Ukrainian Paper Warns Russia: Gas Deal With China Is Worthless

The New Voice of Ukraine warned that Russia’s weaponizing gas would push European nations to impose strict conservation measures on industry and their citizens, with Europe eventually transitioning to a post-Russia energy situation.

Photo Insert: The Power of Siberia 2 pipeline

“Worse for Putin, his much-vaunted energy deal with China isn’t worth the paper it was written on due to permanent geopolitical and geographic challenges. Dreams of vast amounts of gas transiting through pipelines across Siberia have been all but scuttled by costs, distances, terrain and construction challenges. The cost of shipping LNG from the United States, Australia, or the Middle East to China and Asia is substantially lower and has made such projects unviable,” the newspaper explained.

“The most ambitious pipeline to pivot to China is the Power of Siberia 2 pipeline. The strategy is to link the fields in West Siberia, which now supply Europe, with China via Mongolia. An even crazier notion behind this was that the line would allow Moscow to arbitrage between European and Asian markets – a sort of Putin-like version of controlling the world. He wanted to weaponize gas markets but that’s not how they work,” the paper argued.

Worse, even the most optimistic scenario — if such a link could be completed — is that Russian pipeline volumes to China would never match volumes to Europe.

Besides that, they would fetch much lower prices because China would drive a hard bargain, in the knowledge that Russia was overly dependent on its business. Now the reality is that every nation in the world now realizes that Russia is not a trustworthy partner, neighbor, supplier or customer until there’s a regime change.

Russia is a commodity-based economy run by a dictator as a war machine. Since he took power, 11 million Russians have left.

Attempts at manufacturing or technology have been abysmal failures. With Western help, Russia by 2021 was the world’s leading exporter of natural gas followed by the United States — a pre-eminence that will never return.

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