“Hitting Russia's oil industry directly is impossible in an age when no country has the spare production capacity to replace it. And there are refineries among NATO's Central European members - Slovakia, Hungary and the Czech Republic - which can only be supplied by Russian pipelines. The SWIFT idea was quickly dropped because they realised that targeting SWIFT in a blanket way would mean, for instance, German utilities would have no way to pay for Russian natural gas, and that gets to be unthinkable. Russia has a permission factor in that is clearly 'too big to sanction' like Iran. What I think we have to be concerned about is that Russia has sufficient financial reserves that the scenario where Russia 'trolls' Europe and causes severe energy problems in Europe, which in turn makes it impossible to stay on message with regard to a western response.”
04 Feb 2022
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