Russia-Ukraine war: Kremlin has turned up heat in its high-stakes energy war

Vladimir Putin lost his energy war this year.

He may still win it next year by exhausting Europe’s will to resist through another gas and power crunch.

Power will have to flow in the opposite direction to prevent a humanitarian disaster in Ukraine.

The effect is to shave Europe’s margin of energy security to wafer thin levels and to ratchet up the pain through 2023, pushing industries closer to the wall.

Putin has already burned so many geopolitical bridges, and suffered such battlefield reverses, that he is almost forced by events to play his final energy cards.

He wants a Yellow Vest 2.0, this time on steroids,” said Helima Croft, a former CIA energy analyst now at RBC Capital.

The Italians have diversified their gas supplies to Libya, Algeria and Azerbaijan, and the FSB is operating in all of them,” she said.

A clear attack on this would trigger Nato’s Article 5 clause on alliance solidarity, probably a risk too many even for this bad tsar.

There is no shortage of skittish EU states that would try to block Article 5 escalation.

Some 24 BCM (billion cubic metres) kept flowing,” said Thierry Bros, France’s former head of energy security.

Putin warned at the St Petersburg Economic Forum this year that European sanctions would have “catastrophic consequences on the global energy market”.

The democracies have not cracked yet but only 42 per cent of Italians and 49 per cent of Austrians now support sanctions against Russia.

A Globsec poll showed that 19 per cent of Slovakians want a Russian victory, and 34 per cent don’t know or don’t care.

Neither can guarantee energy security in a sustained crisis.

We will never know for sure but the West may have made a grave error by withholding long-range artillery and fighter aircraft from Ukraine over the summer and autumn.

We have given him a second chance to deploy his energy weapon against us