n yesterday's trading on the benchmark Dutch gas exchange, the price of the product fell by 15% and continues to fall today.
This brings us to the August 2021 level, six months before the actual outbreak of war.
Actual because Putin had already started to reduce gas supplies to Europe in the summer of 2021, which slowly started to increase the price. Moscow therefore started the energy war well before it escalated its aggression against Ukraine, which began in 2014, to a new level in February 2022.
The mild winter, the reduction in consumption by the European population and economy, and the super-speed diversification of sources of supply neutralised the Kremlin's potential for blackmail in a year and a half.
Unless extreme cold hits us out of nowhere by the end of March, gas storage levels will remain high in the spring (81% on average in Europe now), meaning that preparing for next winter will not be a problem.
The lessons are many, the surprises fewer and the news almost nothing new.
The economic strength and adaptability to new challenges of the advanced liberal democracies of the West will already in the medium term exceed the initially seemingly effective rapid response of the underdeveloped Eastern dictatorships with their backward social structures and their dependence on the West.
China is still struggling with its covid, while in the West, with little exaggeration, no one remembers it. Russia was able to blackmail Europe with gas until the door was closed on it. Putin's useful idiots can keep spouting their rhetoric about the dying of the West until it is obvious to the electorate that the centuries-old lie will still not be fulfilled.
The Moscow-funded global far right is also in decline, as the Kremlin's financial options shrink and it is slowly but surely being squeezed out of the political arena of the civilised world. Now that we are out of these redundant circles, it is time to end the war, which would never have started if some of the Western political establishment had not been naive, stupid or venal.
Hiding or not, energy dependence on the Russians is gone, no one will freeze. Weapons can go to Ukraine, but now you don't have to fiddle with a few dozen, you can put a zero at the end of the number of pieces.
Translated with
www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
A tegnapi kereskedésben a mértékadó holland gáztőzsdén 15%-al esett a termék ára és ma is tovább csökken. Ezzel a 2021 augusztusi szintet értük el, tehát fél évvel a háború tényleges kitörése előtt...
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