Extreme hike in energy prices was about four months before the war began. It’s when EU decided to abandon long term gas contracts and turned to spot prices (~11.2021). The war started in 02.2022.
From your perspective the war started in 2022.
In reality that phase of the war started before. Russia did not improvise this war. They started disrupting the supply in 2021 to ensure that Europe would not fill their strategic reserves / winter storage during the summer, thus insuring maximum leverage when they needed it. This is well documented [1]
Note that this is just talking about this phase of the war. Hostilities started in 2014 when parts of Ukraine "suddenly self-liberated" themselves. Helped by mysterious soldiers in professional but unmarked uniforms.
[1] https://www.banque-france.fr/en/publications-and-statistics/...
Nobody has sabotaged European energy security more than European governments. The divestment from nuclear and reliance on LNG was an obvious disaster in the making. Taiwan has made a similar blunder and will pay the price at the next whiff of geopolitical instability.
You've just read how Russia literally sabotaged European energy security and you compared this to... some European countries taking a suboptimal decision?
And Europe is not a single country. My country still happily digs out and burns tons of coal (annoying our neighbors in the process). I hope you're proud of us.
It's not suboptimal, it's a geopolitical disaster that people in 50 years will look back on and ask "how did this happen?"
Well, the full scale portion of the war started in February 2022.
But you are right otherwise.
Yes. I was surprised to find out that Russia had been conducted sabotage operations against UA artillery ammunitions dumps for many years prior to full scale invasion, and the Ukrainians had already lost the majority of their artillery ammunition reserves this way by the time invasion began.
And they conquered Crimea in 2014--partially, if I remember right, to get a port that doesn't freeze over in the winter, something they have wanted for literally hundreds of years.
They already had https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_of_Novorossiysk for that.
Yes, but Sevastopol is a better port, and any naval position in the Black Sea is less secure, when you don't control Crimea yourself.
(Russia got into more trouble than it was worth it, even by their own standards, I'd say. And that's not even getting into the moral dimensions.)
To be more precise, they already had the port, but were afraid to lose it to the new government of Ukraine.
This is also a big reason why Crimea, by and large, supported annexation - it has very large proportions of the population that are either active or retired Soviet/Russian navy.
The Russia Empire and the Soviet Union ran concerted efforts to Russianise the population of Crimea by various means, like moving in ethnic Russians, removing the locals (to put it mildly) etc.
removing the locals (to put it mildly) etc.
Virtually the entire indigenous and otherwise non-Slavic population (some 30 percent of the total population of the peninsula) to be precise, according to this graph:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6a/Ethnic_P...
The original Russian colonization of Crimea brought in many Ukrainians as well, though, so that alone did not make it lean Russian so strongly by itself. The naval facilities in Sevastopol, though, meant a lot of military personnel with their families from all over the country would come and settle in the city, and that specifically tilts the popular opinion there today strongly towards imperial Russian irredentism.
