
Russia is not to blame for the global rise in energy prices, it is the fault of an increasingly greedy Europe that has created “energy bubbles”. This false narrative, promoted in an online publication in Romania, repeats Russian propaganda and ignores Moscow's actions that actually led to the current situation.
NEWS: “It's happening on the Holland-Norway axis. And by no means is the fault of the Russian Federation, which continues to be falsely accused of blackmail with regard to gas and oil. Reality is hitting us in the face. Currently, only 9% of all the gas used in Europe comes from the Russian Federation. In record time, Norway became the EU's main supplier. But how does the energy bubble burst? The price of energy has gone up in a way completely and utterly uncontrolled by the European Commission. More bluntly put, through an entirely artificial mechanism. It goes by the name of TTF - Title Transfer Facility, a virtual institution based in Amsterdam, owned and manipulated by a few crooks. This institution and the game it has played so far, extremely dangerous for all EU member states, should have been controlled, but were not, by ESMA. ESMA is the authority that was created to control the financial markets. The leaders of the European Union have literally made a laughing stock of themselves. The charade culminated on September 9, when an extraordinary Council was convened, in which the Ministers of Energy participated and where important decisions were to be taken, aimed at keeping gas prices in check in the future. This Extraordinary Council was falsely put under the banner of the war in Ukraine and Russia’s alleged energy blackmail. And the solution that was envisaged, the solution of all solutions, would have been the mandatory capping of the price of all gas. A decision that apparently would have put down the revenues of the Russian Federation. But in reality, as stated above, only 9% of the gas burned in Europe comes from the Russian Federation at the moment”.
NARRATIVES: 1. Russia is not to blame for rising energy prices 2. The EU and US are greedy and have created an artificial gas price calculator 3. Russia honors its long-term contracts and the price cap comes in breach of these contracts.
LOCAL CONTEXT/ETHOS: The European Commission has proposed capping the price of natural gas coming from Russia.
The French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire and the German Finance Minister Christian Lindner have called for solidarity across the bloc in finding solutions to help the EU households and businesses.
“We want to avoid higher revenues for Russia and we want to maintain the price level for our economies and a favorable means is to cap the price of oil. It is more effective when several member states of the European Union support this idea”, Lindner said.
The idea is not to the liking of Norway, a country outside the EU bloc, and the head of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, has decided to partially abandon it and instead ask for overtaxing energy companies, according to an official document cited by The Guardian.
PURPOSE: To mislead the Romanian public opinion into believing that it is not Russia that manipulates the energy market.
WHY THE NARRATIVES ARE FALSE: In recent years, Russia has frequently used the energy weapon to influence political decisions in the European states where it supplies natural gas. Gazprom has always functioned as the “armed arm” of the Kremlin policies to dictate political courses. The higher the percentage of gas supplied, the more leverage Russia had over the respective countries.
European lawmakers have repeatedly accused Russia of manipulating energy exports to drive up commodity prices and sow uncertainty across the EU bloc. Moscow denied using energy as a weapon, but it was an integral part of the war preparation campaign, with Moscow seeking, on the one hand, to ensure that Europeans did not stockpile for the winter and, on the other hand, that the price of natural gas went up.
The invasion of Ukraine changed the situation further, so prices rose even more. The move was carefully coordinated by Moscow, which made even more money from selling hydrocarbons.
In the first six months of the war alone, Russia earned no less than 158 billion euros, while spending about 100 billion dollars on the war in Ukraine. The EU imported 54% of these hydrocarbons, worth approximately 85 billion euros. Fossil fuel exports have contributed about 43 billion euro to Russia's federal budget since the invasion began, helping to finance war crimes in Ukraine, according to a recent study.
In six months, the EU managed to reduce its dependence on Russian gas from 40% to 9% as a policy of economic suffocation of the Russian war machine unleashed against Ukraine.
As a result of Germany's favorable stance on gas price caps, last week Gazprom decided to indefinitely shut down the Nord Stream 1 gas pipeline, which connects Russia to Germany via the Baltic Sea.
The Kremlin has since said that resuming gas supplies to Europe is entirely dependent on the EU lifting the economic sanctions against Moscow. This clearly shows that Russia makes the contracts in force conditional on political decisions and not, as the author of the article claims, that Russia observes the contracts it has with European countries.
The most relevant example is the Republic of Moldova itself, which even at this time does not know whether Gazprom will supply it with gas and in what volumes for the month of October, although it has a clear 5-year contract signed in October 2021, stipulating a certain volume of gas and a precise price scheme.
“I think that considering the fact that we have a 5-year contract, 6 months does not make a difference. From the discussions with Miller, I did not understand whether they will disconnect the Republic of Moldova from gas or will continue the deliveries after October 1”, said the Minister of Infrastructure and Regional Development of the Republic of Moldova, Andrei Spinu, in a show on the Chisinau public television station on September 9.
GRAIN OF TRUTH: Norway, as today’s main exporter of gas to the EU, has been skeptical about the capping of natural gas price.
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