Nataly Lutsenko at Kanal24 TV in Kyiv, invited me again to an interview. We discussed, in detail, what I see as “the oil war” jointly waged by Ukraine and the USA against Russia. Each has its role:
(i) Ukraine is waging an air campaign with drones and missiles against Russian refineries, oil export terminal ports, and oil tankers. This is an audacious and expanding campaign seriously impeding Russian capacity to handle export of the oil its fields produce.
It is important to note, politically, that these attacks are assisted by USA intelligence, as reported in October by the FT. Ukraine’s intelligence chief also spoke of Ukraine’s crucial dependence on US intelligence assets on 20 December, and later on the depth. Unlike the former “oil price cap” strategy of the Biden administration and the early months of the second-Trump administration, the present, much expanded air war on Russian oil is now clearly embraced by the USA.
(ii) For its part, the USA’s role in this oil-war – along with NATO, UK, EU and G7 allies – involves increasingly harsh tariffs and sanctions against Russian oil exports.
Here is the video of our 10 Nov. event, organized by EIES (European Institute for Energy Security). Our topic was the turn in US Trump administration policy on ending Russia’s war against Ukraine and the Russian oil sector.
My sincere thanks to EIES, and especially Executive Director Albéric Mongrenier, for inviting me along with distinguished energy and geopolitics experts. (Note: EIES is affiliated with, but policy-independent of, SAFE in Washington).
Our distinguished expert panel included:
Dr. Jaak Aviksoo, Former Minister of Defence of Estonia, EIES Energy Security Leadership Council
Christof Rühl, Senior Research Scholar at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy, former BP Chief Economist
Dr. Thomas O’Donnell, Energy and Geopolitical Strategist and Founder of GlobalBarrel.com
Moderated by Rosemary Griffin, OPEC+ Lead Reporter, S&P Global Commodity Insights
Opened by Peter Flory, Senior Fellow, EIES, Former NATO Assistant Secretary General
A central question we addressed was the turn in the Trump administration policy to apply significant coercive measures against the Russian oil sector to undermine the ability of the Putin government to continue its was in Ukraine. We discussed how effective the new sanctions on Rosneft and Lukoil might be and what is the synergistic effect of the Ukrainian drone and missile campaign against Russian domestic refineries and oil export terminal ports.
For an update on expanded attacks on Russian Black Sea oil ports and their meaning, see the written comments accompanying my Kanal24 video interview, posted on Monday, 17 Nov. “The US & Ukraine pound Russian oil | my Kanal24, Kyiv“).
You are invited to register now for Monday, 10 Nov. at 14:00 UK || 15:00 CET || 9:00 ET, an EIES Webinar. [My view: the USA, Ukraine & allies can dismantle the Russian petrostate. My posts on this are linked at the end]. I’m honored to join experts:
Dr. Jaak Aviksoo, Former Minister of Defence of Estonia, EIES Energy Security Leadership Council
Christof Rühl, Senior Research Scholar at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy, former BP Chief Economist
Dr. Thomas O’Donnell, Energy and Geopolitical Strategist and Founder of GlobalBarrel.com
Moderated by Rosemary Griffin, OPEC+ Lead Reporter, S&P Global Commodity Insights
Opened by Peter Flory, Senior Fellow, EIES, Former NATO Assistant Secretary General
Dismantling the Petrostate: Moment of Truth for Russian Oil? – Webinar: Monday 10 Nov.
Register Now – Allies have so far failed to break Putin’s war machine. The EU recently agreed on a 19th round of sanctions and plans to further ramp down Russian energy supplies. But EU sanctions have shown their limits, political leaders have not been able to use Russia’s frozen assets to aid Ukraine, and Moscow’s hydrocarbons still flow into the Union and other major markets.
Washington’s and London’s most recent sanctions may change the game. As we enter another winter of war, can Europe and the United States build on hard-won Transatlantic convergence to strike a decisive blow to the engine of the Kremlin’s aggression: Russia’s oil exports? Can the EU agree to and successfully manage the phaseout of Russian oil and gas?
Credit: Vėjo jėgainė | J. Stacevičiaus / LRT nuotr.
My gratitude to LRT.lt journalist Vaida Kalinkaitė-Matuliauskienė for this in-depth print interview. We spoke just after Baltic states had disconnected from the Russian-Belarus electrical grid, BRELL, and had connected with the European grid. This was a complex and costly project, executed rapidly and flawlessly. [My comment continue below, after the English (first link) and Lithuanian (second link) versions:]
The Baltic states’ impetus was obvious: a deep mistrust of Russia after its 2022 cutoff of half of all European gas imports intended to pressure EU states to abandon solidarity with Ukraine as Russia invaded it. So, switching to the European grid is a great relief. However, the dangers haven’t ended.
