The Morning Dispatch: Russia Cuts Off Gas to ‘Unfriendly’ Countries

Happy Thursday! Best of luck to Rep. Madison Cawthorn, who—as far as we can tell—must be trying to get caught in every imaginable genre of political scandal before he turns 27 this summer. Maybe it’s performance art. (Editor: It’s also convenient for Declan, who can avoid using this space to note that his Chicago Bulls lost in the opening round of the playoffs last night to Steve’s Milwaukee Bucks.)

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• President Joe Biden announced Wednesday that Trevor Reed—a U.S. Marines veteran detained in Russia since 2019 after allegedly assaulting two Russian police officers—was freed as part of a prisoner swap with the Kremlin. Konstantin Yaroshenko—a Russian serving a 20-year sentence for attempting to smuggle cocaine into the United States—was released to Russia as part of the swap.

• Microsoft issued a report on Wednesday confirming Russia has been carrying out “hundreds” of cyberattacks against Ukrainian critical infrastructure in conjunction with its more traditional warfare. “At least six Russian Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) actors and other unattributed threats, have conducted destructive attacks, espionage operations, or both, while Russian military forces attack the country by land, air, and sea,” it read. “Collectively, the cyber and kinetic actions work to disrupt or degrade Ukrainian government and military functions and undermine the public’s trust in those same institutions.”

• A Burmese court on Wednesday sentenced former leader Aung San Suu Kyi—ousted in last year’s military coup—to an additional five years in prison on charges of corruption. It’s the third guilty verdict Suu Kyi has received since the junta took over in February 2021, with several more still to be decided.

Europe to Russia: We Don’t Need Your Stinkin’ Gas

In March, Russian President Vladimir Putin said “unfriendly” countries would need to pay for Russian oil and natural gas in rubles, not dollars or euros—a bid to boost Russia’s economy amid sanctions. Europe balked, so on Wednesday Putin began following through on the threat: Russian state-owned gas company Gazprom cut off supplies to Poland and Bulgaria. European natural gas benchmark prices climbed 4.1 percent Wednesday in response.

Poland has certainly been “unfriendly” since Russia invaded Ukraine, welcoming a flood of Ukrainian refugees, helping deliver military equipment to Ukraine, and calling loudly for the European Union to stop importing fuel from Russia. And it has long relied on Russian fuel—in 2019, Poland imported more than 97 percent of its crude oil, 61 percent of it from Russia. It also imported 80 percent of the natural gas it consumed, again mostly from Russia. The other country Russia targeted yesterday, Bulgaria, is even more reliant, importing from Russia more than 70 percent of the gas it consumes.

But Poland has also been working to reduce its dependency on Russian fuel. It opened a liquefied natural gas terminal on the Baltic Sea coast several years ago, and has a pipeline from Norway scheduled to start moving gas later this year. “There will be no shortage of gas in Polish homes,” Polish Climate Minister Anna Moskwa promised this week. Premier Mateusz Morawiecki went so far as to tell lawmakers the shutoff won’t change a thing. “Not only will we not bow to this blackmail,” he said, “but I would like to assure my countrymen that this action on the part of Vladimir Putin won’t affect households, it won’t affect Poland.”

“It’s not just bravado,” Daniel Fried, a former U.S. ambassador to Poland and Atlantic Council fellow, told The Dispatch. “The Poles had been preparing for a Russian gas cutoff for years. They’ve said for years that the Russians were an unreliable supplier. I’m not sure that the Russians are going to be able to squeeze the more vulnerable east Europeans as much as they think they can.”

White House press secretary Jen Psaki said the U.S. has been preparing for Russia to cut off fuel in Europe. “Some of that has been asking some countries in Asia who have excess supply to provide that to Europe,” Psaki said. “We’ve done that in some cases, and it’s been an ongoing effort.” The Biden administration also recently approved more requests to expand U.S. natural gas exports in Europe. That could eventually help ease the squeeze, though the newly approved fuel exports won’t hit markets until 2024.

European leaders swiftly denounced Russia’s decision, vowing they wouldn’t cave to Putin’s ruble demands. “The announcement by Gazprom that it is unilaterally stopping delivery of gas to customers in Europe is yet another attempt by Russia to use gas as an instrument of blackmail,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said. “It shows once again the unreliability of Russia as a gas supplier. We are prepared for this scenario.”

