In June 2015, Royal Dutch Shell and a handful of other Western European oil and gas producers announced a new agreement with the Russian energy giant Gazprom, a new $10 billion–plus pipeline project called Nord Stream 2 that would run nearly eight hundred miles from Russia to Germany along the bottom of the Baltic Sea. It would parallel Nord Stream 1, the pipeline that had been supplying Europe’s biggest economy with much-needed energy since 2011. The billions Russia would reap in revenues every year would dwarf the cost of the sanctions it had endured since the Crimea land grab.
