EU is gradually stopping all energy purchases from Russia. Long term contracts for LNG purchases stop end of this year, pipeline gas late next year. Oil imports from Russia are planned to come to end late next year, too.
The days of Russian energy exports to EU are basically permanently over, and will not be reinstated even after the war has ended.
Solar works also in the north, except in the winter of course, and it complements wind pretty well. So solar does make economic sense and is actively built in the north too.
Russians are always conveniently forgetting that they were the other major aggressor of the European WW2 theater. Heck, the so-called "Great Patriotic War" starts in 1941, skipping over their alliance with Nazi Germany and invasions of neighboring states.
De-russification didn't really start until the Orange Revolution, though. It's a long and painful process for Ukraine as reducing corruption requires shedding all the Russian influence. Before that, a lot of the problems genuinely are because of Russia.
All states escaping the Russian curse improve speedily once they join the EU, and I expect the same to happen in Ukraine.
Belarus developed much faster than Ukraine in the decade between the Orange revolution and the start of the war. It's per-capita GDP quadrupled (to a much higher end result) in that time, while Ukraine's only doubled.
Yet, Belarus is politically 100% a Russian province.
Belarus was rewarded for loyalty. Ukraine was unstable, oligarchic, and increasingly punished for partial exit.
Belarus in 2004-2014 is a subsidised client. Ukraine after 2004 Orange Revolution is a contested borderland. They are different mechanisms inside the same imperial political system.
Russian dominance can produce short term client-state rents (Russia sells very cheap crude to Belarus, Belarus sells world price refined products to world market), but it tends to trap countries in dependency, weak modernization, and political subordination. When a country tries to leave the orbit, the coercive part of the system appears. Ukraine had it's gas price dramatically increased, then supply interrupted, among other pressure.
So when Russia sells oil for low price - it's rewarding for loyalty, when Russian sells gas for normal price - it's punishment.
What the price of hydrocarbons should be to make you happy?
>then supply interrupted
You might have consumed too much of Western and Ukrainian propaganda, if you re-translate it in 2026, long after Ukrainian lies have been exposed.
"The conflict began when Russia claimed that Ukraine was not paying for gas and was diverting gas bound from Russia to the European Union from pipelines that crossed the country. Ukrainian officials at first denied the last accusation, but later Naftogaz admitted it used some gas intended for other European countries for domestic needs. The dispute peaked on January 1, 2006 when Russia cut off supply.[" [0]
Russian propaganda is really running out of steam if Belarus of all countries is now the success case. What's next, statistics of how happy the North Koreans are?
>if Belarus of all countries is now the success case
That's how easy it is to be a success case when compared to the independent Ukraine. Even landlocked Belarus with no natural resources is doing better.
Funny story, except Azerbaijan, which has its own oil of premium quality is doing worse than Belarus[0]. Still better than the Ukraine, but anyone is doing better than the Ukraine.
Sour flavor can cut down on the richness of very savory dishes. You can use it in sauces, directly on fish and meat. It will function similarly to vinegar. If you grill or broil it, the sour flavor mellows out.
> I think it was Leisure Suit Larry that asked multiple choice history questions that I guess were meant to be impossible for fifth graders to guess.
I'm from a non-English-speaking country. We didn't understand the questions at all, but all us kids in the neighborhood got into the game just fine with some brute forcing.
Also, coming up with the expected commands in the game was way beyond our skills so we'd only advance to a point where someone had seen and memorized others play. Didn't matter, as it was one of the only games in the system so we'd play it anyway. I still remember how hard it was to type "ken sent me" in the allotted time window.
That wasn’t the era of global releases via the internet. You had to either buy it in person or, order by mail or get a copy from a BBS. It was an American game made for Americans.
Well, the main hurdle was that we were 7-9 years old iirc and didn't know any English at all, beyond the memorized "knock knock" etc. So the topic of the questions wasn't on the table :-)
I love this story. I remember seeing two pre-literate kindergarten kids playing on a gameboy or similar handheld, one of them teaching the other strings of button presses for things like “save game” - just navigating through all the menus by memory.
I played through the entire Pokemon Yellow without understanding a lick of english. You just remembered what the commands did, and you learnt by experimenting.
Thanks for this comment -- it dredged up a memory I had almost forgotten.
I did this but inverted. When only pokemon red/blue were out in the US I downloaded a rom for pokemon yellow (discovered on whatever p2p I was using at the time) when searching for pokemon to play in an emulator. I didn't know it existed at the time and it was in Japanese. When I told my friends "pikachu follows you around!" None of them believed me.
