• hark@lemmy.world
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    2 years ago

    A decent chunk of Russia’s gas runs through Ukraine and Russia had their puppet in Ukraine overthrown in 2014. Their gas business was already in danger from a long time ago and was constantly being attacked on all fronts, including sanctions and fearmongering campaigns against the nord stream pipelines. You can point to the current situation and say the fear was justified, but it took a lot to get to this point.

    Shutting off their largest export is a move of desperation which they made while smugly pretending they were more indispensable than they actually are. Heck, invading Ukraine was a move of desperation itself. As you can see from the Gideon Rose interview I posted, the US was actively moving to isolate Russia for a long while. It doesn’t justify Russia’s actions, but also these actions didn’t crop up out of nowhere. The US has overthrown governments over oil (even when they have plenty of other countries to get oil from) and here is Russia having its main export threatened.