The identity of the the Ukraine "whistleblower" is revealed

The Plundering of 

Ukraine by Corrupt 

American Democrats

A talk with Oleg Tsarev reveals the alleged identity of the "Trump/Ukraine Whistleblower"

Israel Shamir

Unz Review,
25 October, 2019

Top Dems are involved in the plundering of the Ukraine: new names, mind-boggling accounts. The mysterious ‘whistleblower’ whose report had unleashed the impeachment is named in the exclusive interview given to the Unz Review by a prominent Ukrainian politician, an ex-Member of Parliament of four terms, a candidate for Ukraine’s presidency, Oleg Tsarev.

Mr Tsarev, a tall, agile and graceful man, a good speaker and a prolific writer, had been a leading and popular Ukrainian politician before the 2014 putsch; he stayed in the Ukraine after President Yanukovych’s flight; ran for the Presidency against Mr Poroshenko, and eventually had to go to exile due to multiple threats to his life. During the failed attempt to secede, he was elected the speaker of the Parliament of Novorossia (South-Eastern Ukraine). I spoke to him in Crimea, where he lives in the pleasant seaside town of Yalta. Tsarev still has many supporters in the Ukraine, and is a leader of the opposition to the Kiev regime.

Oleg, you followed Biden story from its very inception. Biden is not the only Dem politician involved in the Ukrainian corruption schemes, is he?

Indeed, John Kerry, the Secretary of State in Obama’s administration, was his partner-in-crime. But Joe Biden was number one. During the Obama presidency, Biden was the US proconsul for Ukraine, and he was involved in many corruption schemes. He authorised transfer of three billion dollars of the US taxpayers’ money to the post-coup government of the Ukraine; the money was stolen, and Biden took a big share of the spoils.

It is a story of ripping the US taxpayer and the Ukrainian customer off for the benefit of a few corruptioners, American and Ukrainian. And it is a story of Kiev regime and its dependence on the US and IMF. The Ukraine has a few midsize deposits of natural gas, sufficient for domestic household consumption. The cost of its production was quite low; and the Ukrainians got used to pay pennies for their gas. Actually, it was so cheap to produce that the Ukraine could provide all its households with free gas for heating and cooking, just like Libya did. Despite low consumer price, the gas companies (like Burisma) had very high profits and very little expenditure.

After the 2014 coup, IMF demanded to raise the price of gas for the domestic consumer to European levels, and the new president Petro Poroshenko obliged them. The prices went sky-high. The Ukrainians were forced to pay many times more for their cooking and heating; and huge profits went to coffers of the gas companies. Instead of raising taxes or lowering prices, President Poroshenko demanded the gas companies to pay him or subsidise his projects. He said that he arranged the price hike; it means he should be considered a partner.

Burisma Gas company had to pay extortion money to the president Poroshenko. Eventually its founder and owner Mr Nicolai Zlochevsky decided to invite some important Westerners into the company’s board of directors hoping it would moderate Poroshenko’s appetites. He had brought in Biden’s son Hunter, John Kerry, Polish ex-President Kwasniewski; but it didn’t help him.

Poroshenko became furious that the fattened calf may escape him, and asked the Attorney General Shokin to investigate Burisma trusting some irregularities would emerge. AG Shokin immediately discovered that Burisma had paid these ‘stars’ between 50 and 150 thousand dollar per month each just for being on the list of directors. This is illegal by the Ukrainian tax code; it can’t be recognised as legitimate expenditure.

At that time Biden the father entered the fray. He called Poroshenko and gave him six hours to close the case against his son. Otherwise, one billion dollars of the US taxpayers’ funds won’t pass to the Ukrainian corruptioners. Zlochevsky, the Burisma owner, paid Biden well for this conversation: he received between three and ten million dollars, according to different sources.

AG Shokin said he can’t close the case within six hours; Poroshenko sacked him and installed Mr Lutsenko in his stead. Lutsenko was willing to dismiss the case of Burisma, but he also could not do it in a day, or even in a week. Biden, as we know, could not keep his trap shut: by talking about the pressure he put on Poroshenko, he incriminated himself. Meanwhile Mr Shokin gave evidence that Biden put pressure on Poroshenko to fire him, and now it was confirmed. The evidence was given to the US lawyers in connection with another case, Firtash case.

