Russia in Double War Trouble: Burns Gas It Won’t Sell, Pulls Jets from Crimea

(Satellite photo shows the giant flame of burning "excess" natural gas by Russia near Finland's border)

The situation of Russia is getting more and more unenviable as a result of its vicious aggression against Ukraine.

The Moscow dictatorship appears to be engaging in bizarre actions, such as burning at least $10 million worth of natural gas per day that it doesn’t want to sell in Europe as a way of punishing the Europeans.

Russia is also pulling out its warplanes from the occupied Crimean Peninsula because of increasing Ukrainian attacks that are destroying Russian fighter jets on the ground.

Putin Sends the West a Bizarre Gas-Burning Message

Russia has been subjected to unprecedented financial and economic sanctions from the West since it invaded Ukraine.

Nevertheless, western nations haven’t imposed a natural gas sale embargo on Russia yet simply because a lot of them, like key US allies in Europe, are heavily dependent on the imports of the energy resource from Russia.

However, in many cases, Russia unilaterally stopped selling natural gas to some European nations – such as Poland, Finland, and Bulgaria – in order to “punish” them for sticking with the West and supporting Ukraine.

At the same time, the Putin regime seems to be burning natural gas worth at least $300 million per month near the Finnish border.

Residents of Finland are reporting seeing giant jets of flames at a Russian plant for liquefied natural gas located in Portovaya, northwest of St. Petersburg.

The amount of natural gas getting destroyed there is sufficient to fuel the homes of 1.5 million European households. It is more than the entire daily consumption of natural gas in a medium-sized Eastern European nation, such as Bulgaria.

 

According to Knutsson, the Russian natural gas burning is producing 9,000 metric tons of CO2 per day and presents a real “environmental disaster.”

In his words, Russians are deliberately making a fire so huge that it can be seen from Finland; that is supposed to be them sending a message to Europeans that they dominate the European energy market.

Meanwhile, Miguel Berger, Germany’s ambassador to Britain, speculated the natural gas being burned by the Putin regime is probably the destruction of “excess inventory” of gas since Russians have no other clients to which they can sell their produce.

(Social media footage snapshot shows destroyed Russian fighter jet on the ground in Crimea)

The Humiliating Putin Pullout

Meanwhile, an “increasingly panicking” Putin regime is withdrawing all of its warplanes from Crimea.

A document of the US-led NATO alliance dated August 22, and leaked to German media, shows Putin’s commanders already removed ten of their top fighter jets from Crimea.

They relocated them to Russia, where they would be safer from Ukrainian counterattacks. These include 6 Su-35S jets and 4 MiG-31BMs.

The humiliating retreat done in secret by the Russians comes after Ukrainian missiles, special forces, and guerrilla saboteurs recently caused numerous explosions in Russian military facilities in the Crimean Peninsula.

This article appeared in MorningPress and has been published here with permission.

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