Latest U.S. and Polish activities, including speeches of American experts at Minsk conference and an information campaign of subordinated Belarusian media, indicate that they aim at provoking strict Russian countermeasures and pushing it to the conflict with Belarus. Under the pretext of taking part in a dialogue, Americans conduct information operations, targeting the Union State of Belarus and Russia. Americans need to bring as much distrust and discord in Russia-Belarus relations as possible and to do their best in inflaming the situation in Belarus on the eve of the 2020 presidential election. NATO military exercises Defender 2020 means that the large assault force is created in Poland and Lithuania, aimed at Belarus and Russia’s western regions.
Europe catastrophically lacks gas. In addition to gas from the [Nord Stream 2] pipeline, it will be necessary to purchase more and more Russian liquefied gas. The launch of Nord Stream 2 will greatly increase the export of Russian gas to Europe.
This case is part of the Kremlin's recurring disinformation campaign about the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. Europe is not "catastrophically lacking gas" - on the contrary, there is enough natural gas supply that prices in Europe have been going down this year. This is because the continent has been flooded with liquefied natural gas (LNG) from a number of suppliers since fall 2018, including the United States. A mild winter in Asia has driven gas prices to a three-year-low level and caused LNG shipments to be redirected to Europe, pushing down the prices. As Polygraph explains, energy experts say LNG has allowed natural gas to become a global commodity that can easily move from one continent to another depending on demand, similar to the way oil is traded. Moreover, the Nord Stream 2 pipeline will not import any new Russian gas to Europe; it will simply divert Gazprom’s current transit through the Ukrainian route to Nord Stream 2. Indeed, about 40 percent of Gazprom's transmission capacity to Europe is not utilized - Gazprom's currently unused export capacity to the EU is almost 100 bcm, which contradicts the claim that constructing a new 55-bcm pipeline is necessary to increase gas imports to the EU. More background is available here. For more disinformation cases about Nord Stream 2, see here.