Russian War in Ukraine A Step Back for European Energy Peace
Europe faces enormous challenges as energy interdependence buckles from the military conflict
After years of consistent hostility and tension on the Russia-Ukraine border, the eyes of the world have returned their gaze upon this conflict as tensions have flared up into a full-on conventional kinetic war, the largest such event in Europe since the Second World War. Setting aside the West’s overtly aggressive handling of Russia in recent decades, in a number of key areas, Russia and the West had been taking some political and economic steps toward cooperation. One of these steps was the completion of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. It could have been one piece of stitching for holding together the tenuous relationship between Russia and the West that has now taken many steps back.
War and the Throttling of Energy
The invasion has eclipsed those years of relatively low-level political turmoil since the commencement of the Donbas War in 2014 and has hailed a major shift in larger macro trends in areas of human mobility, security and cooperation, finance, and commodity markets as U.S. aligned countries and corresponding multinationals have piled in on sanctions against Russia. As far as commodities, these include critical resources such…
