Gazprom announced on Wednesday that it turned off the tap for Bulgaria and Poland after those two US allies refused to comply with President Putin’s geo-economic judo move of demanding payment for gas in rubles. It also declared that it’ll reduce supplies to others by whatever amount those two countries might siphon off from transit to others. This sequence of events amounts to Europe’s worst-case energy scenario, which risks provoking one of the largest economic crises that the bloc has ever seen.

Everyone in Europe has already been struggling enough as it is due to the economic consequences connected with their governments’ epidemiological policies to contain COVID-19. Now, however, they’re also forced to confront the potential shutting down of their factories due to the disruption in Russian gas supplies that would be the full responsibility of Bulgaria and Poland if it happens. Should they dare to siphon off others’ supplies, then those countries will inevitably suffer too.

This could quickly catalyze a chain reaction of events whereby European production grinds to a halt, including possibly within its German economic engine. The socio-political consequences could be tremendous since people have already shown how rebellious they’re becoming after organizing massive rallies against their governments’ epidemiological policies as was explained in the preceding paragraph. They might very well soon start protesting against the disruption of Russian gas supplies too.

The only way that the bloc could contain this potentially continental-wide unrest that might very soon occur would be through heavy-handed tactics that risk backfiring by both discrediting the EU’s own self-proclaimed “values” and also possibly creating even more unrest. This spiraling scenario could lead to profound changes in European politics and even for its people’s very way of life. The bloc might inevitably become more totalitarian and impoverished than it already is.

The larger trend that’s been set into motion is that Western Civilization is experiencing a full-spectrum transformation, some of which was earlier preplanned by its liberal-totalitarian elites but other aspects of which are organically emerging as a result of the complex interplay of innumerable variables connected to the US-led West’s proxy war on Russia through Ukraine. By the time everything is said and done, however long it takes, the West might be unrecognizable from what it previously was.

For that reason, it can be concluded that Russia’s ongoing special military operation in Ukraine actually accelerated preexisting multipolar trends, which in the context of the present analysis includes the one relating to the emergence of civilizations as actors in International Relations. The US-led West has been galvanized as a result of that campaign and America’s subsequent reassertion of hegemony over this civilization, but it’s also on the verge of a very painful economic crisis that’ll totally transform it.

At the same time, the non-Western countries of the Global South are actively diversifying from their erstwhile disproportionate dependence on the Golden Billion, which will lead to them becoming much more strategically autonomous and therefore more confident actors in International Relations. This means that the megatrend at play is the “bifurcated decoupling” of the previously US-dominated globalized world into the two primary blocs of the Global South and the Golden Billion.