Don’t Fall For Putin or Orban as They Try to Exploit Europe’s Energy Crisis
The leaders of Russia and Hungary have ideas about solving the power crunch. Let’s hope the European Union ignores them.
Orban and Putin have some modest proposals for Europe.
Photographer: Alexander Zemlianichenko/AFP via Getty Images
Europe is in a full-blown energy crisis, but two people seem to be enjoying it: Russian President Vladimir Putin and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban. They’d love to seize this opportunity of chaos and anxiety to foist their own designs on the European Union on the sly. The EU must see through these ploys and resist.
The crisis has many causes, which makes it confusing and thus attractive to demagogues bent on spreading FUD — fear, uncertainty and doubt. For months, there’s been speculation that one factor behind higher gas prices may be the KGB-trained Putin’s tactic of piping less Russian gas than usual to western Europe — though still enough to satisfy existing contracts — and thereby leaving stockpiles abnormally low as winter approaches.