(CN) — The battle lines over Ukraine hardened significantly on Wednesday with the European Union’s president telling Europeans to steel themselves for a total cutoff of Russian natural gas and the Kremlin saying it aims to conquer much more than Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region.
Wednesday’s developments underscored that the war in Ukraine may drag on into the winter months, carrying with it greater risks for further military escalation, global unrest, economic recession and famine in the poorest parts of the world.
On the battlefields of Ukraine, meanwhile, fighting was again turning particularly fierce as Russian and pro-Russian Ukrainian separatist forces pushed to seize cities still holding out in the eastern Donetsk region. There also were reports that Ukraine was desperately striking back hard at Russian-held territories, including a hit on a strategic bridge in Kherson in the south.
Speaking to journalists in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen laid out a plan to enforce, if necessary, a 15% reduction in natural gas consumption across the bloc. She said all 27 member states must begin diminishing their gas use now and stock up for the winter months.
“We have to prepare for a potential of a full disruption of Russian gas and this is a likely scenario,” von der Leyen said. “Russia is blackmailing us. Russia is using energy as a weapon.”
For the past three months, the Kremlin has been slowly squeezing Europe by cutting off gas flows to companies and countries that refuse to abide by a new payment system using rubles. EU leaders are rejecting the Kremlin's ruble scheme.
Moscow’s demands for ruble payments came in response to the United States and its allies cutting Russian banks off from the dollar-dominated international system for bank transactions.
Von der Leyen said 12 EU countries have already seen their gas from Russia cut and that the EU as a whole is taking in less than a third of what it did before the start of the Ukraine invasion.
The disruption of Russian gas is causing prices to soar in Europe and threatens to cause an economic recession. Much attention is being paid to whether Gazprom, the Russian gas giant, will announce the resumption of gas flows through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline on Thursday following scheduled maintenance.
In a bid to replace Russian gas, the EU has increased its supply from other countries by about 35 billion cubic meters, von der Leyen said. The EU is scrambling to find alternative sources of gas and it's signed new deals with the U.S., Algeria, Azerbaijan, Qatar, Norway and Egypt since Russian President Vladimir Putin launched the invasion on Feb. 24.
But it will not be easy to replace Russia, which provided about 150 billion cubic meters of gas last year to the EU. The EU consumes about 500 billion cubic meters of gas each year.
Frans Timmermans, an EU commission vice-president, said Europeans must make sacrifices by taking “no-regret measures” such as switching off lights and using less air conditioning and heating.
“We remain masters of our destiny if we really do this,” he said. By giving up “a few comforts” he said the EU can “avoid a full-blown crisis next winter.”
In Moscow, meanwhile, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told Russian media that the Kremlin now sees it necessary to control a large swath of Ukraine to ensure Russia’s safety against the arrival of advanced Western weapons systems in Ukraine.
“Now the geography is different,” Lavrov said in an interview, as reported by RIA Novosti, a Russian state news outlet.
He said Russia must not only control Donetsk and Luhansk, two industrial regions in the east that make up Donbas, but that it needs to seize Kherson, Zaporizhzhia and “a number of other territories” to deal with the threat posed by long-distance Western weapons.
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