(speaking in foreign language)
- Vladimir Putin has a trick up his sleeve
and he's finally using it.
It's a weapon he's been holding onto for years
waiting for this moment.
The weapon is this umbilical cord that ties Russia
to Europe, infrastructure and fuel,
now a weapon of war.
It starts up here in this freezing cold part of Russia
where under the snow and ice there's energy from plants
and animals that lived a hundred million years ago
now stored in the cracks of rocks
thousands of meters underground.
From here it is sucked up and sent through pipes that are
in land and water all the way to Europe
where it is burned in power plants to boil water
to turn turbines and make electricity
to keep the lights on in Europe.
The gas is also burned right in European homes
to cook a meal or to heat a home.
Oh, and it's not just one big pipeline.
Natural gas moves through a mindbogglingly massive network
of pipes linking Russia to Europe.
What I want to do here is quickly get you
up to speed on what is happening
and how these pipelines have been turned
into a weapon in a weird version of hybrid warfare.
We call it hybrid because you have two things going on here.
You've got this traditional
old school style war playing out,
you've got artillery and foot soldiers and cruelty
against civilians,
you have the conquest an annexation of land.
That's like old school style war.
And yet Putin hasn't declared an official war.
He's covering this whole thing up back home
calling it a special military operation,
while simultaneously stealing a bunch of land in Ukraine
and drafting hundreds of thousands of Russians
to the battlefield.
As someone who studies conflict, this has gripped me
because it's playing out not just on these battlefields
but on a bunch of other battlefields too.
Energy markets, infrastructure, financial systems
and information sharing on the internet that simply
has never existed before like this.
And it's on these battlefields.
where the big nuclear powers of our world are going
head to head in an increasingly dangerous way.
So I'm gonna walk you through the moves
and the counter moves of this hybrid war
so that we can understand how Vladimir Putin
has turned these pipelines into a weapon of war
- On Europe's ongoing energy crisis
leaders in the region gathering
- This week the Russian energy company
gas pump drastically reduced its deliveries.
- Prices skyrocketed ahead of the looming winter season.
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Let's get back to the moves
and counter moves of the war in Ukraine.
First thing to note here, this is not just a war
between Russia and Ukraine, it's also a war between Russia
and a huge group of countries that we're calling the west.
Russia started it, but now both sides are engaged
in a complex game of 4D chess or maybe more accurately
we could call it a high stakes game of chicken.
So let's look at the moves and counter moves
on either side and try to make sense
of why I'm calling these boring pipelines a weapon.
As we know this really started in February
on a physical battlefield with a full scale invasion.
The superpowers in the west couldn't intervene directly
with like troops and stuff because that would risk
an escalation between nuclear countries.
But they also couldn't let Russia just do this.
So the west counter move to Russia's invasion
was to cut Russia off
from a huge number of its economic ties to the world.
- The European Union and its partners are working
to cripple Putin's ability to finance his war machine.
- The second thing the west did
as retaliation for the invasion looks like this.
- My administration authorized another $200 million
to keep a steady flow
of weapons and ammunition moving to Ukraine.
- The west has been pouring a huge amount
of money and weapons and intelligence support and ammunition
into Ukraine to help them fight this war.
I mean, look at this, this, this this.
Yes, I print Wikipedia articles sometimes
like why did I print it?
Because I like to look at it in physical form.
It makes me feel smart.
This massive document is the list
of foreign aid to Ukraine during this war.
And by foreign aid we mean like weapons and ammunition.
I printed it in black and white.
I really want color flags.
That's the whole reason I printed it.
Can we reprint this?
I need color flags.
I'm going to print a new one with colored flags.
Okay, here it comes, pressing print.
I'm getting my color list.
No, I didn't print every single page, I just printed a few.
I just really like color flags.
The point is that none of us can fathom
how much military hardware has been delivered
by the west to Ukrainians to fight this war.
If you just glance at a few pages
of this meticulously built Wikipedia article
it just starts to blow your mind.
Like who knew that Portugal
was giving 10 million Euros worth
of military support to Ukrainian armed forces?
Wait till you get
to the United States section of this thing.
Not only is it billions and billions
and billions of taxpayer dollars,
but then it's loads of really advanced equipment.
Javelin anti-tank missiles, five helicopters, 200 shotguns
200 machine guns, 40 million rounds
of small arms ammunition, just a thousand pistols
400 machine guns, anti personnel munitions, sounds horrible.
15 tactical vehicles, 50 armored humvees.
By the way, can we all just appreciate
that we live in a time where there are people
who spend their days assembling all of this
on an open source platform like Wikipedia so
that all of us can read it and yes, we have to go
and fact check it and make sure it's well sourced.
All glory be to the people who assembled this list.
So not surprisingly
Putin is not loving all of this support.
So this was the West counter move.
It was sanctions and unfathomable amounts
of military hardware sent to Ukraine.
But wait, let's be clear what's happening here.
The west is not giving billions of dollars worth of weapons
and support to Ukraine out of the goodness of their hearts.
This is a calculated response in an escalating conflict.
The west has to show their adversary Russia
that there's a cost to all of this behavior,
otherwise Putin would get really comfortable stealing land.