What is Firtash Case?

The Democrats wanted to get another Ukrainian oligarch, Mr Firtash, to the US and make him to confess that he illegally supported Trump’s campaign for the sake of Russia. Firtash had been arrested in Vienna, Austria; there he fought extradition to the US. His lawyers claimed it is purely political case, and they used Mr Shokin’s deposition to substantiate their claim. For this reason, the evidence supplied by Shokin is not easily reversible, even if Shokin were willing, and he is not. He also stated under oath that the Democrats pressurised him to help and extradite Firtash to the US, though he had no standing in this purely American issue. It seems that Mrs Clinton believes that Firtash’s funds helped Trump to win elections, an extremely unlikely thing [says Mr Tsarev].

Talking about Burisma and Biden; what is this billion dollars of aid that Biden could give or withhold?

It is USAID money, the main channel of the US aid for “support of democracy”. First billion dollars of USAID came to the Ukraine in 2014. This was authorised by Joe Biden, while for Ukraine, the papers were signed by Mr Turchinov, the “acting President”. The Ukrainian constitution does not know of such a position, and Turchinov, “the acting President” had no right to sign neither a legal nor financial document. Thus, all the documents that were signed by him, in fact, had no legal force. However, Biden countersigned the papers signed by Turchynov and allocated money for Ukraine. And the money was stolen – by the Democrats and their Ukrainian counterparts.

Two years ago, (that is already under President Trump) the United States began to investigate the allocation of 3 billion dollars; it was allocated in 2014, in 2015, in 2016; one billion dollars per year. The investigation showed that the documents were falsified, the money was transferred to Ukraine, and stolen. The investigators tracked each payment, discovered where the money went, where it was spent and how it was stolen.

As a result, in October 2018, the U.S. Department of Justice opened a criminal case for “Abuse of power and embezzlement of American taxpayers’ money”. Among the accused there are two consecutive Finance Ministers of the Ukraine, Mrs Natalie Ann Jaresko who served 2014-2016 and Mr Alexander Daniluk who served 2016-2018, and three US banks. The investigation caused the USAID to cease issuing grants since August 2019. As Trump said, now the US does not give away money and does not impose democracy.

The money was allocated with the flagrant violation of American law. There was no risk assessment, no audit reports. Normally the USAID, when allocating cash, always prepares a substantial package of documents. But the billions were given to Ukraine completely without documents. The criminal case on the embezzlement of USAID funds had been signed personally by the US Attorney General, so these issues are very much alive.

Sam Kislin was involved in this investigation. He is a good friend and associate of Giuliani, Trump’s lawyer and an ex-mayor of New York. Kislin is well known in Kiev, and I have many friends who are Sam’s friends [said Tsarev]. I learned of his progress, because some of my friends were detained in the United States, or interrogated in Ukraine. They briefed me about this. It appears that Burisma is just the tip of the scandal, the tip of the iceberg. If Trump will carry on, and use what was already initiated and investigated, the whole headquarters of the Democratic party will come down. They will not be able to hold elections. I have no right to name names, but believe me, leading functionaries of the Democratic party are involved.

Poroshenko was aware of that; he gave orders to declare Sam Kislin persona non grata. Once the old man (he is over 80) flew into Kiev airport and he was not allowed to come in; he spent the night in detention and was flown back to the US next day. Poroshenko had been totally allied with Clinton camp.

And President Zelensky? Is he free from Clintonite Democrats’ influence?

If he were, there would not be the scandal of Trump phone call. How the Democrats learned of this call and its alleged content? The official version says there was a CIA man, a whistle-blower, who reported to the Democrats. What the version does not clarify, where this whistle-blower was located during the call. I tell you, he was located in Kiev, and he was present at the conversation, at the Ukrainian President Zelensky’s side. This man was (perhaps) a CIA asset, but he also was a close associate of George Soros, and a Ukrainian high-ranking official. His name is Mr Alexander Daniluk. He is also the man the investigation of Sam Kislin and of the DoJ had led to, the Finance Minister of Ukraine at the time, the man who was responsible for the embezzlement of three billion US taxpayer’s best dollars. The DoJ issued an order for his arrest. Naturally he is devoted to Biden personally, and to the Dems in general. I would not trust his version of the phone call at all.