Bulgaria, which had close ties with Russia but has distanced itself recently—still more after the invasion—also promised to keep refusing to make ruble payments. “What we’re seeing is unprecedented economic aggression against Bulgaria,” Bulgarian Deputy Prime Minister Assen Vassilev told reporters. “The politics of pretending that there’s no aggressor isn’t working. We’re not looking for conflict, we’re not looking for war, but when the war comes at our doorstep, we’ll face it and we’ll fight the aggressor off.” The country plans to increase imports from other nations including Turkey and Greece, with the hope that spring thaws will reduce the demand for fuel to heat homes.

Only Hungary has publicly agreed to pay in rubles, so other European countries could soon find themselves cut off from Russian gas as well—though that would also hit Russia’s own economy, reducing the cash flow feeding its war effort.  Germany—which in 2021 bought about 32 percent of the gas it used from Russia and even more of its crude oil and coal—is especially vulnerable. German Economy Minister Robert Habeck said he couldn’t rule out the possibility of Russia cutting off fuel exports to Germany and that it would likely trigger a recession in Germany. The country has resisted calls to ban Russian fuel, arguing that would hurt Europe more than Russia.

“The Germans especially are dealing with the ruin of their previous assumption that the Russians would never use energy as a weapon,” Fried said, but added that they haven’t been caught totally flat-footed. “The Russians have some leverage, but not as much as they think they do.”

Indeed, Germany’s reluctance to abandon Russian fuel is fading. Habeck said Tuesday that, since the invasion, Germany has cut Russian oil imports from over 30 percent of its supply to 12 percent, and he promised Germany is days from striking a deal to find alternative options for the remainder. Bloomberg reported Wednesday Germany is now open to supporting a total ban on Russian oil if it’s rolled out gradually.

German lawmaker Norbert Röttgen epitomized Germany’s pivot Wednesday. “As Europeans, we must not allow ourselves to be divided by Russia,” he wrote. “Russia needs to know: when they meet one, everyone responds. Therefore, an oil and gas embargo is now also a question of European solidarity!”

The New Emperor of Twitter

$239 billion is a lot of money. You can do a lot with it. You could build the world’s most expensive private residence—the skyscraper-mansion Antilia in Mumbai—a hundred times over, and have plenty left to buy each of the world’s hundred most expensive paintings to hang in each of the master bedrooms. You could buy every team in the NFL, NBA, and MLB. Or you could buy a major U.S. social media platform over the protests of basically everyone currently involved in running it.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk, whose $239 billion makes him the world’s richest man, doesn’t go in for skyscraper-mansions—he reportedly splits his time between a $50,000 prefab home and crashing at the home of a Texas billionaire pal—and he’s never shown much interest in art or pro sports. But he does really like Twitter. And this week, he committed a significant chunk of his fortune in a deal to buy the social media giant for approximately $44 billion.

The offer came less than two months after Musk purchased a 9.2 percent stake in Twitter, causing the company to announce he would be joining its board of directors. But Musk rejected that offer, which would have made it impossible for him to exceed a 15 percent ownership stake in the company. Two weeks ago, Musk announced his intention to buy the company outright for $54.20 a share, a significant premium over current market value—prompting the board to approve a “poison pill” measure that would flood the market with new Twitter shares if Musk acquired more than 15 percent of the current stock.

But the board reversed course this week, announcing Monday it had inked an agreement with Musk to move forward with the acquisition and take the company private. Assuming a majority of shareholders are willing to cash out and federal regulators don’t throw the brakes, Musk will take control of the company later this year. (Either Musk or Twitter could in theory pull back out of the deal too, although the filing stipulates the party causing the split would need to pay the other a $1 billion penalty.)

“Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated,” Musk said in a press release announcing the deal.  “Twitter has tremendous potential—I look forward to working with the company and the community of users to unlock it.”

Such talk about free speech and a digital town square sounds suspiciously like how many people on the right talk about Twitter, so it perhaps wasn’t surprising that reactions to the news split more or less along partisan lines: right-wingers doing the samba at the prospect of Musk kicking the company’s left-leaning content moderators to the curb, left-wingers wringing their hands over the likelihood that, as a Time headline put it, “Elon Musk’s Twitter Acquisition May Spread Disinformation.”

How strictly Musk will hold himself and his new platform to this standard remains to be seen. There is, of course, a very good reason beyond supposed leftist machination why most internet platforms ban tons of speech that isn’t against the law: because many types of posts, from racial slurs to depictions of violence to pornography to spam, harm the experience of using the platform for nearly everybody who sees them, and a platform saturated with such things tends to be the sort of platform people don’t want to use. (See this video for an excellent—if vulgar—illustration of the point.) Meanwhile, Twitter isn’t just beholden to U.S. laws about free speech: It also has to navigate the far more parsimonious speech climate in places like the European Union, which this week imposed a steep new penalty regime for social media platforms that don’t do enough to moderate “harmful content.”  

