The Kremlin’s dastardly attempt to blackmail the West into turning its back on Ukraine has backfired
The factories would have closed down. The schools and offices would have emptied. The hospitals would be running on emergency generators, and the rest of us would be stocking up on woolly jumpers and candles as we prepared to shiver our way through a winter of blackouts. From his lair in the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, evidently planned that this winter would be the moment when he froze Western Europe into submission. Putin would use Russia’s vast energy resources as a tool of blackmail, and victory in Ukraine would be within his grasp.
After his invasion of Ukraine, and the Western sanctions that followed, it certainly looked as if Putin still had a decisive weapon to deploy: oil and, even more importantly, gas. With Germany, Italy and, indeed, most of the Continent critically dependent on cheap energy imported from Russia, there were fears that the economic and social damage of standing up to Russian aggression would be more than most European societies could withstand.
If he gradually turned off the supplies, Europe would have no choice but to wind down its military and financial support for Ukraine. And without that, even Kyiv’s brilliantly led and heroic military would not be able to withstand the Russian onslaught.
But Putin’s dastardly plan is now backfiring badly. In fact, the Russian president may even be losing the energy war that he started.