Russia's Invasion of Ukraine (Official Thread)
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Ivans, you OK? You've barely touched your Bakhmut water 
Wagner Fighter Shot Dead at His Homecoming Party
Even as Yevgeny Prigozhin taunted defense officials with the group's withdrawal from Bakhmut, news broke that a Wagner fighter was killed almost immediately upon his return home.
www.thedailybeast.com
Wagner Fighter Shot Dead at His Homecoming Party
BACK TO REALITY
Even as Yevgeny Prigozhin taunted defense officials with the group's withdrawal from Bakhmut, news broke that a Wagner fighter was killed almost immediately upon his return home.
Allison Quinn
News Editor
Updated May. 25, 2023 8:01AM ET / Published May. 25, 2023 7:58AM ET
via Concord Press Service
Having notched a slew of new war crime allegations on their belts, Wagner fighters in Ukraine’s Bakmut are now withdrawing from the decimated city to “rest” and relish in their “victory,” Wagner Group founder Yevgeny Prigozhin announced Thursday.
“We’re all pulling out by June 1. We’re resting, getting ready [for the next assignment]. We’re transferring all positions to the military: a basement with a bed and sheets,” Prigozhin said, telling his men to “leave them the soap.”
Ukrainian authorities confirmed that regular Russian troops had replaced Wagner on the outskirts of Bakhmut, but said some Wagner fighters were still located in the city.
Separately, the mercenary boss bragged that some of his fighters had received high honors from the Kremlin after President Vladimir Putin intervened to order awards be given promptly.
“Thank you very much to the president for the high marks,” he said.
He said those leaving Bakhmut would be allowed to take a break before being sent on a new mission.
Or before killing and being killed back home.
Even as Prigozhin on Thursday gloated over the group’s supposed success and seemed to taunt his rivals at the Russian Defense Ministry, news broke that a Wagner fighter freshly released from the battlefield was almost immediately shot dead upon returning home.
A man identified only as Yury S. was shot dead while celebrating his homecoming in a village in the Irkutsk region on Wednesday night, according to local reports.
Having returned from the war zone just a day earlier, Yury had gotten into a drunken argument with an acquaintance at his party when the latter suddenly pulled out a gun and killed him. It was not immediately clear what the two argued about.
Police are now reportedly questioning the alleged gunman, identified only as Konstantin in local reports.
It’s not the first time violence has quickly followed the return home of a Wagner fighter. Earlier this week, a man reportedly wearing a military uniform and a Wagner patch was accused of sexually assaulting two school girls in Novosibirsk.
The 10- and 12-year-old girls told authorities that the mercenary warned them he had a grenade on him and threatened to “blow them up” if they didn’t do as he said, Baza reported. Investigators are still searching for the suspect, and his status in Wagner has not been confirmed.
Since the mercenary group secured pardons for hordes of prison inmates who agreed to fight in Ukraine, at least two of those ex-convicts have allegedly gone home and committed murders.
But Prigozhin clearly takes pride in what he claims the deranged prison-recruitment scheme accomplished. He made sure to take a parting shot at the regular Russian army Thursday as he performed his victory lap.
“We’re handing over the positions to the military… But if the military will have a hard time, of course, we’ll leave those who played a key role in the capture of Bakhmut,” he said in a video released by his press service.
“Everyone is thinking about how we won. There were two factors involved! The two people we are leaving behind. As soon as it gets difficult for the military: they will stand up and block the path of the Ukrainian army,” he said, presenting two mercenaries named Biber and Dolik for the camera, one of whom appeared to be prepubescent and the other on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
Dude is straight up clowning on some carnival barker shyt. Dude is pumping out comedy skits a week after cutting a promo with dozens of corpses. How could you take him seriously in any way if you were serving under him?
Man is a legit WWE chicken shyt heel manager. On his Paul Heyman talking cash shyt till he gets his wake-up call
EU Declares No Longer Dependent on Russian Energy
The European Union has announced that it was able to overcome dependence on Russian energy sources thanks to the EU’s plan to reduce gas consumption.
EU Declares No Longer Dependent on Russian Energy
THURSDAY, 25 MAY 2023
The European Union has announced that it was able to overcome dependence on Russian energy sources thanks to the EU's plan to reduce gas consumption.
"Over the past year, Europe has realised its ambitions according to the plan to end dependence on Russian energy. Now we can say that we are no longer dependent on them," said Tim McPhie, European Commission spokesman, at a briefing.