Daniluk was supposed to accompany President Zelensky on his visit to Washington; but he was informed that there is an order for his arrest. He remained in Kiev. And soon afterwards, the hell of the alleged leaked phone call broke out. Zelensky administration investigated and concluded that the leak was done by Mr Alexander Daniluk, who is known for his close relations with George Soros and with Mr Biden. Alexander Daniluk had been fired. (However, he did not admit his guilt and said the leak was done by his sworn enemy, the head of president’s administration office, Mr Andrey Bogdan, who allegedly framed Daniluk.)

This is not the only case of US-connected corruption in Ukraine. 

There is Amos J. Hochstein, a protege of former VP Joe Biden, who has served in the Barack Obama administration as the Assistant Secretary of State for Energy Resources. He still hangs on the Ukraine. Together with an American citizen Andrew Favorov, the Deputy Director of Naftogas he organised very expensive “reverse gas import” into Ukraine. In this scheme, the Russian gas is bought by Europeans and afterwards sold to Ukraine with a wonderful margin. In reality, gas comes from Russia directly, but payments go via Hochstein. It is much more costly than to buy directly from Russia; Ukrainian people pay, while the margin is collected by Hochstein and Favorov. Now they plan to import liquefied gas from the United States, at even higher price. Again, the price will be paid by the Ukrainians, while profits will go to Hochstein and Favorov.

In all these scams, there are people of Clinton and spooks who are fully integrated in the Democratic Party. A former head of CIA, Robert James Woolsey, now sits on the Board of Directors of Velta, producing Ukrainian titanium. Woolsey is a neocon, a member of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), pro-Israel think-tank, and a man who relentlessly pushed for Iraq war. A typical Democrat spook, now he gets profits from Ukrainian ore deposits.

One of the best Ukrainian corruption stories is connected with Audrius Butkevicius, the former Minister of Defence (1996 to 2000) and a Member of the Seimas (Parliament) of post-Soviet Lithuania. Mr AB is supposedly working for MI6, and now is a member of the notorious Institute for Statecraft, a UK deep state propaganda outfit involved in disinformation operations, subversion of the democratic process and promoting Russophobia and the idea of a new cold war. In 1991 he commanded snipers that shoot Lithuanian protesters. The kills were ascribed to the Soviet armed forces, and the last Soviet President Mr Gorbachev ordered speedy withdrawal of his troops from Lithuania. Mr AB became the Minister of Defence of his independent nation. In 1997 the Honourable Minister of Defence “had requested 300,000 USD from a senior executive of a troubled oil company for his assistance in obtaining the discontinuance of criminal proceedings concerning the company’s vast debts”, in the language of the court judgement. He was arrested on receipt of the bribe, had been sentenced to five years of jail, but a man with such qualifications was not left to rot in a prison.

In 2005 he commanded the snipers who killed protesters in Kyrgyzstan, in Georgia he repeated the feat in 2003 during the Rose Revolution. In 2014 he did it again in Kiev, where his snipers killed around a hundred men, protesters and police. He was brought to Kiev by Mr Turchinov, who called himself the “acting President” and who countersigned Joe Biden’s billion dollars’ grant.

In October 2018 the name of Mr AB came up again. Military warehouses of Chernigov had caught fire; allegedly thousands of shells stored for fighting the separatists had been destroyed by fire. And it was not the first fire of this kind: the previous one, equally huge, torched Ukrainian army warehouses in Vinnitsa in 2017. Altogether, there were 12 huge army arsenal fires for the last few years. Just for 2018, the damage was over $2 billion.

