Baltic countries notify Russia and Belarus they will exit the Moscow-controlled electricity grid
Baltic countries notify Russia and Belarus they will exit the Moscow-controlled electricity grid
The electricity grid operators of the three Baltic countries on Tuesday officially notified Russia and Belarus that they will exit a 2001 agreement that has kept Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania connected to an electricity transmission system controlled by Moscow.
The electricity grid operators of the three Baltic countries on Tuesday officially notified Russia and Belarus that they will exit a 2001 agreement that has kept Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania connected to an electricity transmission system controlled by Moscow.
Sounds like Estonia figured out how to network cybersecurity with their neighbors, because Russia is gonna go absolutely nuts trying to attack their grid now.
Well great thing. What will this mean to the Kaliningrad Region of Russia. As it is not directly connected to Russia and landlocked by Lithuania and Poland.
That is an interesting thought exercise. Would they really be cut off, and what would the impacts look like? I don't know anything about Kaliningrad internal sustainability, but could guess it's... not good. Time to annex?
Unless you are proposing a genocide (which I hope not), Königsberg is full of russians, which I doubt many countries would want to deal with right now.
It is (or it was) the major military seaport in the baltic... and we are speaking about russia. They most likely generate their own power.
On the long run, i think it should be annexed by the EU as a common land for the whole union.
Edit: Just checked, they mainly produce energy with gasoil and are apparently currently importing energy from EU to satisfy internal demand. They also have a nuclear power plant of 2,34 MW (2 VVER) under construction. They built it under the idea of producing energy to export but as they failed to find buyers, construcción was halt.
If they can't generate their own, I'd guess they'd have to buy it from a neighbour. The agreement isn't a total lack of trade, but withdrawing from Russia having control over their grids.
Of course that means they'd have to behave in Kalingrad, else they'd see power cut off. Personally I thing Moscow has the resources to build a power plant in Kalingrad if they haven't already.
Down with Russia’s economy!
I don't think Russia's economy lives off of some electricity it has been selling to the baltics
Down with ruSSian imperialism and fascism!
Unfortunately, the Russian economy is growing faster than all developed economies.
Statistical inflation from their, you know, fascist invasion.
damn I didn't even realize that this was a thing.
Power grids are very interlinked, it helps with grid stability. It would be weird if they weren't.
This is a fun map: app.electricitymaps.com
It would be weird if they weren't.
See also: Texas
I know these things in the back of my head, but I never think about them. like during the opening shots of the second Gulf War, when they use those cruise missiles that didn't have warheads, they just had a bunch of carbon filament wires to dump on their power substations; like that makes total sense but I had no clue that we did shit like that
Power grids are very interlinked
Interlinked
This is the best summary I could come up with:
VILNIUS, Lithuania (AP) — The electricity grid operators of the three Baltic countries on Tuesday officially notified Russia and Belarus that they will exit a 2001 agreement that has kept Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania connected to an electricity transmission system controlled by Moscow.
Utility operators Elering of Estonia, AST of Latvia and Litgrid of Lithuania said that the exit notice was signed in the Latvian capital of Riga on Tuesday.
The joint agreement with Moscow and Minsk will end Feb. 7, and the Baltic systems will be disconnected from the grid the next day.
“We will disconnect and dismantle the last physical connections with Russian and Belarusian grids,” Litgrid CEO Rokas Masiulis said, calling the move an “ambitious energy independence project.”
Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland agreed with the European Union’s executive commission in 2019 to coordinate on connecting the Baltic nations to the EU’s power network by the end of 2025.
Lithuania wanted an energy exit as early as this year, citing Moscow’s unreliability and its aggression in Ukraine.
The original article contains 432 words, the summary contains 170 words. Saved 61%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
They definitely know what it was like to suffer under Soviet repression, so no surprise here.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shock_Doctrine
Klein argues that neoliberal free market policies (as advocated by the economist Milton Friedman) have risen to prominence in countries and regions such as the United States, the United Kingdom, China, the European Union, and Eastern Europe, because of a deliberate strategy of "shock therapy". This centers on the exploitation of national crises (disasters or upheavals) to establish controversial and questionable policies, while citizens are too distracted (emotionally and physically) to engage and develop an adequate response and resist effectively. The book advances the idea that several man-made events, such as the Iraq War, were undertaken with the intention of pushing through unpopular free market capitalist policies in their wake.
The Eastern Bloc suffered an enormous drop in living quality following the dissolution of the USSR. Far from reaping a bounty via free market liberty, the people in these countries found themselves the subject of a historic privatization and looting of national treasuries and resources.
Bulgaria is an interesting data point. It's economy collapsed during the '90, and was rapidly privatized in the '00s after the son of Tsar Boris III of Bulgaria (deposed in 1946) was installed as the state's Prime Minister.
Corruption under the former aristocrat soared, access to education and housing was stripped away, and the country's most productive assets were sold off piecemeal to private investors.
By the mid-10s, the country was wracked with the same street protests and riots that brought down the Soviet government. These protests only ended after a far right paramilitary backed government cracked down on public media and launched police raids against the largest dissident groups. The country currently has no functional government, as the PM-ship is passed between minority party stakeholders, crime is rampant, and poverty is endemic.
The Eastern Bloc suffered an enormous drop in living quality following the dissolution of the USSR. Far from reaping a bounty via free market liberty, the people in these countries found themselves the subject of a historic privatization and looting of national treasuries and resources.
This is a black and white perspective. You have to keep in mind that citizens of these countries were significantly worse off as (involuntarily) being part of the USSR than the countries that were not in the Eastern Bloc, and most of them are now significantly better off as part of the EU. Most citizens remember the repression, shortages, and russification all too well.
Fuck the blyats. Russia as a geopolitical entity should be destroyed.
Fuck yeah!