The Hamas / Israel is just an example of a strange foreign policy of Germany supporting both sides of the conflict financially instead of attempting to mediate and find a solution that doesn’t involve murdering each other.

The whole gas debacle doesn’t really make a lot of sense if you just read the media headlines. What really happened is: around 2007-2009 US became a net exporter of gas thanks to shale revolution. Thus an LNG market was created and countries could now price gas against LNG benchmark (eg ICE TTF or JKM Japan). What happens then is a multitude of articles started appearing attacking existing European gas infrastructure pricing arrangements. Russian contracts were long term, take-or-pay and linked to oil price. Russia had no incentive to switch to TTF pricing as Russian gas doesn’t trade there. It’s like switching your local gasoline prices to those in South Africa. You don’t live there, you don’t drive there, why should you transact in South African pricing benchmarks?.

One particular point of attack was the so-called “take or pay” contracts which guarantee that a buyer will procure a minimum volume to ensure eg Gazprom has enough to cover its opex costs.

A WSJ article from 2009:


Here is discussion from 2009 from a specialized oil discussion forum: http://theoildrum.com/node/5907

TLDR: The idea behind this change of pricing methodologies was that during summers gas prices would go down below contracted price under take or pay contracts with Russians as Europe doesn’t need to heat itself so an argument was made to move away from these in favour of spot LNG market to trade around those. We all saw what happened to Germany in August 2022 when free spot markets played against them. Pakistan has had to rely on free LNG markets for quite some time now and you can read what a shitshow it was as in a free market with no guaranteed take-or-pays - goods flow to the highest bidder which might not be Germany:

https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2023-how-commodity-traders-switched-off-pakistan-energy/

2021 rolls around and lo and behold, turns out not only “ producers needed long-term deals with stable prices to underpin vast investments in new gas fields”, but buyers too are concerned about security of supply and Germany does a complete 180 turn on their own arguments and starts signing 15+ year take-or-pays which they were stoically fighting Russians for decades claiming these type of contracts are not in the interest of Germany.

(See Qatar 15 year LNG contract I linked above).


Again - dont forget that Russian gas fields are inland and do not have an easy access to be liquified into LNG ready to export cargoes. It’s cheaper to build a pipe to a long term customer and deal in long term supply arrangements. It’s just basic economics really. For western side of Europe (where ICE TTF benchmark is located) the opposite is true - it’s easier to build regas capacity and accept LNG cargoes now that Groningen is shut down and Norwegian production is declining. You can see that in eg Spanish market which has a lot of regas capacity, but is not connected to neither ICE TTF nor Eastern Europe gas networks - hence prices there might deviate from those benchmarks.

Please tell me any of this makes sense and is not just higher powers fighting for market share against each other through propaganda warfare.

This post was edited by Malopox on Feb 7 2024 03:19am

Iirc, the contracts with Qatar were signed in 2022, not 2021. And in 2022, German politics were in panic mode since they knew that Russian gas supplies were hanging by a thread, and that they'd most likely need to find a long-term replacement. From what I understand, that's the reason why they did a 180 and suddenly agreed to a long-term contract with a take or pay clause. Germany's responsible minister, Robert Habeck, actually came under quite heavy fire for these contracts, from both climate activists and the conservative opposition.


One thing to note, btw: yes, Germany did get bent over on the spot market in 2021, but this does not necessarily mean that the extra costs incurred this way in 2021 outweigh the cumulative savings we got out of this decision between 2009 and 2020.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Feb 7 2024 03:18am

My timeline is correct. As mentioned previously - all gas contracted for 2021 was delivered. Germany demanded more spot cargoes which Russia was not obliged to deliver. Nothing wrong with that. Winters are cold in Russia too and they should try to get as much as possible for their gas. This is not a charity after all and Germany was increasingly a bad faith customer to them.

2022 rolled around and Germany panicked.

So instead of contracting more from Russians they contracted more from Qatar and Americans. Nothing wrong with that, Germany is free to choose the best deal they can get. Just don’t need to trash talk your customers about long term contracts if you are going to turn around and sign those anyway.

I do not have numbers whether Germany got better deal subcontracting less volumes and buying the rest spot as compared to more guaranteed volumes, but I doubt the difference was in the hundreds of billions incurred in 2022 thorough state guarantees of eg KfW to Uniper and many other utilities who ended up with deep holes in their pockets.

This post was edited by Malopox on Feb 7 2024 03:27am

This is complete BS, imagine the rest of the world dogpiling on the West because the second Iraq war for example where they used a false weapons of mass destruction narrative while the UN had clearly stated that the weapons inspectors on the ground in Iraq reported that nothing was found and therefor a second war against Saddam was not justified.

Or Vietnam. Or Afghanistan, Libya / Arab Spring or any of the West's coups, overthrow of elected government or what have you.

If you don't wage all out economic war and bomb the shit out of other countries because you don't like their leaders or government it's submission

Well good to know how you really feel about this, you've dropped your mask pal

To be fair Germany opposed Iraq war together with France vehemently and did not participate in the invasion.

Vietnam involvement was on the winning side (hence big communities of Vietnamese in East Germany).

They did join in on Aghanistan as US invoked NATO Article 5 and UN SC approval was obtained to chase former democratic freedom fighter Osama around some mountains, but that’s water under the bridge.

