It’s too late to break Europe’s gas reliance on Russia

So, Nord Stream 2 will not be plugged into Germany’s gas grid. A little surprisingly, Chancellor Olaf Scholz has been first out of the blocks this morning in the western economic response to Putin’s recognition of breakaway states in eastern Ukraine. The block is not total: what Scholz says is that the certification process for the pipeline will be halted — leaving open the possibility that it might, after all, be connected if Putin starts to behave himself, or Germany becomes especially desperate for gas. Nevertheless, it is a significant move which will have an economic impact on Russia.

But it is astonishing that the project was ever allowed to come this far in the first place. It ought to have been obvious from the beginning that Nord Stream 2 was rather more than just an infrastructure improvement: it looked almost designed to put western Europe and Germany exactly in the incurably vulnerable position it is in now.

Britain, though, has hardly approached the problem of dependence on Russian gas much better.