According to him, the EU has stopped importing Russian coal. Oil from the Russian Federation will be only a small fraction of the volume that was before the full-scale war against Ukraine unleashed by Moscow.
He also added that "Russian gas is rapidly disappearing from the European market."
The EU plan to reduce gas consumption for all the European Union by 15% to cope with the gas crisis due to the war with Russia, began to operate last year in August.
According to the plan, EU countries had to cut gas use by 15% from August to March, compared with their average consumption in the same period during 2016-2021.
This year, the European Commission decided to offer the EU countries to voluntarily continue reducing gas consumption by 15% in the future.
On May 24, the European Commission recommended that all EU governments end support measures for energy prices by the end of this year to keep public finances in check and stay in line with proposed new fiscal rules in 2024.
ADevilYouKhow
Rhyme Reason
Rzeszów: How a small Polish airport became the gateway to Ukraine | Flightradar24 Blog
✈ How did Rzeszów-Jasionka airport become Ukraine's logistics hub? Learn more about who is flying there with Flightradar24.
www.flightradar24.com
Power of Siberia: China keeps Putin waiting on gas pipeline
Beijing is driving a hard bargain as Moscow presses for a new Sino-Russian pipeline through Mongolia
www.ft.com
Power of Siberia: China keeps Putin waiting on gas pipeline
Beijing is driving a hard bargain as Moscow presses for a new Sino-Russian pipeline through Mongolia
17 hours ago
Russia’s prime minister left China this week without a reward Moscow has long prized: a clear commitment from Beijing on Power of Siberia 2, a grand gas pipeline project to transform energy flows across Asia.
Conceived more than a decade ago to help Russia “turn to the east”, the pipeline through Mongolia to China was a way to diversify gas sales, bolster revenues, and give the Kremlin more diplomatic clout.
That project, first dubbed “Altai” after the mountainous region of southern Siberia, has taken on new urgency since the invasion of Ukraine, with Moscow seeking new outlets for gas that flowed to Europe before sanctions stood in the way.
The hitch for Moscow is that Beijing — a crucial economic partner since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine — appears in no rush to engage. It is a reticence that analysts say shows how weak wartime Moscow’s bargaining power has become when dealing with its economically more powerful neighbour.
Another Russian pipeline, the Power of Siberia, was launched in 2019 and is expected to reach its maximum capacity of 38 bcm per year by 2024. But this pipeline relied on developing new gasfields in eastern Siberia, which had never sent the fuel to Europe — making it less useful to Moscow’s diversification strategy.
The PS-2, in contrast, aims to supply China with gas from the north-eastern Yamal peninsula, which historically served the European market through several pipelines, including the Nord Stream, whose supplies had ceased to flow in disputes with the EU even before it was sabotaged in 2022.
Seeking alternatives has moved from being a strategic choice on Russia’s part to its only option.
“Beijing has a history of prolonging negotiations to get a better deal — this was the case when the Power of Siberia 1 was negotiated,” said Alicja Bachulska, a China policy expert at the European Council on Foreign Relations. “As Russia’s aggression against Ukraine has turned into a protracted war, Beijing believes that its bargaining position vis-à-vis Moscow can only get stronger.”
Taking its time may enable China to secure a lower price for gas through the pipeline, she added.
Sino-Russian talks over the pipeline had intensified in the months before the war. During the Beijing Olympics, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping signed a 25-year contract for the far-eastern route and “definitely talked about the PS-2”, said Tatiana Mitrova, a research fellow at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy.
But since then, while Russia has repeatedly emphasised its readiness to launch PS-2, Beijing has been conspicuously silent. While visiting the Kremlin in March, Xi skirted around PS-2 — while Putin spoke about the plan as if it were a done deal, saying “practically all parameters . . . have been finalised”.
Careful not to depend too heavily on any one supplier, China has been active in securing natural gas contracts for larger quantities than it actually needs, said Gergely Molnar, the International Energy Agency gas analyst.
China relies on Russia for just over 5 per cent of its gas supply, he said. Together with planned increases in supply through existing routes from Russia, agreement on PS-2 would increase that share to about 20 per cent by the early 2030s.
China does stand to gain from the pipeline. It is keen to diversify the country’s energy sources, especially overland supplies from Russia and Central Asia that would be more secure than sea routes in the event of geopolitical or military tensions with the west.
“The transportation of gas is safer to go through Russia, through land transport, compared with [the] faraway Middle East,” said Lin Boqiang, the head of the China Institute for Studies in Energy Policy, Xiamen University.
