“I find it very unfortunate that this entire discussion has come to focus on who blew [the pipelines] up, rather than who built them,” Heorhii Tykhyi told the BBC, forcefully.
He argued that Nord Stream had “untied Russia’s hands” to go to war, because it no longer needed to transit Ukraine for its gas to reach Europe.
“Did we warn about this? We did,” Tykhyi wanted to know. “Did anyone listen to us? No, no-one did.”
Schröder ending up on the board of gazprom immediately after ending his chancellery kind of dispels the notion that nordstream was built for any reason other than massive German government corruption.
Sure.
But if that corruption had achieved a friendly Russia and peace in Europe, I could easily justify looking the other way in that case.
Look at the situation of the war: billions in damages, millions of dead. If I could trade that for a handful of corrupt politicians who get a fraction of what it’s going to cost Europe to rebuild, I would, in seconds.
Corruption never works this way… Unless you could give me one historical example when it did?
Examples for corruption, and resource extraction related peace? There should be plenty, if that’s what you mean. Maybe you’ll count the united fruit related coup d’etat in guatemala. Afterwards there was “peace” and “cooperation”. There certainly was corruption involved.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_Guatemalan_coup_d’%C3%A9tat
The oil situation in general? Idk what you would call the arrangement the rest of the world has with the gulf states.
Wait, resource extraction and peace? How are yours examples of peace? To me they are extreme examples of a war with one side dominating the other so much that they win the war outright, sometimes without even fighting. Even the Gulf stakes keep killing people, which I cannot agree is peace to anyone who doesn’t close their eyes.
Yeah, well, “peace” in the sense of “the opposite of declared international war”.
I am aware of the oppression, that’s actually the point. The “nations” legitimately or other have “agreed” to a peace deal that still definitely harms people, but less than in a full on “war”. There specifically isn’t an installed colonial administration or something. They’re did fake-ish elections and manipulated the democracy to put their supporters on top.
They’re not marching literal millions to either front lines to die, or into death camps. That’s the bar I’m referring to. An extremely shitty one, no argument there.