When Chief Military Prosecutor of Ukraine Anatoly Matios investigated the fires, he discovered that 80% of weapons and shells in the warehouses were missing. They weren’t destroyed by fire, they weren’t there in the first place. Instead of being used to kill the Russian-speaking Ukrainians of Donetsk, the hardware had been shipped from the port of Nikolaev to Syria, to the Islamic rebels and to ISIS. And the man who organised this enormous operation was our Mr AB, the old fighter for democracy on behalf of MI6, acting in cahoots with the Minister of Defence Poltorak and Mr Turchinov, the friend of Mr Biden. (They say Mr Matios was given $10 million for his silence).

The loss was of Ukrainian people, and of US taxpayers, while the beneficiaries were the Deep State, which is probably just another name for the deadly mix of spooks, media and politicians.

Gas wars as Russia terminates supply to Ukraine

The fucking arseholes. The Brits should be left to freeze. While all the British press can talk about is this the Russians targets UK infrastructure wiht a tanker of gas to save their arses.

Putin's gas threat: What happens if Russia cuts the gas to Europe?

‘Malevolent’ Moscow targets UK energy infrastructure… with tanker of gas to help beleaguered Brits

Not reported in the British press!

Gas Wars: Will Europe Freeze For Ukraine’s Belligerence?

Russ Fort,

5 March 2018

By Eduard Popov, translated by Jafe Arnold –

On Friday, March 2nd, the chairman of the board of the Russian company Gazprom, Alexey Miller, announced that the company has been forced to begin terminating its gas delivery and transit contracts with Ukraine’s Naftogaz in the Stockholm arbitration institute. This was Miller’s reaction to the Stockholm arbitration’s resolution that ordered Gazprom to pay Naftogaz $2.56 billion.

In other words, Gazprom has been compelled to break off contracts with Ukraine’s Naftogaz due to the asymmetric Stockholm decision which violated the balance of forces and parties’ interests. Miller also remarked that, given this situation, Russia is not going to solve Ukraine’s economic problems at its own expense and will immediately start terminating contracts.

The day before, on March 1st, Gazprom returned advance payments from Naftogaz for gas deliveries in March, arguing that there is no additional contract. Naftogaz and the Ukrainian leadership in turn accused Gazprom of irresponsible behavior. Ukrainian President Poroshenko threatened to have Russian property confiscated (including Nord Stream pipelines) all over the world. According to Poroshenko and Naftogaz head Kobelev, Gazprom’s actions are supposedly indicative of the company’s unaccountability to European consumers.

Meanwhile, facing an acute gas shortage, Ukraine has been forced to save on blue fuel. On social networks, Poroshenko has launched the Prikruti! campaign which calls for patriots to turn down the temperature in their homes. Classes in universities and schools have been cancelled, and kindergartens have been closed. These urges by authorities have drawn violent indignation on the part of ordinary Ukrainians, who have lashed back on social media with accusations that Poroshenko is a liar and hypocrite. Meanwhile, the temperature in many homes is already dangerously low, which I can personally confirm based on the testaments of my relatives living in Ukrainian-occupied Donbass and Odessa.

Under these present circumstances, Ukraine has to seek additional means to purchase gas from its European neighbors. Considering the fact that Europe is now at peak consumption amidst an unexpectedly severe winter, this will be difficult to pull off. What’s more, Ukraine cannot hope for any preferential prices in the likes of what it is used to buying gas from Russia for.

On March 2nd, reports appeared in Ukrainian media that Poland is ready to reverse its gas deliveries to Ukraine. According to some Ukrainian gas market experts, the cost of such might be double (from $300 to $600 for 1,000 cubic meters). These experts also blame the Naftogaz leadership for irresponsible behavior, especially Kobelev and his team for not preparing the country for such force majeure conditions.

The state propaganda of the post-Maidan regime, which has for the last four years proclaimed the achievement of energy independence, is therefore exposed as bankrupt. Since 2015, Kiev has categorically refused to buy the “wrong” gas from the “occupier”, instead buying reversed gas from Poland or Slovakia – which is still Russian, but with a mark up from the mediator. Now, suddenly, Ukraine has agreed to buy gas directly from Russia, but was offended and surprised at refusal.

What motivated Gazprom’s position and just how appropriate is this sharp reaction? To answer this question, we need some brief backstory.