Part 2:
From left, Gazprom chief executive Alexei Miller, Russian president Vladimir Putin and Chinese vice-premiere Zhang Gaoli attend the ceremony marking the welding of the first link of the Power of Siberia in 2014 © Alexey Nikolsky/RIA NOVOSTI/AFP/Getty Images
There are geopolitical complications to agreeing the deal against the backdrop of war in Ukraine. But some China policy experts believe a deeper energy partnership with Russia is only a matter of time.
“No one should really expect that China should cut off its access to Russian oil and gas,” said Victor Gao, vice-president of the Beijing-based Center for China and Globalization. “This kind of trade is normal, it’s peaceful trade.”
He said the huge energy trade between Russia and China would “eventually lead to a reconfiguration of the oil and gas supply in the world . . . and the west should not be surprised by that”.
For Russia, the construction of the PS-2 is the only way to compensate for at least part of the EU market it has lost. That market accounted for most of the gas produced from the Yamal peninsula. But this means there is no particular incentive for China to agree to the new pipeline now.
China, indeed, has been busy developing other overland supplies. At a summit with Central Asian countries last week, Xi championed the construction of the so-called Line D pipeline, which would be China’s fourth in the region bringing gas from Turkmenistan.
About 35 bcm of gas were exported to China via three pipelines from Turkmenistan last year. That compares with 16 bcm sent by Russia via Power of Siberia.
Even with the PS-2 pipeline in place, Russia would not be able to match what it has lost in European sales. The price of this gas would also be lower. Gas sent through the first Power of Siberia pipeline — on terms struck when Russia’s negotiating position was much stronger — is priced well below the European market rate.
Sergei Vakulenko, a former strategy director for Gazprom Neft and a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace said Russia fails to even match the price China pays for pipeline imports from other suppliers.
Given these factors, PS-2 would generate an estimated $12bn a year for Gazprom, of which the state would receive about $4.6bn in duties and tax, according to Ronald Smith, senior oil and gas analyst at BCS Global Markets.
This sum, equivalent to less than half of Russia’s average monthly energy revenues in 2023, would hardly be transformative. But the Kremlin is desperate for additional revenue as its budget deficit balloons, its war costs increase, and its European gas sales wane. Mitrova of Columbia University said: “This gas has nowhere else to go.”
There are geopolitical complications to agreeing the deal against the backdrop of war in Ukraine. But some China policy experts believe a deeper energy partnership with Russia is only a matter of time.
“No one should really expect that China should cut off its access to Russian oil and gas,” said Victor Gao, vice-president of the Beijing-based Center for China and Globalization. “This kind of trade is normal, it’s peaceful trade.”
He said the huge energy trade between Russia and China would “eventually lead to a reconfiguration of the oil and gas supply in the world . . . and the west should not be surprised by that”.
For Russia, the construction of the PS-2 is the only way to compensate for at least part of the EU market it has lost. That market accounted for most of the gas produced from the Yamal peninsula. But this means there is no particular incentive for China to agree to the new pipeline now.
China, indeed, has been busy developing other overland supplies. At a summit with Central Asian countries last week, Xi championed the construction of the so-called Line D pipeline, which would be China’s fourth in the region bringing gas from Turkmenistan.
About 35 bcm of gas were exported to China via three pipelines from Turkmenistan last year. That compares with 16 bcm sent by Russia via Power of Siberia.
Even with the PS-2 pipeline in place, Russia would not be able to match what it has lost in European sales. The price of this gas would also be lower. Gas sent through the first Power of Siberia pipeline — on terms struck when Russia’s negotiating position was much stronger — is priced well below the European market rate.
Sergei Vakulenko, a former strategy director for Gazprom Neft and a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace said Russia fails to even match the price China pays for pipeline imports from other suppliers.
Given these factors, PS-2 would generate an estimated $12bn a year for Gazprom, of which the state would receive about $4.6bn in duties and tax, according to Ronald Smith, senior oil and gas analyst at BCS Global Markets.
This sum, equivalent to less than half of Russia’s average monthly energy revenues in 2023, would hardly be transformative. But the Kremlin is desperate for additional revenue as its budget deficit balloons, its war costs increase, and its European gas sales wane. Mitrova of Columbia University said: “This gas has nowhere else to go.”
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ADevilYouKhow
Rhyme Reason
China can’t save Russia even if they wanted to