I did not expect Putin to invade Ukraine. the way Russia goes about it now it is happening is painfull to watch. A russian analyst (bad source but ok) said that the planners approved every plan because they where told nothing would come of it anyway. You can argue that if Putin had come in convincingly this would have meant less dead soldiers and civilians who are so incredibly brave. Now Putin doesn’t seem to stop or piss off and the whole system of exchange of energy and services is in chaos and uncertainty, while we see innocent people get killed. It is a horrendous crime done to Ukraine.
NATO is responding semi naively. It can not ignore that supplying Javelins and Stingers is an act of war, so it is involved and Putin sees it that way. The mental state of Putin seems a wish to destroy everything to get his way. The question really is if he will be left with anything, or if he is just causing a general mobilization of unwilling russians to battle with the world. Russians are forced to show a Z sign, an invention of the pro-russians who can coerce any russian into doing it because there are enough that will beat up people that fail to show the sign. Its the inverse of a David Star that jews had to wear or the hitler salute you had to give when you saw a Nazi official.
All this madness needs to remain contained imho. The current isolation strategies are severe. Putin is not prepared according to experts. The West is also not prepared. Our gas now needs to come from other places, because we need energy to transition to renewables, if we are allowed to. Now there’s talk about using gas from Qatar, but where will that bring us. Energy independence is not allowed by fatalist pro-fossil regimes. The environment is super treacherous if you really think about security, with all the surveillance technology, drones etc. Good thing though that some countries just can’t make them.
For Europe many actions can reduce the hardship of high energy cost. But for instance fertilizer for food is made with gas, so that’s not going to be cheaper. Measures that use organic resources or require little energy are the best to make. Laws can be changed for example sharing power and heat in a street should be made legal. There is some advantage to making the changes sting because then the response will be stronger, and the benefit bigger in the short term.
Strangely if Russia remains cut off it will have a lot of oil and gas and food (provided climate change doesn’t mess things up). The crops growing in Middle America are in trouble according to recent news, so food shortages in the world can become a real problem. This will be even wors in poor countries (oil price is expected to reach $170+ and poor countries can’t print USD like the US). The focus should be fully on replacing fossil dependency ASAP.