Over the course of the 1990’s and early 2000’s, Russian gas was subject to “unauthorized extraction”, i.e., large-scale theft, from the Ukrainian gas transport system. As noted by Ukrainian experts, in the early 2000’s all major holdings in Ukraine were obtained by virtue of stolen Russian gas wealth. Thanks to this, for example, the political celebrity “gas princess”, Yulia Tymoshenko, rose to power and fortune. In addition to stealing gas, Ukraine also received ultra-favorable prices, but still did not return any accumulated debts. Therefore, the construction of gas pipelines for bypassing Ukraine to transport Russian gas to European consumers is not so much of an urgent task as it is a long overdue one.

Now back to Miller’s statement. Miller, like many Ukrainian experts, believes the Stockholm resolution to be a manifestation of double standards. Simply put, Swedish lawyers, in imposing a fine on Gazprom on behalf of Naftogaz’s suit, were guided by the following: in the two companies’ contract, the rule of “pump and pay” was clearly spelled out. According to the current contract, Gazprom was committed to pumping through Ukraine’s gas transport system 110 billion cubic meters a year. In 2017, the total volume amounted to only 91 billion. This would seem like a violation of the agreement. But there is a second side of the coin.

The contract also spelled out another rule: “take and pay”, which obliges Naftogaz to purchase a declared volume of gas (51 billion cubic meters a year). However, following Crimea’s reunification with Russia, the Ukrainian authorities’ economic blockade of Donbass, and the overall collapse of Ukrainian industry, gas consumption fell by half or even three times. This objectively made purchasing previously declared gas volumes economically impractical and financially impossible given the default state of the Ukrainian economy. Ukraine justified its case with this argument in Stockholm. Miller reasonably objected to this and refused to pay for Ukraine’s problems at Russia’s expense.

Thus, a selective approach, or what Miller called double standards, was the name of the game in Stockholm. One principle was taken into account while the other was discarded. Meanwhile, the moral unscrupulousness and professional incompetence of Naftogaz was called out on March 3rd even by Ukraine’s Prime Minister Groysman, who criticized Kobelev for the energy crisis in the country.

For obvious reasons, European consumers are not interested in the details of gas disputes between Russia and Ukraine. But they are extremely interested in the uninterrupted supply of Russian gas to their homes, businesses, and social facilities. Gazprom supplies the EU with a third of its total gas volume, and this amount is only increasing. Russian gas remains significantly cheaper than American liquified natural gas or liquified natural gas from the Shah Deniz field in the Caspian Sea.

An objective and unbiased analysis of the essence of this conflict yields the following conclusion: Stockholm arbitration’s unilateral decision is wrong because it acted not as an arbitrator, but as a Naftogaz lawyer. Do European consumers who regularly pay Gazprom deserve to freeze because of Ukraine’s whims? Of course not.

But I do not believe that this dispute will go that far. Some Russian experts are already arguing that Gazprom is deliberately issuing fierce statements in order to get the most favorable starting conditions for new negotiations. Indeed, Miller’s office is already demanding a review of the Stockholm arbitration decision. For Europe it is only becoming all the more obvious that there is no alternative to Nord Stream that is more economically profitable and politically shielded from Moscow-Kiev conflicts. This, in my opinion, is the main point to be drawn from an analysis of the ongoing “gas wars.”

Eduard Popov is a Rostov State University graduate with a PhD in history and philosophy. In 2008, he founded the Center for Ukrainian Studies of the Southern Federal University of Russia, and from 2009-2013, he was the founding head of the Black Sea-Caspian Center of the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies, an analytical institute of the Presidential Administration of Russia. In June 2014, Popov headed the establishment of the Representative Office of the Donetsk People’s Republic in Rostov-on-Don and actively participated in humanitarian aid efforts in Donbass. In addition to being Fort Russ’ guest analyst since June, 2016, Popov is currently the leading research fellow of the Institute of the Russian Abroad and the founding director of the Europe Center for Public and Information Cooperation

The latest from Dmitry Orlov - on Russoan nэtural gas shipments to frozen America

Sanctions, Shmanctions!