But again, the west can't interfere directly.
So they've been forced to fuel this conflict using Ukraine
as their proxy to push back Russia.
Oh boy, here comes the backlash.
Yes, I just called this a proxy war and lots of people
in the west don't really like to frame it this way
because it's literally a talking point
of Russia's foreign minister
that this is a proxy war from the west.
But that's what it is.
Let's be real about it.
It really is the West's only move here.
It's the best thing we could do.
International relations nerds.
I will see you down in the comments
for a nice healthy debate on this point.
The rest of us, let's move on.
- A senior NATO official is warning
that a potential Russian nuclear strike would almost
certainly trigger a physical response from many allies.
- So needless to say
things are kind of escalating in this conflict.
Putin keeps flexing saying
that he's considering using nuclear weapons
and reminding us that he's very serious.
Okay, wait a minute.
This whole like I'm not bluffing like isn't
that exactly what someone says when they're bluffing?
Putin get a better poker face, bro.
He's not using nukes anytime soon.
And God, I hope I'm not wrong on that.
Like imagine the apology video I'll be making
if I'm wrong on this prediction.
Anyway, the point I'm trying to make here is
that nukes are not the next move for Putin.
He's got one more massive trick
up his sleeve and it looks like this.
These pipelines and the gas that flows through them
these pipelines are the umbilical cord
between Russia and Europe.
They're the result of years
of a mutually beneficial relationship
because Russia who's got tons of natural gas
is able to serve the demand
in European countries who have built their economies
off of that natural gas.
For a long time this was a very
mutually beneficial relationship.
I mean look at all these European leaders
and Putin in 2012 and they're talking
about this new pipeline they're opening and they're giddy
and excited because they're all cooperating on energy.
Putin gets loads of money.
Europe gets natural gas to build their economy off of,
everyone's happy.
- I believe in natural gas, gas will be supplied directly
by the shortest route linking the major Russian gas reserves
to European markets.
We can guarantee this
- But it turns out this was a trap.
What it ended up doing is putting a huge amount
of leverage in the hands of this guy.
A weapon that he's now using in this war.
Putin's government has a controlling stake
in the biggest gas company in Russia, which means
that Putin himself can give the order to turn
off the taps on these pipelines, turn them off.
And that's exactly what he did.
- European gas prices
again reached near record highs on Monday.
- Gas prices up 43% last week.
- Gas crop says it's indefinitely holding the flow
of gas through our key pipelines.
- We are working hard to become independent
of this gas supply.
- And the question I always have when
I hear this big news of like prices
and I see graphs is like what does this actually
mean for Europeans?
To understand that you have to look at one more graph.
What we see here is
that Europeans need their natural gas most
in the winter when they burn that gas to heat their homes
or to make electricity to keep their lights
on during darker days.
But it's not just heating homes.
This cheap abundant gas from Russia
has been a foundational aspect of European economies,
especially in Germany, which by far
is the most reliant on this cheap gas from Russia.
You just gotta look at a place like this.
It's a town that is basically just a giant
chemical plant in Germany.
It's the biggest gas guzzler in the country.
But I mean like come on,
chemical plant kind of sounds boring, unimportant, right?
Like we can do without chemicals
for a bit while we get through this crisis.
No, no, no, no, no, no.
That's what I thought for a moment.
I was like chemicals,
that sounds like some like,
like what are people doing chemistry
in there with natural gas?
Like I was, I was not aware.
I started tracing down all of the products that are linked
to this specific German chemical plant and it's wild.
I mean next time you're driving down the road
and you see one of these like weird looking buildings
with a bunch of pipes, give it like a salute
because inside of this plant they're making ammonia
which is used to make fertilizer
which is used to grow your food.
They make the menthol for your toothpaste
and they make make tons of chemicals that are necessary
for building cars, which is Germany's biggest export
I didn't really grasp this before
but I now see that our modern industrial economy
is like founded on chemicals
and you need a lot of natural gas to make chemicals.
So as Russia strangles Europe from natural gas
it's having an effect on paper and steel and so much more.
You need energy for all this stuff.
So when the cost of energy goes up
the cost of everything goes up.
- Inflation and soaring prices are biting hard.
- The price of olive oil has gone up by 27%.
- Consumer prices in Germany reach 8% higher
than one year earlier.
That's a level not seen since the 1970s oil crisis.
- And this is exactly what Putin wants.
This is his next move in the war.
And notice the timing here.
It's about to get really cold in Europe.
Another mind blowing fact here is
that 70% of the energy that is used
by European households is just to heat the homes.
70% and about half of European homes
rely on natural gas for heat.
And where does that natural gas come from?
Russia, well no, not Russia.
It doesn't come from Russia anymore.
It now needs to come from somewhere else
somewhere that doesn't have a bunch
of pipelines that can pipe it in cheaply.
It's either that or Europeans freeze this winter.
Cue the current panic in Europe.
(speaking in foreign language)
- Two of our producers, Jack and Paji
were recently in Berlin
and I asked them to go look for electric heaters to see
if like it was easy to buy them.
Like is this panic real
- Is this thing on?
- Hey Johnny.
