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WAR IN EUROPE

George Soros advises world leaders how to ditch Putin’s war-financing gas supply

George Soros advises world leaders how to ditch Putin’s war-financing gas supply
epa06680854 (FILE) - George Soros, Chairman of Soros Foundation, speaks to the press during the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, 29 January 2005 (reissued 20 April 2018). According to media report, Patrick Gaspard, President of the George Soros' Open Society Foundations (OSF), said the OSF would leave Budapest and move their eastern European operations to Berlin. EPA-EFE/ALESSANDRO DELLA VALLE

The billionaire has said Russia will have to resort to closing down Siberian gas wells without its European market as the nation’s storage capacity reaches its limit.

Billionaire businessman and philanthropist George Soros has urged Europe to turn the tables on Russian president Vladimir Putin by accelerating its independence from Russian gas.

Putin’s only gas market is Europe and he is running out of storage capacity. So if Europe stops buying Russian gas, he would have to shut down the gas wells in Siberia where the gas comes from, he says. 

Soros spelt out his strategy in a letter to Italian prime minister Mario Draghi whom he considers the go-to European leader because of his “leadership” and “imagination.”

The Hungarian-born Soros, who now lives in the US and has donated billions of dollars to foundations advancing democracy, divulged his letter to Draghi during a dinner at this week’s World Economic Forum in Davos

“Putin is obviously blackmailing Europe by threatening to or actually withholding gas,” Soros wrote to Draghi. “That’s what he did last season. He put gas in storage rather than supplying gas to Europe.

“This created a shortage, raised prices and earned him a lot of money. But his bargaining position is not as strong as he pretends.

“It is estimated that Russian storage capacity will be full by July. Europe is his only market. If he doesn’t supply Europe, he must shut down the wells in Siberia from where the gas comes.

“Some 12,000 wells are involved. It takes time to shut them down and once they are shut down, they are difficult to reopen because of the age of the equipment.”

But “Europe would need to undertake urgent preparations before using its bargaining power,” Soros warned. “Without it, the pain of sudden stoppage would be politically very hard to bear.”

However, he noted these preparations were necessary anyway as European countries had already committed to becoming independent of Russian gas. And he said Putin might decide anyway to turn off the taps when this would really hurt.

‘Preserve civilisation and defeat Putin as soon as possible’

All of these pressures pointed in the same direction — to make Europe largely independent of Russia’s gas before winter he suggested. 

He also proposed that European Union (EU)  should impose “a hefty tax” on gas imports so that the price to the consumer did not drop but that the EU would earn a large amount of money which could be used to subsidise the needy and invest in green energy.

“Russia would never regain the sales it has lost,” he concluded. 

After meeting President Cyril Ramaphosa in Pretoria on Tuesday, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz explained that Germany and other European countries which imported Russian gas were working hard to end these purchases as soon as possible. That included adapting infrastructure to receive the gas in liquid form via tankers rather than through gas pipelines from Russia, as now. 

That would allow Germany to purchase its gas from many other sources, he said. He also described how the European nations were adapting their infrastructure to end imports of Russian oil by the end of 2022.

And they were also preparing to stop importing Russian coal by the northern autumn of this year. Scholz said Germany was shifting to other coal suppliers, including South Africa. DM

 

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  • Chris Green says:

    Great thinking, thanks for sharing. It gives weight to ” out of chaos comes opportunity ”
    Just need the international electorate to “see the long view “

    • Pet Bug says:

      Yes. One must also hope for a Russia after Putin and the decimation of Russia’s only golden egg presently – fossil fuels.
      It might be Russias first real opportunity to escape it’s historic strangulation by Tsarist, communist and klepto-autocratic power regimes over, what? 200 odd years. My hope for an otherwise great, artistic people.

    • Dragan KostaKostic says:

      This is a war for markets and resources between rival imperialist powers. It is strange that those who condemn Russia the loudest say nothing about the crimes of the west. All over the world governments are using the war as an excuse to attack peoples standard of living and curtail political rights.

      • Johan Buys says:

        Dragan: nobody regards russia as a world power other than in nuclear war. When its oil gas and coal markets dry up it will be economically irrelevant. As to the attack on peoples’ rights, you REALLY do not want to do a scorecard of russia measuring democracy, economic freedom, freedom of association and expression, rule of law or any standard of decency.

  • Wendy Dewberry says:

    Its quite a conundrum. No one thinking about ecology wants to frack in their own back yard. In South Africa, the question is then – Putin gas or Mantashe gas ?

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