Dmitry Orlov

Club Orlov,

16 January, 2018

Whatever pagan deity happens to be in charge of weather this winter seems to be playing a joke on the Americans. You don’t believe in global warming? Fine, why don’t we have Muscovites enjoy the rare sight of pussy willows in bloom in January while letting you freeze? The result has been brutal. Not only have the very low temperatures, in a region where some people seem to believe that a baseball cap qualifies as winter headgear, exacerbated an already very bad flu season (the standard flu vaccine is only 10% effective against this year’s strain) but they have caused natural gas prices to spike up to $6.4 per cubic meter, testing a four-year-old record and breaking above the price in Asia.

The Russians do believe in global warming. It has opened up Arctic sea lanes to year-round navigation, supported by Russia’s new icebreaker fleet. They provide shortcuts to world’s sea freight while getting around strategic chokepoints such as the Straits of Malacca, the Suez Canal and the Straits of Gibraltar. The Russians have also taken advantage of the warming Arctic to open the region to oil and gas exploration and production. Late last year the ambitious new Yamal liquefied natural gas project opened to great fanfare. An entire new city was built above the Arctic circle. Putin himself flew in and gave the order to start pumping. A new fleet of ice-capable LNG tankers is being readied to take the gas to customers anywhere in the world.

Back in 2012 I wrote that there really isn’t a global natural gas market. Well, now there is! (But everything else I wrote then pretty much still stands.) In the meantime, the US went all-in on fracking—an expensive and environmentally damaging technique for exploiting the marginal hydrocarbons present in shale. This scheme has resulted in temporarily increased oil and gas volumes and in astronomical levels of indebtedness for the companies involved, which are now locked into a Ponzi scheme scenario, fighting for their lives while continuing to produce at a loss. But the temporarily increased volumes have allowed the Americans to dream that they will be able to become purveyors of natural gas to Europe and beyond, squeezing out Russia’s Gazprom. To this end, in the middle of last year the Trump administration imposed a set of sanctions designed to stop Russia from growing its share of the European gas market (which currently stands at 40%) to great consternation from Germany, Austria and others, which see no benefit to being forced to buy expensive, unreliable American gas.

At the time, I didn’t think that this scheme would work, and now it turns out that I was right. Not only are US gas deliveries to Europe turning out to be something of a joke, but the very first tanker load of LNG from Russia’s Yamal project is going to… Boston, due to arrive at the gasification plant in Everett on January 22. Apparently, the Trump administration is happy to let the Europeans shiver in the dark, deprived of access to Russian gas, but as far as the US itself is concerned—sanctions, shmanctions! The embarrassing fact that this episode pretty much puts paid to the idea that US LNG exports could compete with the world’s largest gas producer Gazprom can easily be dealt with by… refusing to talk about Russian gas imports and instead talking about importing people from “sh*thole countries.”

But is this a singular event, caused by record-breaking cold temperatures, or a sign of things to come? I believe that it is the way of the future. For one thing, the sanctions regime isn’t holding. The US is not the only “exceptional nation” as far as breaking its own sanctions: the British, when faced with gas shortages, have also chosen to ignore them, eager to become Yamal’s new customers. After such a ludicrous performance, why should anyone, anywhere in the world, take the US administration’s pronouncements seriously? At this point, the Americans themselves will probably prefer to keep quiet about anyone violating their sanctions, for fear of being laughed out of court. After all, there are far easier ways to dominate the news cycle; for instance, simply by saying something that gives people the excuse to act offended.

But while the Americans are keeping busy by acting offended, there is another, much bigger issue looming on the horizon. Do you think that Peak Oil is dead? Oh, then how about Global Warming?… The fact is, 2017 was nothing short of disastrous as far as oil and gas exploration. Geologists were only able to find replacement for 11% of the hydrocarbons that were produced over the course of the year. This is the worst result ever! Nothing of this sort has happened since the 1940s, when the world was too busy fighting a world war to engage in oil and gas exploration. What this means for energy prices is anyone’s guess: as I explained in this article, the conflict between prices higher than consumers can afford but lower than production costs will bankrupt both consumers and producers, but not all of them and not at the same time. But what is certain is that if this long-term trend continues (and why wouldn’t it?) serious oil and gas production shortfalls will start to occur within a decade.

