Putin’s Big Chill in Europe
Russia threatens to punish support for Ukraine by cutting the gas supply. The West must not be blackmailed.
For 10 days in mid-July, Russian gas stopped flowing to Europe through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline. At the end of last week, the flow briefly resumed, though slower than usual. On July 25, the flow was disrupted again, falling to about 20 percent of usual seasonal volumes.
Russia has offered technical reasons and excuses for the shutdown: These were maintenance issues, according to the state-owned Gazprom. Those explanations may not be wholly false: Just as the Russian army turned out to be a much more broken-down organization than advertised, so the Russian natural-gas industry may be more broken-down as well.
But the interruptions and disruptions to gas supplies over the past weeks