10-12 February, I was invited to contribute to the NATO Advanced Research Workshop (ARW) on critical European infrastructure, organized in Podgorica by the Atlantic Council of Montenegro, a NATO member, and The International Society for Risk Management (ISRM), Serbia, a non-NATO member. This partnership plus experts from neighboring states made the workshop on risks to regional and West Balkan infrastructure very informative. I felt quite honored, as a regional outsider, an American working on EU energy and geosecurity (based in Berlin), to be invited. Conference FB link
I planned to discuss drivers of EU deindustrialization, but decided to focus on one sharp example: how tech failures in the EU’s energy-infrastructure model, the Green Deal, is causing the unexpected 2025 EU natural gas crisis. This comes while gas prices were still high and supply still problematic from the 2022-23 Energy War – caused by Russia maliciously stopping Nord Stream pipeline flows. This new hit to European competitiveness and security was, however, an eminently avoidable “own goal.” (The workshop discussion is off the record, but I may post my own talk.)
How has the Green Deal model caused another gas crisis?
The EU Green Deal model requires installation of high percentages of wind and solar renewables. However, to supply energy reliably, installation of wind and solar renewable (RE) technology must be paired with installation of sufficient universal, long-term, grid-scale storage (ULTGSS) technology. The idea is excess electricity generated on very sunny, windy and mild days should be stored to compensate supply on dark, calm and cold days. (Let’s put aside, for now, expert debunking of this RE-plus-storage model using weather and tech data.) Over-installation of solar and wind beyond what can be backed up by some other source, is a critical vulnerability to energy infrastructure reliability during periods of cloudy, calm and cold weather. This is called “Dunkelflaute” in German.
However, the reality is that, after some four decades of storage-tech R&D, such a technology still does not exist. There is no lack of studies and data on this. However, EU members remain mandated by the Green Deal and ancillary EU and/or national laws to continue installing ever higher percentages of renewable generation.
As a result, Dunkelflaute conditions in late-November and early December 2024, and again in February 2025 across northern Europe led to prolonged periods of plunging RE generation. Without the aforementioned ULTGSS backup (my acronym), the “de facto ULTGSS” has primarily been natural-gas-fueled generation, plus importing of nuclear, hydro and coal generation from neighboring countries having excess capacity in these.
My talk was an analysis the root cause for another EU natural gas crisis this winter. I explained that the EU’s initial win in the energy war imposed on it by Putin, overcoming the initial, acute crisis of 2022, is nevertheless evolving dangerously into a Pyrrhic victory – into a defeat. This is because EU energy policy, the Green Deal, has critical technological failings, and the present EU Commission leadership refuses to reform it, rejects any serious criticism of the model, and is instead doubling down on an all-renewables system ASAP. In fact, it is assumed that Van der Leyen will announce, late in February, adoption of a new, more “ambitious” target of 90% net-zero emissions by 2040 relative to 1990. (GlobalBarrel.com readers might recall I termed this as “fantasy” in Op-Eds last year in the Polish daily press and elsewhere.)
A Green Deal reform, based on science, is not inherently “right”, “center” or “left”
I explained why a radical reform of this Green Deal model should not be a matter of political philosophy, rather ait requires only an honest recognition that the tech simply does not exist for this scale of installations. Refusal to reform is no longer only anti-science Green populism. After ca. 15 years of this Green Model’s hegemony in various member states, then in Brussels, ALL PARTIES are beset with ideological-scientific confusion and need a certain fresh start, a reeducation or green-energy deprogramming. In particular, center-right parties, such as the CDU in Germany, are typically confused in that they tend to see the entire problem as one of the methods of financing the Green Deal (and the German Energiewende, which provided the model the Green Deal is based on). They focus on having less government mandates, less subsidies, more public financing, and a more liberal, interconnected electricity market in Europe. All well and fine. However, if one is talking about alchemy, funding the transmutation of lead into gold, then it matters little how efficiently it is financed, and how liberal is the market model. In this case, the problem is that a highly RE based model (much less the German, Spanish, Austrian, etc. model of 100% renewables), lacking any universally applicable, long-term, grid-scale storage, is simply energy-infrastructure “alchemy”. It is simply impossible without an entire parallel natural gas system on standby awaiting any instance of Dunkelfloute. This is a disaster, an impossibly complex and expensive model that guarantees ever deeper EU deindustrialization.
Even the farthest right and left parties are hesitant to embrace a fundamentally different model of massive large-scale nuclear as the basis, with also extensive electricity-fueled mass transit build-outs as a clearly already-proven model. The alternative is further high energy prices, deindustrialization and undercutting of European security.
This is in English, after Eugene Romer of Układ Sił media introduces me in Polish. This was at the “3 Seas -1 Opportunity Forum” in Gdansk, last June 4-5, 2024. I have been wanting to post it ever since, as the questions remain relevant. My thanks to Eugene and his team, and to his Opportunity Think Tank colleagues.
My panel at the forum was on problems of relying on energy security that arrives via the sea. So, think Poland and Lithuania’s LNG terminals, of the many sub-sea pipelines, power and communications cables between Baltic and Nordic states. And, since June, all the incidents where ships leaving Russian ports “accidentally” dragged their anchors, cutting such vital links. So, this conference was rather prescient. My sincere thanks to our hosts The Opportunity Institute for Foreign Affairs.
(Arabic. English is above). Asharq-Bloomberg spot.
