We’ve all heard about the sinking of Russia’s flagship Moskva in the Black Sea, apparently downed by two Ukrainian Neptune missiles. This was the same vessel that warned Ukrainian soldiers to surrender their positions on tiny Snake Island, to which one of them replied: “Russian warship. Go Fuck yourself!” The Western press turned him and his fellow Ukrainians as heroic matyrs for valiantly resisting—but ultimately succumbing to—the onslaught of Russian bombs.
Only days later, the world learned that they had survived, having been taken captive and were later freed in a prisoner exchange. What the world did not know was that Snake Island (also known as Serpents Island) sits atop huge gas deposits in the Black Sea and has become “the bone of contention between Romania, Ukraine and Russia,” according to Le Monde, and “one of the key points in the war that Moscow is waging against Kyiv.”
The Russians seized Snake Island on Day One of their invasion of Ukraine. The same day, the U.S. leveled its first economic target against the $11 billion dollar Russian-owned pipeline, Nord Stream 2 linking Russia to Germany. N2 had recently been completed despite numerous efforts by the U.S. since 2017 to prevent this from happening, arguing it would make Europe even more dependent on Russia for its energy supplies—and would cost Ukraine billions in lost transit fees earned on aging Russian pipelines crisscrossing the country.
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