This is going top be a fascinating fall and winter in the geopolitical aspect of all of this. Putin has Europe by the balls and he knows this. We have EU leader after EU leader and different parliaments and houses of government trying to come up with a variety of different programs and shadow accounting schemes to try and deal with the ever changing cost of energy and this upcoming crisis.
The powerbrokers of Europe in countries like Germany need to wake up and smell the borsch. Rookie hour is officially over. If Putin is laser focused on reducing gas flows to the point where Europeans start to freeze to death, than that is an act of war that needs to be met with severe levels of aggression and a disproportional response back.
I know a lot of people are cheering some of the failures on the battlefield that Russia has incurred during this entire nightmare but the truth of the matter is Putin has been ahead of this from the start. Poor policy decisions from the start on behalf of the global community have led us to this. The level of economic damage, human carnage and environmental effects of all of this is astronomical. 1 man and an entire global community for the most part sitting back like a bunch of idiots debating how to deal with this while the crazed man is coming through with action can sometimes be too much to actually witness.
I don't pretend to know the answers to all of this but I don't think the leaders of the west do either. Perhaps we just need to provide Ukraine with every ounce of military equipment and intelligence they need to get this job done and than see where the cards lie.
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