What is particularly notable about this dismal result is that it is not in the least upsetting to the Russians. This is because most of the newly discovered oil and gas is in Russia. Over the course of last year, Russia was able to grow its oil reserves by a billion tonnes, 350 million of which can be produced without investing in new technology. In comparison, last year Russia produced 560 million tonnes. Thus, depending on its level of technology investment, Russia has either broken even or gotten ahead in terms of its ability to maintain and increase its oil production. A similar situation obtains with regard to natural gas: over last year, Russia was able to grow its reserves by 1.5 trillion cubic meters. This positive trend is likely to continue, because when it comes to exploring its vast reserves in the rapidly warming Arctic, Russia is just getting started.

Ever since the 2014 coup in the Ukraine, which was followed by the imposition of anti-Russian sanctions, there has been a great deal of thought given to what it would take for these various sanctions to be lifted. And now it seems that we have the answer: all it takes is a cold spell. The UK and the US are good examples, but here is an even better one: cold weather has caused the Ukrainian government to lift its sanctions against Russia’s Yuzhtrans and to resume importing Russian anthracite. The Ukraine is a sort of mini-me to America’s Dr. Evil, who tells it that its job is to hate Russia, and so it does its best with its own anti-Russian sanctions, all the “alternative facts” you can eat and ridiculous hate speech. But freezing to death in the dark would be more than it bargained for, and so it buys Russian nuclear fuel, and now Russian coal too.

But that is now; in the coming years, as hydrocarbon reserves outside of Russia are draw down, production shortfalls will become common and markets will break. Then governments throughout much of the world, perhaps even including the US, will come to the realization that they simply can’t get by without Russian energy. Eager to keep the lights on and the pipes from bursting, they will recognize that it is in their own interests to curb their Russophobia, go light on the anti-Russian rhetoric, either lift or simply ignore the sanctions, and simply try to make the best deal with Russia that they can.

Australia: Tony Dumb Dumb exceeds himself with call for military invasion of states

Tony Abbott says defence powers should be used to force states to approve mining projects

TONY Abbott has suggested Canberra should use the Army as a means to control Australia’s resources, and force states to increase gas exploration and supply.

News.com,au,

28 September, 20187

TONY Abbott has been ordered by senior colleagues to cool it after he seemed to suggest the Army could invade the states which don’t expand natural gas production.

The former Prime Minister has said his successor Malcolm Turnbull could invoke “defence powers”, telling Fairfax Media the Commonwealth could then take management of resources from states.

His drastic response to warnings of a possible gas shortage next year was an implied criticism of Mr Turnbull’s deal with three major gas suppliers yesterday to ensure potential exports would be used to protect the domestic market from gas scarcities.

And it was immediately laughed off by senior colleagues of Mr Abbott.

“No we’re not interested in a khaki solution,” Treasurer Scott Morrison said curtly today.

And a senior Government source said the move would be illegal.

“The Defence Powers are a wartime provision. There is no way the High Court would allow it to be used like that,” said the source.

The defence powers allow the Commonwealth to impose domestic new controls during wartime, such as rationing and price fixing.

They have never been seen as a means to control the market or other governments during peace time.

The Turnbull Government is celebrating its agreement with the gas producers but wants the eastern states, in particular Victoria and NSW, to increase gas exploration and supply.

This would mean easing restrictions on coal seam gas and shale gas projects.

The principle area under contention in NSW is the Narrabri Gas area in the Pillaga Forest. Gas giant Santos paid $1 billion for the project six years ago but has since bowed to government and local objections to the development.

The forecast gas shortages, caused in part by the high prices overseas encouraging exports rather than domestic use, has added new life to the dormant asset.

The Prime Minister specifically mentioned it yesterday saying: “The bottom line is that there is a cost, a price to be paid by families and businesses and in jobs in terms of excessively expensive energy if you don’t develop your energy reяources.

“The Narrabri project is one that should go ahead. It should have gone ahead long ago. The same is true with opportunities in Victoria.”