Haha, that's incredibly cool too! I actually played through a rom of Pokemon Green for the exact same reason - it was cool, no one at school believed me Pokemon Green was a real thing.
Like, I remember someone telling me at one point that the thing in Head over Heels was a Dalek with prince Charles head. I didn't know either of those.
My brother and I had a notepad with all the questions and possible answers, and we'd run the game several times until we got through, then make a note of the answers. Eventually we had all of them.
"Ken sent me" is buried in my brain for that same reason. :)
Same, our solution was to pirate Softice, then step through the startup to find the checks and replace them with nops or point at the desired location. Sierra games were not that amenable to this though because of the interpreter.
I learned to read very early because I really wanted to be able to start the games on the family computer (instead of having to ask an adult to do it for me).
And only then I realised that it was all in English :-).
Yes it was a bit weird how the latest generation AMD laptop chip was a sideways step. I blame the useless NPU wasting silicon, but what do I know.
I still got it as it was better than Intel's last year's offering, and it's still a fine chip. But kind of highlights how good the previous 7000 series chip was.
My reading was that nothing of that applies in Europe. No earning 6 figures, no way to invest pre-tax or in any other tax advantaged way, no way to optimize healthcare costs, early retirement unlikely.
Retirement accounts are a thing in Europe though. In Poland for example there's IKE and IKZE. IKE is a bit simpler of the two. If you hold your money on IKE until you're 60 you're not paying taxes on that. Can invest in stocks or bonds.
UK has the state pension which comes from NI (National Insurance) contributions which in a way acts like a Defined Benefit pension in that you work for X number of years and get state pension of Y in return(currently adjusted for inflation, wage growth, or 2.5% annually, called the 'triple lock'). Not based on income so you don't get a massive state pension by earning 6+ figures.
Then more recently (as in, as of around 2012 and up to 2018) we got auto-enrollment into private pensions, which are more like Defined Contribution (DC). Employer has to pay a percentage into the pot and so do you. Usually 5% employee and 3% employer by default but many will offer better (or contribution matching) as a perk. I think this is probably the same or similar to the 401k in US terms. The employer chooses the pension provider but you need to proactively switch to a high risk scheme to see any growth from it.
At a certain point the tax rebate from the government doesn't cover your whole income so you have to file a tax return to get the rest of the rebate. You can instead choose to 'salary sacrifice' which means you are lowering your income on paper but the sacrifice is put directly into pension (or otherwise can be used to get a car on lease or a bicycle via another scheme). Salary sacrifice is used by a lot of higher earners to bring their gross income down in order to avoid being cut off on certain benefits like child-care.
After all that you have SIPP (Self-Invested Personal Pension) which gives you more control over what you can invest it. Not just stocks, ETFs, and all that, but can also be commercial property (so the pension itself owns that asset). This gets the same tax treatment for pensions.
Finally there is the ISA and LISA. The first is a savings account where any interest or capital gain is free of tax, the second gets a 25% boost by the government to help buy a house or flat, but you can only use that money for a mortgage deposit.
Most people won't see all that much from their auto-enrollment given they could just opt-out to get the extra cash in their paycheque (especially when a low earner), or might not know to switch to the high risk fund, so the state pension and other benefits for OAPs will be there still. Those with more disposable income or a long term view (e.g. doing FIRE) are likely to max out the various vehicles available to them but at that point you're gonna be earning too much to care.
No need to optimise healthcare costs or any of that unless you want to go private.
There are options to save extra for retirement, if you take a private pension or a bank account that you can't withdraw from until retirement for example; in that case, you don't pay wealth tax and only pay taxes when it starts paying out. Sometimes the money you put into it is tax deductible, too. But, that's in NL, I don't know anywhere else. Source: https://www.nibud.nl/onderwerpen/pensioen/pensioen-opbouwen/
6 figures is possible, there are/were some software companies (VC backed, US based, US startup style, FAANG) that pay that much, otherwise there's highly paid jobs like management, doctors/dentists, landlord, public motivational speaker, drug dealer, etc that can earn you that much. But it's not handed to you like it feels like it is in the US / SF, but I realize that's very much a unique bubble.
So yeah, basically none of your comment is true, it's just not talked about as much because our basic systems are alright for most people and few have the extra income to think about doing more with it.
The investment taxation was already discussed in a sibling comment. As always in Europe, it depends on a country. Good for you if that's possible in Netherlands.
Of course some roles can earn six figures or more, hopefully everyone knows there isn't a hard cap on earnings. Should've been obvious that wasn't my claim.
The days of Russian energy exports to EU are basically permanently over, and will not be reinstated even after the war has ended.
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