- We're about to like walk into an electronics store
and see if this is actually true
and people are buying these electric heaters like crazy
(speaking in foreign language)
This is actually happening.
They had like five or six still in the store on display
but he said they have nothing left back in storage.
And once those five or six radiators are sold,
they're not getting new ones.
- Electric heater sales
all over Germany seem to be going up.
76% this year over last by one estimate.
Okay, but I hate to break it to you Germany.
The electricity that you need to run these
electric heaters is now way more expensive too
because natural gas is also used to make electricity
and it drives up the price
for all other forms of electricity as well.
So yeah, Putin played his big wild card
in this economic war by turning off the taps.
And let's walk through his calculations here
cause it wasn't just to like
make European suffer as payback.
He has an end game.
His goal is that by doing so the people will get fed up
and go to their leaders and be like
why are we supporting a war in Ukraine at our own expense?
And under pressure the leaders in Europe would then fracture
and be more likely to go to President Zelenskyy
who they have lots of leverage over and pressure him
into making a deal with Putin to stop the war
give Putin all the land that he's annexed and move on.
- President Putin has announced
the annexation of four regions of Ukraine
that are controlled by Russian forces
in the biggest seizure
of territory in Europe since the second world war.
- And this would mean a big win for Putin.
Moves and counter moves, that's what this is.
And let me just say Putin's plan is not not working.
This is happening right now and it's changing every day.
So by the time you're watching it, boy
things could have changed.
But there is a growing movement
especially in Germany to protest the sanctions.
and this military aid to Ukraine.
(speaking in foreign language)
People are taking to the streets,
they're fed up with higher prices
for something they don't think is worth it.
(speaking in foreign language)
And as winter comes and the demand for gas increases
to heat homes and keep the economy alive
this tension will only get worse.
Just as Putin planned using his energy weapon just
at the right time to inflict the most amount
of pain on Europe's economy.
(speaking in foreign language)
Okay, wait a minute, did you catch this?
We're talking about like high stakes, like global conflict
and Putin is invoking this folk tale
in which a clever fox presumably Putin himself
outsmarts this dumb wolf by tricking him to going
down to a frozen lake and putting his tail
in a hole in the ice to try to like catch fish.
But eventually the wolf's tail freezes and the wolf is stuck
until a bunch of villagers come down and beat him up.
By the way, I talked to a Russian about this
and she told me that like the fox
is not portrayed as like a a role model here.
Like the fox is actually like a pretty unsavory character.
And yet Putin wants to be the fox,
and the EU is the wolf.
Putin man, he's just quite the storyteller.
So that is what is going down here in this conflict.
It is hybrid warfare with a particular 2022 flavor,
something we've never seen before
and we don't really know what happens next.
It's developing right now, but allow me to share
with you a few closing facts that we should keep
in mind that will help us make sense of this economic war.
First, turning off the pipelines
to Europe doesn't just hurt Europe it hurts Russia too.
In the short term they've been making tons of money
off of this surge in natural gas prices.
But in doing so, they have severed their ties
with their best highest paying customer, Europe.
They're now looking east for new customers
maybe in China and India
but none will pay the prices that Europe was willing to.
Oh, and plus they don't have nearly the network
of pipelines that they have into Europe.
Building those takes decades.
But somehow this was worth it to Russia
to inflict short term pain on Europe
in exchange for a long term hit to Russia's gas industry.
Second, and speaking of long term, yes
this is painful for Europe right now
but what it's gonna do is quickly force them to look
for new places to find their energy.
Spoiler alert, in the short term
Qatar is gonna get way rich off of all of this.
Richer than they already are, if you can imagine.
But the point is that this will accelerate
Europe's already started transition away from fossil fuels.
They're now being forced to speed that up.
In other words, if they can weather this difficult time
they will come out way better off than they did before.
And Putin will come away
with way less economic leverage over them.
And this gets to my last point
and this is a little bit more of my opinion and prediction
on the situation, which is that this guy, Vladimir Putin
I think has overplayed his hand once again
using all of his leverage in one swoop
and dramatically underestimating its ability to work.
I mean, just go back.
He miscalculated his army's ability to take
over Ukraine's capital very swiftly.
He miscalculated his army's ability to hold land.
He miscalculated the response
of the Ukrainian military and people to resist his invasion.
He miscalculated the response from the west and now it seems
like he once again has miscalculated his ability
to force Europe to stop supporting Ukraine
through energy blackmail.
He seems to be 0 for five, which is good news
until you realize that every time he loses
one of these bets, he escalates the conflict.
What's scary is that Putin can't lose.
He's not allowed to.
If he loses, he gets thrown out of power back home.
So I think he'll keep digging in his heels
using all of the tricks in his arsenal.
I'm not totally sure where it goes from here
but I can tell you that this conflict is far from over.
Thank you for watching this video and you're still here,
look at you, you're still watching this video
even after it's kind of over.
I am really excited about what we're doing here.
We are building more and more really exciting videos
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That's what I wanna do more of.
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So thank you all for being here.
I'm gonna see you in the next one.
We've got a million videos coming up and boy
it's gonna be a busy winter.
Have a good one.
- The end.