Lybia invasion was indeed a black spot on the reputation of NATO project as it was completely abandoned after Lybia was ravaged by civil war that took down incumbent government. Funnily enough local proxy freedom fighter sent over by NATO has also turned on them (Khalifa Haftar) and is now under US sanctions and pressure to stop trading slaves. I think he still has US citizenship.

This post was edited by Malopox on Feb 7 2024 04:33am

Germany didn't sanction the US, try to get all their EU allies to cut off trade with us and spend years sending heavy weaponry to Ba'athist forces to kill Americans. Nobody went out of their way to dogpile on America and run up to the brink of war against us because of our interventions in 3rd world countries. We conducted unjustified and self-defeating interventions in a whole bunch of brown places around the world. Will Russia's invasion of Ukraine turn out to be a mistake for Putin in the long run? Perhaps, though I rarely see it discussed in the lens of pragmatic Russian policy, only moralizing jingoist rhetoric from the outside. The same drumbeats we had for Iraq and Libya and Yemen and Syria and Afghanistan.

Moral thumping just shouldn't have a place in geopolitics. The vatniks could pull up old USSR propaganda about America's empire of evil and how Putin could spend the next 50 years training Russians to strangle puppies and never live up to the amount of damage the USA has done worldwide in the past 80 years. I'm very much alike the neoliberals / neoconservatives when I say that pragmatism should be our guiding principle, my opposition to them is simply that they are morons and do it wrong

The problem is - majority of everyday Joe and Jane’s want to feel good anbout themselves and support the right and just cause. Nobody is inherently evil. They have no time to dig into causes and effects of events that took place 100 years ago sparking a slow burning conflict that erupted yesterday on the other side of the world. Hence they rely on media they trust. Be that TV, papers like The Economist or China Daily or your favorite Joe Rogan or the next big thing coming up hot off the press on Musks X.

It is generally difficult to expect everyone to bonafide educate themselves about issues that do not directly concern their daily life. Do not forget that due to the fact that western civilization has developed faster than Asian or African in 20th century - there is an inherent belief that “we know it better over here”. Tables are slowly being turned, but you would not realise that unless you travel to China or Africa or Russia as a part of your job and interact with those countries outside of your domestic MSM propaganda bubble.

And then there is PARD, full of sweet summer children with opinions about everything and everyone. Myself included.

This post was edited by Malopox on Feb 7 2024 04:47am

russia is no military threat to the rest of europe, i am not sure why a well informed guy like you spreads the new cold war style propaganda

ukraine is the last possible battleground, the outcome of that war will lock in the blocks and its borders

lets just say russia will annex the territory they hold now, the rest of ukraine is going to join the EU and NATO membership will also be possible without an ongoing conflict

any action on that new border equals WW3 and thats not happening

Sure, but in the past, they had been willing to deliver on the spot (at a corresponding premium). Why was 2021 the year they suddenly changed their mind? I just don't believe that it was coincidence they changed their approach and let our gas storages run low mere months before they wanted to get NS2 going against political pressure from Germany's allies and before they would pull the trigger on their invasion of Ukraine.


Signing oppressive long-term contracts during times of peace is an entirely different story from signing them at a time when your back is against the wall because you and your biggest supplier ended up on opposite sides of a war and you need to replace him asap.






I didn't mean what I wrote in the sense that Russia poses a credible threat of militarily conquering all of Europe, just that they pose a military threat for European countries. Which is clearly true with regard to the Baltics and Ukraine.


I think it's more or less a done deal that the territory currently held by Russia will end up being annexed. What the current fighting in Ukraine is all about is the rest of Ukraine (will Russia gain more territory?) and its status (can the remaining Ukraine join NATO and/or the EU?) I don't think that the answer being 'no/yes/yes' is a given.







The second Iraq war, as well as all the previous blundered interventions in foreign countries, have indeed alienated the West from much of the third world. Hell, you and your ilk love to stress how much clout the West has lost and how everyone hates them. Economic sanctions against the West are obviously not an option for third world countries since the West represents around two thirds of the global economy and wealth. If they were in a position to boycott the West, a lot of African and Middle Eastern countries would do it in a heartbeat if you ask me.

I feel we are going in circles here. Germans wanted SPOT supplies which are unreliable for myriad of reasons. One of them can be that people dont like your face or because its Thursday. Nobody can be forced to trade if they dont feel like it. Germany got exactly what they wanted. Spot supplies which can be cut off and you cannot cry or do anything about it.

- We don’t want guaranteed supplies!
- Then we cannot guarantee we will sell to you?
- No you have to, because otherwise we will be sad. You have to guarantee you will supply no matter what, but we reserve the right to not buy if we don’t like the price today.

So now they realized they were not so right perhaps and the whole spot market thing doesn’t really work. So they did what they could, sign those long term contracts anyway. Why bother and antagonize your main supplier for years then? It’s simply not rational unless you had other motives or were driven by an external party trying to gain market share in an existing market,

Putting pressure on your counterparty sounds pretty normal in negotiations and real life world. Have you ever tried selling or buying a house? It is not illegal to refuse to sell. US and EU refused to sell all kinds of stuff and tech to Russia even before 2022. Was that legal?

This post was edited by Malopox on Feb 7 2024 09:08am