Heard wherever you're listening to this podcast for more of our original shows, and find us on our website at messageheard.com or on our Power Lines Twitter, @PowerLinesPod, as well as Instagram and Facebook by looking up @MessageHeard.
Jakub Parusinski: You can also follow The Kyiv Independent on Twitter and Facebook, @KyivIndependent and Instagram @kyivindependent_official to get the latest news and stay up to date with our coverage. Please also subscribe and rate Power Lines in your podcast app, as it really helps others find our show.
Anastasiia Lapatina: Power Lines is a partnership between The Kyiv Independent and Message Heard. It was produced by Bea Duncan, Harry Stott, and Talia Augustidis. The executive producer is Sandra Ferrari. The theme music is by Tom Biddle and Alfie Godfrey.