Risking retaliation, Germany grabs control of Russian-owned refinery

Hey everyone, Peter Zion here. Hello again from Lake Louise. 

The news as of this morning is that the Germans have nationalized a couple of physical assets, refineries specifically that belonged to Russian state owned oil company Rosneft, multibillion dollar assets. 

We’ve always known this was coming. As soon as you have the Germans and the Russians having a dispute over economics and strategy, they are going to start drawing lines. And this is one of the big ones. 

Now, the German strategy for dealing with the Russians going back two centuries has been pretty straightforward. They want to avoid a war because wars between the Germans and the Russians are awful. 

They fight in Poland, they fight in Ukraine, lots of people die, the weather is horrible. The terrain is wide open, they both commit atrocities. It’s just wretched. So they try to avoid it. And they do that by trying to entangle their economies. So they have a vested interest in not fighting. But ultimately, it doesn’t work out and then fighting and it’s horrible. Suddenly, to head to a tangle again. 

What we’re seeing now is the disentanglement and the preparing for a direct confrontation. The Germans, of course, hope it won’t come to that. History suggests that hope is largely in vain. That’s the bigger strategic picture. 

The economic picture is almost just as bold, because we have now had direct entanglement between the Europeans and the Germans for going on 30 years. And now that all becomes unwound. 

So the Germans have fired the starting gun with some multibillion dollar assets they’re  taken away from the Russians. 

Expect every single joint venture that the two sides have and lots of property on both sides to basically be unwound and returned to the national authorities. 

And that is the end of this phase of Russian European integration. 

Don’t count on it coming back anytime soon, because the demographic pictures on both sides are just atrocious. So this is where it gets real. And this is where we have a sharp severing. 

We’ll talk about what’s going on with the Chinese next.