Germany Halts Russian Oil Pipeline In Response To Invasion Of Ukraine

Germany has announced that they are halting the Nord Stream 2 oil pipeline from Russia as long as the country continues to send and station troops in Ukraine. This is an effective move by the German government that will be felt by the elites in Russia, and that may be the best way to force the country to retreat. Meanwhile, President Biden announced new sanctions on Russia, but these could easily impact the most vulnerable in the country. Germany has the right approach, as Ring of Fire's Farron Cousins explains.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

With Russia officially invading Ukraine this week, lots of different countries of course have come out and said what they're gonna do to kind of put the squeeze on Russia to get them to withdraw. But nobody has had a better response to this than Germany. Germany announced on Tuesday that they were officially halting the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which of course would put a financial squeeze on Russia without putting a squeeze, by the way, on the people most at risk in the country. This would directly affect the Russian government. It would affect Putin. It would affect their nationalized utilities. This is a smart decision by the German chancellor to cut off this pipeline. On the other side, Biden yesterday in a speech yesterday afternoon, came out with his new sanctions against Russia. Now let me read what those are. This is directly from his speech.

We're implement full blocking sanctions on two large Russian financial institutions, VEB and their military bank. We're implementing comprehensive sanctions on Russian sovereign, Russia's sovereign debt. That means we've cut off Russia's government from Western funding. It can no longer raise money from the West and cannot trade in its new debt on our markets or European markets either. We'll also impose sanction on Russia's elites and their family members they share in the corrupt games of the Kremlin policy and should share in the pain as well. That's probably about the only good thing that these sanctions would do. I agree with that part. We've worked with Germany to ensure that Nord Stream 2 will not move forward. Um, the other sanctions with the banks and the debts and not being able to get money, that's actually going to harm the most at risk people in Russia.

And that's the problem with these kinds of economic sanctions. When you just put the broad sanctions in place, the powerful elite in countries typically do, okay. Right? They have the resources to do that. It's the people that are barely scraping by, the people that don't have enough to eat, those are the people that suffer ultimately from those kinds of sanctions and unfortunately it appears that that is what this administration has decided to do. Now, again, as I said, I do agree a hundred percent, put the sanctions on the elite, put the sanctions on the wealthy. Screw them over and make them pay the price as well. I'm okay with that. But I much prefer Germany's plan. Now, let's take Germany's plan a little bit further, right? How about instead of just temporarily cutting off the pipeline to make Russia rethink their invasion of Ukraine, what if we just got off fossil fuels all together?

I mean, think of how many global problems we could solve if we had this unified global push for renewable energy. Right? You take away a lot of Russia's power. You take away a lot of Saudi Arabia's power. You take away country's dependence on these other countries for their energy needs when they can produce it at home with wind, solar, geothermal, possibly even nuclear power. That should be the ultimate goal of all of this and every time we see a situation like this, where yes, the oil interest do come into play, that should be the ultimate goal. This should kind of kickstart a green revolution across the planet because we can take away a lot of the power of these authoritarian leaders.