On 16 September, before the European Parliament, Ursula von der Leyen summed up in a single sentence the energy crisis that has cost Europe hundreds of billions of euros and is now destroying its industry: “When Russia cut off the gas we fought back.” The sentence is short, it has the air of the obvious, and it points to a culprit. It has one flaw, however: by starting the story in the middle, it is a staggering lie.<\/p>\n\n
Two narratives in one speech<\/strong><\/p>\n\n One need only reread the speech to see that the President of the Commission tells two contradictory stories in it. She begins by celebrating a European Union that is “breaking free from its toxic dependency on Russian fossil fuels”; a few pages later, the same European Union becomes the victim of a Russia that has stopped delivering gas to it\u2026 On 3 December 2025, when agreement was reached on the permanent ban on Russian gas, Ursula von der Leyen was already hailing, with some grandiloquence, “the dawn of a new era, the era of Europe’s full energy independence from Russia”. The same day, she declared that “Europe is closing the tap on Russian fossil fuels once and for all”. Before the European Parliament, on 17 December of the same year, she promised to phase out these fuels “for good and forever”. How can one congratulate oneself on closing the tap while accusing the other side of having done so?<\/p>\n\n What the sentence does not say<\/strong><\/p>\n\n Let us go back over the chronology. On 24 February 2022, Russia launched its offensive in Ukraine. In the days that followed, the G7 countries and the European Union froze nearly half of the foreign exchange reserves of the Central Bank of Russia \u2014 some 300 billion dollars, of which more than 200 billion euros were held in the Union, mostly at Euroclear. Several Russian banks were excluded from SWIFT.<\/p>\n\n Moscow drew the lesson quickly. A euro, even when credited to the account of a Russian bank, remains recorded in the eurozone banking system, on a correspondent account opened in Frankfurt or Luxembourg \u2014 where a simple European regulation can block it, as had just happened to the reserves of the Central Bank. “It makes no sense whatsoever to supply our goods to the European Union, the United States and receive payment in dollars, euros,” Vladimir Putin declared on 23 March. The decree of 31 March therefore required buyers from so-called unfriendly countries to pay their euros to Gazprombank, which converts them into rubles; payment is deemed made only once those rubles have been credited to the seller’s account, Gazprom’s, in Russia \u2014 a currency which, for its part, circulates only within the Russian banking system and is beyond the reach of any Western freeze. Failure to comply would lead to suspension of deliveries. Meanwhile, Europe had made its decision. As early as the Versailles Declaration of March 2022, European leaders agreed to do without Russian fossil fuels. At that point, gas deliveries had not been cut. Russia was honouring its contracts. It was only on 27 April, when Poland and Bulgaria refused the new payment mechanism, that they ceased to be supplied \u2014 followed by Finland, the Netherlands and Denmark.<\/p>\n\n In other words, the first cut-offs were not the starting point of the rupture. They were the response to an unprecedented freeze of assets, and they came after Europe had announced that it wanted to do without Russian gas..<\/p>\n\n Nord Stream: Brussels’ silences<\/strong><\/p>\n\n The European version focuses on the Nord Stream 1 pipeline, whose deliveries to Germany were reduced from June 2022, then halted at the end of August. Gazprom then cited a Siemens turbine held up in Canada by sanctions; Berlin saw it as a pretext. The technical argument can be debated. What cannot be debated is what came next.<\/p>\n\n On 26 September 2022, three of the four strings of Nord Stream 1 and 2 were destroyed by explosions. For months, European capitals implied that Moscow had sabotaged its own pipeline. The German investigation eventually led to the arrest in Italy, in August 2025, of a Ukrainian national suspected of having coordinated the operation. The Ukrainian state is said to have been behind the operation\u2026 As for the string that remained intact, that of Nord Stream 2, Russia offered as early as autumn 2022 to use it to resume deliveries. Berlin refused. That refusal does not appear in any State of the Union address.<\/p>\n\n To present the gas rupture as an initial act of aggression by Russia, as Ursula von der Leyen does, while remaining silent about the freeze of reserves that preceded it, the European decision that announced it and the sabotage that made it irreversible, therefore amounts to a lie by omission. Europeans pay the bill for that choice every month. They are at least entitled to the whole story.<\/p>\n\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On 16 September, before the European Parliament, Ursula von der Leyen summed up in a single sentence the…","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":6740,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"csco_display_header_overlay":false,"csco_singular_sidebar":"","csco_page_header_type":"","csco_page_load_nextpost":"","csco_post_video_location":[],"csco_post_video_location_hash":"","csco_post_video_url":"","csco_post_video_bg_start_time":0,"csco_post_video_bg_end_time":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[38,39],"tags":[48],"class_list":["post-8278","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-geopolitics","category-politics","tag-articles-en","cs-entry","cs-video-wrap"],"yoast_head":"\n