Member-only story
Europe After Ukraine
What will Europe look like after Putin has shown NATO to be worthless?
Excitable journalists are rarely reliable sources of information, especially when it comes to reporting (a) scientific matters, and (b) war. So it’s hardly surprising that the sensationalist reportage regarding Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has been riddled with misconceptions and highly misleading accounts of events.
This is not to say that Western media sources are engaged in the kind of crude propaganda by means of which the Kremlin controls Russian minds. In the West, that kind of propaganda is seen only in the USA where Fox News has been telling infantile lies to ignorant morons for nearly three decades. Even now, Rupert Murdoch may be asking his corporate lawyers whether he can sue Vladimir Putin for infringement of copyright. Instead, the kind of nonsense Western news organizations pump out comes from a mixture of profound ignorance combined with the need to be as sensational and context-free as possible so as to grab lazy Western eyeballs and monetize them as much as possible.
Hence the claims that sanctions are hitting Russia hard. In reality, sanctions were very carefully designed explicitly to exclude hydrocarbons (Russian oil and gas) in order not to upset Europeans and US citizens with dramatically increased energy costs. So the…