Last night, Asharq, the Mideast Bloomberg news affiliate, asked me three questions (roughly translated):
The the EU wants to extend the sanctions (on Russian gas), at the same time they want to open open the Russian pipeline through Ukraine. What is this contradiction? How to understand it in practise?
How will Ukraine respond to these talks? Don’t you think that Ukraine will accept, for example, to open this project or to reopen these pipelines to resupply gas? Don’t you think the other European nations that were impacted neglecting or abandoning this Russian gas?
Doctor, don’t you think that there has been a change in US policies, economic and political policies towards Russia after the reelection of Trump? Do you think we may see a change?
Here is a transcript of the Q&A (AI generated)
1 00:00:00,052 –> 00:00:02,772 are joined by Doctor Thomas Odoner. From
2 00:00:02,932 –> 00:00:05,052 Berlin. Welcome back, Doctor. Happy to
3 00:00:05,052 –> 00:00:07,972 have you with us tonight. So the EU
[Warsaw, 21 Nov] Here’s my interview with BiznesAlert’s Artur Ciechanowicz (in EN & Pl)on Germany’s energy, industrial and political crises. I spoke here in Warsaw Monday at the CEE Energy Security Conference, attended Wednesday’s 25 Years of NATO Membership conference, and was invited yesterday evening, by a leader of the Sejm (parliament) for a long talk in his offices, joined by Mark Voyger (American University Kyiv and former-NATO). More soon. Tom O’D.
It was my pleasure to be with Thierry Bros of Sciences Po University, Paris, and Peter Zalmayev, Ukrainian security analyst and executive director of Eurasian Democracy Initative on David Foster’s Roundtable on TRT World, London, broadcast 9 June 2021.
I discussed Biden’s apparent reasoning for waiving Nord Stream 2 sanctions:
First off, the German government of Angela Merkel simply would not cooperate otherwise. Allowing her pet energy project to go forward was the price she had demanded for trans-Atlantic “unity” before Biden’s summit with Putin.
(Aside: My research in Berlin and elsewhere has convinced me that, at no point from the late-Trump administration through Biden’s six months in office, did the German side actually engage in any meaningful “negotiation” or discussions with the US side to seek to find some compromise or to initiate a moratorium on construction. Not until Biden waived sanctions on Nord Stream 2 AG, and decided not to sanction any German firms inolved in construction did Merkel show any real interest in discussions. She emphasized her change of attitude on negotiating with Biden about: “what now are also the necessary commonalities in the relationship with Russia” in comments during a German national broadcast interview immediately following Biden’s sanctions waiver. Until this waiver, she had held up any real discussion of the pressing issues of trans-Atlantic unity-in-general, whcih urgently needed attention.
Secondly, as the EU and NATO allies all realize, Biden has to have this summit with Putin for a number of reasons. As I indicated on the show, the summit is needed to discuss:
Soldiers deployed in Poland are a kind of warning to the Kremlin. – Source: GazetaPrawna.pl
My interview on Trump’s announced US troop draw downs from Germany and partial reassignment to Poland appeared in the Polish economic press Gazeta Prawna on 25 June 2020 by the Polish journalist Artur Ciechanowicz. You can read it (a) in ENGLISH below (via Google Translate, with minor fixes) or (b) in the POLISH original at this link.
O’Donnell: Soldiers at the borders of Russia are a signal to the Kremlin [INTERVIEW]
From a military point of view, deploying too many troops too close to the border with a potential enemy is dangerous because there is a risk that they can be overrun rapidly – says Dr. Thomas O’Donnell, energy and international affairs analyst, and adjunct faculty at Hertie School of Governance in Berlin.
Question: US President Donald Trump has decided to increase the US military presence in Poland, while also reducing the contingent in Germany. Where do these decisions come from?
On the one hand, they logically result from the American National Security Strategy (NSS) of December 2017. Work on it began during Barack Obama’s term of office and was completed by the Donald Trump administration. According to the NSS, the US priority is no longer the war on terror and the situation in the Middle East, but competition with China and Russia. It is therefore quite natural that the United States moves its troops and increases its military presence in countries closer to Russia – the Baltic States, Poland and Romania. The second factor that led to these decisions was the personal involvement of Donald Trump, who is running his election campaign.
Poland’s security will increase?
As a rule, increasing the US military presence in Poland is of course good news. The Pentagon’s activities have been moving in this direction for some time, although the US military is of the opinion that this should be done a little slower and not at the expense of Germany. From a military point of view, deploying too much of the army too close to the border with a potential enemy is dangerous because there is a risk that it will be overrun too soon. There is therefore a tactical reason to keep some of the army a little further from the Russian border. Therefore, the rapid relocation of a significant number of soldiers to Poland is viewed skeptically by some American commanders. Remember, soldiers deployed in Poland are a kind of warning against the Kremlin. There are enough of them for Vladimir Putin to think twice before doing anything. However, not enough – even after increasing the quota – to stop the first strike. The rule is simple here: if Russia decided to attack Poland and American soldiers would die, it would mean a war with all the power of the US. Neither any president nor Congress would hesitate a single moment.
Some American commanders are opposed to the permanent presence of US troops in Poland. Why? Continue reading →
The Global Barrel 