Posted on 03/26/2014 11:41:10 PM PDT by tcrlaf
The West has not yet reached a stage where it will be ready to impose economic sanctions on Russia, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said, stressing that she hopes for a political solution to the stalemate over Ukraine crisis.
The chancellor said she is “not interested in escalation” of tensions with Russia, speaking after Wednesday meeting with the South Korean president in Berlin.
“On the contrary, I am working on de-escalation of the situation,” she added, as cited by Itar-Tass.
Merkel believes that the West “has not reached a stage that implies the imposition of economic sanctions” against Russia, advocated by US President Barack Obama. “And I hope we will be able to avoid it,” she said.
Berlin is very much dependent on economic ties with Russia with bilateral trade volume equaling to some 76 billion euros in 2013. Further around 6,000 German firms and over 300,000 jobs are dependent on Russian partners with the overall investment volume of 20 billion euros.
The US really has gone Owellian, haven't we?
As I was saying...
don’t worry, barry, all the queers are still behind ya
Germany needs Russian oil. They can’t afford to do without it.
It’s more about the natural gas than the oil. Most of Europe buy its natural gas from Russia. If they were to adopt fracking, they might be able to ween themselves off of Russian gas.
Somewhere in the summer of 2013, you could sense that the Obama fan wagan in Germany had run out of steam. The speech at Berlin? German journalists called it simply unimpressive. The NSA scandal? Merkel called and had a brief chat after it blew up, and the general description she had after the the conversation....was that he’s ‘lost’ on events and unable to comprehend anything until he’s told what to say.
The current crisis? Germany gets roughly a quarter of it’s natural gas from Russia. If this gets cut off, then what? Maybe they could get more from Norway, and maybe they could frack (if the regulations didn’t stop them). But counting on the US for anything from now to 2016? Zero.
As for the source of this article? RT? Zero worth. They get paid by the Russian gov’t, so they slant every article. There’s going to be sanctions....that you can bet on, and Germans will be furious come November when natural gas prices have soared by twenty to thirty percent over last year.
Merkel called and had a brief chat after it blew up, and the general description she had after the the conversation....was that he’s ‘lost’ on events and unable to comprehend anything until he’s told what to say
That’s a money quote.
I can’t see Germany going along with a natural gas spike of 30% plus. Their economy, although the most powerful in Europe, would suffer.
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