The latest development in the British policy drive to ram through economic decoupling, deindustrialization and depopulation globally is Ukraine’s Aug. 4 suspension of flows of Russian oil through the southern branch of the Druzhba pipeline, which goes through Ukraine into Slovakia, Hungary and the Czech Republic. They did this purportedly because Western sanctions have prevented Russia from paying Ukraine the transit fees, according to Transneft, the company responsible for Russian oil supplies to the EU.
This is another one of those Catch-22 scenarios that are being fabricated continuously based on the sadistic sanctions policy—much as happened with transit of freight from mainland Russia through Lithuania to Kaliningrad, the refusal to repair turbines for Russia’s natural gas pipeline, and so on.
Transneft said it was working on alternative forms of payment. The northern branch of the Druzhba pipeline (going through Belarus and Poland to Germany) has apparently not been affected—at least not yet.
The Hungarian energy giant MOL has offered to step in and pay the Druzhba fees on behalf of Transneft, but hasn’t gotten a reply from Ukraine yet. RT reported that Druzhba “is one of the longest pipeline networks in the world, carries crude some 4,000 km from the eastern part of European Russia to refineries in the Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia. Russia normally supplies about 250,000 barrels of oil per day via the southern leg of the route.”
How this suspension will affect the physical economies of central and western Europe remains to be determined.