That said, there’s no question a Musk-run Twitter might take steps in the direction of free speech that would keep Republicans singing his praises and Democrats reaching for their pitchforks—reinstating the account of a certain former President of the United States, for instance.

It’s possible, too, that all this is premature. Tesla stock plunged in the wake of the announcement, wiping more than $30 billion off Musk’s net worth (before that, he theoretically could’ve bought out the NHL too!) and causing some to wonder whether Musk’s financing plan could be in jeopardy. World’s richest man or no, Musk didn’t just have $44 billion sitting in his checking account to buy Twitter with—the deal was financed with loans secured by both Twitter and his own Tesla shares. The more those shares fall, the more he needs to put up as collateral for his loan, and the less he can sell to come up with the cash portion of the deal.

Worth Your Time

• For more thoughts on Musk and Twitter, check out Kevin Williamson’s latest at National Review. “I have my doubts that Elon Musk will be able to produce a good version of Twitter, because a good version of Twitter would not be Twitter, just as a hammer that you can’t bang your thumb with isn’t a hammer,” he writes. “If I have learned anything from the political developments of the past several years, it is that my enemies’ enemies are not necessarily my friends. Conservatives who think he is going to rescue the public square from the pious fanatics who have appointed themselves its roving mutaween are going to be terribly disappointed. Elon Musk is an enormously intelligent, emotionally immature, charmingly eccentric man who has $264 billion or so with which to amuse himself and, at times, to amuse the rest of us, too. … But the problem with Twitter is not who owns it, and it never has been. The problem with Twitter is that mankind is a fallen creature in need of a redeemer, a creature that now has the technological capacity to demonstrate its fallenness 6,000 times per second.”

• It gets a bit heated at times, but this episode of The Argument about sexual orientation and gender identity—featuring Jane Coaston, Ross Douthat, and Michelle Goldberg—is an example of what thoughtful and respectful political disagreement can look like. “As someone who is a social conservative,” Douthat says. “If I had written a column in 2012, and I had said, ‘Look, here’s what’s going to happen: We’re going to have same-sex marriage as the law of the land, and within five or 10 years, like a quarter of young people are going to identify as L.G.B.T.Q. And we’re going to have the President of the United States saying that the appropriate response to gender dysphoria is puberty blockers, hormone treatments, and eventually, potentially surgery. That is going to be the position of the Democratic Party.’ If I had written that column, I think maybe Michelle would have responded that I was being crazy—that this was, like, the crazy alarmist perspective of social conservatives who think everything will get fluid and weird and crazy the second we allow same sex marriage. … [But] this is what has happened. And I think there probably should be some room in the debate for conservatives to be able to say, well, I told you so.” 

Presented Without Comment

Also Presented Without Comment

Toeing the Company Line

• Scott went looking for the conservative principles underlying Florida Republicans’ recent actions toward Disney and its special district, and came up empty handed. “Progressives, by definition, harbor far fewer ideological reservations about using the state in (ahem) novel and heretofore-constitutionally-suspect ways to achieve ‘urgent’ priorities, real or imagined,” he writes in this week’s Capitolism (🔒). “Fears of government power or respect for longstanding fundamental rights are supposed to prevent conservatives from doing the same. Or, at least, they were.”

• On Wednesday’s episode of The Dispatch Podcast, Steve talks to Lanhee Chen—Hoover Institution fellow and policy director for Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign—about his decision to run for state controller in California. First of all, what does a state controller do? And what’re his plans if he wins?

• With Jonah under the weather, yesterday’s G-File (🔒) excerpted his second book, the highly underrated Tyranny of Cliches. “‘Middle class’ is a confounding term,” he writes. “Everyone uses it. Everyone claims to know what it means and who it describes, and yet it is almost entirely useless as a term of economic precision and deeply misleading as a term of political identity.”

Let Us Know

A study from Pew last year found that just 25 percent of Americans use Twitter and the quarter of that quarter that we might describe as “superusers” is responsible for 97 of the country’s tweets. Where are you in those groupings? Among the 75 percent of Americans living lives of Twitter-free bliss? A Twitter lurker who maintains a presence but doesn’t post much? Or a superuser like @jonahdispatch, with his 178,000 tweets? 

And if you use Twitter, why?