Any shutdown would increase gas prices worldwide. Just because the UK doesn't use Russian gas direct, it does buy gas on the open market, when Germany can't buy it for €1 per unit from Russia, they'll pay €1.20 from the UK (which has 50% domestic production, Norway having most of the rest), pushing prices up for the UK and other countries despite not using Russian gas direct.
The failure here was the inability to boost nuclear and renewable sources in Europe over the last 8 years to reduce reliance on Russia.
The anti-nuclear push in the last few years in Europe has been extremely short-sighted, and undoubtedly helped make Russia's decision to attack Ukraine easier.
The opposite is true, nuclear energy has lits of problems in the long run.
Many french reactors are shut down because of damages and the US ones have a problem with fake parts.
We are all connected. In Spain we get no gas from Russia (it comes mainly from Algeria), but there are already news that we will send gas up north to help Northern European countries that may experience outages.
Germany shutting down their most reliable source of clean energy, nuclear energy, is an incredible self own. Hopefully now they will reverse that and quickly for all our sake.
Well there will be some damage to eu countries. East europe accounts for 15% of all german exports, being the largest market, should they start playing the sanctions game as the eu seems to enjoy whenever someone is out of line? Basically buying russia’s gas means financing a potential war against nato member states.
There has been less gas flowing from Russia to Europe for months now, leading to large price spikes. In hindsight that was clearly preparation for this war - the tanks are the opposite of filled.
Gazprom fulfilled their contractual obligations. Putin being responsible for our MBAs gambling on falling prices and not making long-term contracts just so he has an easier time invading Ukraine? That's stretching it so thin that it's utter non-sense.
Except they were happy to send gas above the "contractual obligations" previous to the ramp up to invading Ukraine. This was clearly planned as a way to exert more pressure on NATO allies.
It's like falling out with IT support. Suddenly your ticket to fix a printer takes 2 days, rather than 5 minutes because that is the "SLA".
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