OPINION: Putin Losing Battle with Reality Once Again

Putin and the Kremlin elite who run Russia are out of touch with reality. This translates into poor decisions and failed policies, an example of which is Russia’s goal of freezing Europe and ensuring record high gas prices, which has backfired dramatically.       

The most senseless battle is the battle fought with reality.

You will never win it. And if you have a distorted view of the world that you live in, you won't be able to win the fight against it.

If you believe that the Earth is flat, not only will you never build a spaceship, but you will never even discover America. 

If your view of the world is based on the laws and beliefs of the 19th century, you will never conquer this world in the 21st century. 

You can look brutal, you can frighten, shock, but you cannot conquer.

The same applies to Putin.

Russia longs for the past, denies the future and always loses in the present precisely because it denies reality.

It considers reality to be a fiction of Western Freemasons.

Russia has suffered defeat on the gas front.

Recent economic and geopolitical shocks caused the price of gas to soar to never before seen levels.

It was a shock, a short trend.

But when the price was $3,500 per 1,000 cubic meters, Russian propaganda took courage and predicted a price of $5,000 and a frozen Europe. Russia thought that cold and hunger, in unison with the pressure of high gas prices, would force Europe to abandon its support for Ukraine and bring it back to its knees before Gazprom.

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Putin fumes that Kyiv is hitting back and meting out the same sort of damaging punishment inside Russia as his missiles and drones continue to do in Ukraine.

"Europe will freeze!" the Kremlin’s propagandists shouted.

But as it turned out, weaponizing gas did not work.

The price of gas fell to below $700 per 1,000 cubic meters, which is already lower than a year ago.

And there is more gas in storage facilities.

At the same time, Gazprom has lost the European market, which provided it with the lion's share of revenues for the past 50 years, for a very long time, if not forever.

So, what actually happened?

It's not worth expecting Europe to freeze while there is global warming.

Why did Russia not take this factor into account?

Simply because Putin and others do not believe in it. The Kremlin seriously believes that climate change is a myth invented by the treacherous West for some reason.

The Kremlin constantly refutes alternative energy. Putin talks about  how worms and birds suffer from windmills. 

For the Kremlin, this has always been a frivolous story. This is another example of how much the values of Trump and Putin have in common.

At the same time, the Kremlin has often used environmental activists to promote its own interests, believing that this is the only reason that they exist.

Everything is like during Maidan in Ukraine. The Kremlin does not believe that people are capable of getting together, uniting and overthrowing the hated government – there must be a dark force behind it. 

The situation with atomic energy in Germany is directly connected to the protests that were held by activists against the deployment of nuclear weapons at the U.S Ramstein Air Base back in the middle of the 20th century.

Hardly anyone will be surprised to learn that the Kremlin supported these narratives.

Gazprom's interests were often lobbied in precisely the same way, using an environmental agenda.

While playing this game, the Kremlin thought everyone was playing.

And what happened in the end?

As a result, winter is warm and the price of gas is low.

The result was an absolutely insane desire to freeze Europe, where there have been no cold winters for a long time.

The outcome is defeat, a very expensive defeat – in financial terms because the Russian budget actually got rid of its gas revenues, and in terms of politics because the bet made on the disunity of the West did not work out, and that was the biggest bet.

Can the price of gas still rise this winter season? Of course, it can.

But it will be a temporary spike, and that's if a number of factors come together. 

But it won’t affect anything.

At the same time, lower gas and oil prices contribute to reducing inflationary pressure, helping Europe and the world as a whole to move out of the crisis caused by the launching of money printing presses.

The last few months have revealed to us the world in which Putin lives.

And this world is full of conspiracy theories.

We got used to thinking that the people "up top," possessing more information, will never believe the nonsense about Freemasons and Reptilians, and let ordinary people handle that.

But everything is different in Russia.

The lack of feedback means that power in the country belongs to people who do not actually understand reality.

And such people can never make the correct decisions, even if they seem to be rational ones.

There is a phrase in stock market trading: "don't confuse a bullish trend with your talent."

This is about the fact that as a trader you can ride the wave of fortunate circumstances.

And you should not consider it a manifestation of your genius.

Putin was lucky with the circumstances in the early 2000s. But, as we can see, there is no talent here...

The views expressed in this article are the author’s and not necessarily those of Kyiv Post.