After careful analysis, I have concluded that the West has completely and utterly outplayed Mr. Putin. America is the biggest winner in this Ukraine/Russia conflict. Even if Russia gains some territory, they will forever have to deal with a now-mortal enemy, Ukraine, on their border. If Russians were any smarter, they wouldn’t have fallen into the trap setup for them… a shitshow for Putin, with the PR war completely lost, nobody will or want to “trust” Putin or Russia for decades to come, depriving China of its trading partner (well, anything more than a raw resource partner due to them being ostracized by the West), which is the whole aim of choking off Russia to continue to be another 3rd world country nobody wants to go to or be associated with.
They will deprive China of being able to rely on Russia to defend themselves against the West. Divide and conquer, China has been increasing military spending for a decade and it shows… military weapons, size of the Navy… but they are still in the 20th century thinking… Russia has been trying to outthink the 20th century to get ahead but they don’t have enough insight to think about the world that exists today and how to win in it…
China will happily bleed them of raw resources for their billion-plus people. Sad these leaders fail to see the present or future problems… oligarchs are a dying breed, mostly due to the competition they face, this only gets worse with every new technological development cycle… more people compete and more technology is available for competition to outcompete the old dogs who just use manual labor.
If you read the “great reset” you understand how insane it’ll be in another two decades with robotic manufacturing and material processing… Russia falls apart as the world passes it by with Russia going after the resources, it’ll be a bloodbath until Russia is banned from the ability to party in the West…
The West has wanted the small parts of the world to fully go western that hadn’t, like Cypress and Monaco. Now those places will become desolate and dangerous even for the few Russians who make it there because the oligarchs will mostly be stuck in Russia and no other Russians will be able to afford traveling.
Putin could have engaged Ukraine as their western Allie and become European through Ukraine but Putin and his oligarchs didn’t want to give up their fake little empires of Russian resources. I spent most of yesterday reading through too many articles on Ukraine's war with Russia...
https://www.theguardian.com/business/202...sia-suffer
Russian generals keep making the same mistakes over and over again, Putin is trying to switch to a long haul war but they keep supplying Ukraine with tanks and armored vehicles every time the Russians retreat... Now about half Ukraine's armies tanks are Russian, over 400 of them... over 600 armored vehicles. Polish Krab tanks have 3x the precision of the Soviet tanks and just got added to Ukraine's army frontlines, upgrading the distance 2x and precision 3x of their attacks to outcompete anything Russians have...
Quoting the above article: “Nato is a $40tn economic bloc while Russia is a $1.7tn economy,” he says. “Nato is spending 2% of its income on the military, which means whatever Russia spends, Putin doesn’t stand a chance.” as the whole article points out the scale of Russia's failure to think long term and failure to capitalize on the last two decades to grow its economy and manufacturing potential, failing to comprehend that Russia's largest asset, energy in gas and oil, was the single largest vulnerability to the viability of the Russian state... Putin went all into a fight that he thought Ukraine's politicians were holding an empty hand in, NATO/US backing the Ukrainian hand means Russia sent their troops into a hell hole of a trap, prepped by 8yrs of training exercises in the East of Ukraine that effectively resulted in the blockage of Russia's flash invasion, and the three-day invasion didn't quite go according to plan.
The fact that the Kremlin still thinks this is a winnable war speaks of how mentally limited they are in seeing the larger picture of what they lost when they started the invasion of Crimea and Ukraine... Much like the invasions of Ukraine/Crimea centuries ago https://www.smithsonianmag.com/hist...de...180949969/ it always has been and will be a fight between what are "Russian Nobility" who think they own the peasants and the peasants who realize their only chance for freedom is to fight back... This time NATO is backing the peasants who are fighting for their land.
Fascinating history going on and repeating... This time the numbers of "peasants" seem to be too great for the nobility to suppress once more, so the democratic process proceeds towards the less corrupt forms of governance -- Commercism lol, so corrupt it should be stopped too but that requires so many more laws and regulations and pollution detection and responsibilities, etc. all the things that take time and technology to uphold... almost the exact opposite of what China and Russia are using technology for, so it basically seeds the self-destruction of pollution into the future that was the downfall of the Aztecs (mercury poisoning), Romans (lead pollution), and modern day (plastic pollution everywhere, individual countries like Russia and China have exceedingly high pollution in other realms...)... All seems like a shitshow now that I can use my brain again to think about all of it!
Russia has now put themselves back to before the collapse of USSR in terms of relations with Europe and sped up the retreat from fossil fuels by two full decades by the Europeans… this will give Russia (I mean Moscow’s idiots selling out the raw resources from the whole of Russia to the rest of the world) a life line for another few decades as they were set to run out of their oil and gas anyway by selling it to Europe, now they will have their own oil for a few more decades if they don’t solve their logistics problem of sending it across the entire country to Asian countries on the east coast.
I’d argue Putin is literally just reacting to the western powers excluding his direct involvement in the world economy — because his economy was failing and he only had a decade of energy resources to sell, as his country wasn’t moving outside of its backwardness and embedded corruption. So, leave the idiots too their idiocy and you often get wars
So, they’ll still be exporting wheat and gold to anyone who will take it to keep their economy going… likely falling to around the GDP of Mexico, so barely hanging on to a top G20 economy spot but they could slip beyond that with enough countries banning their products due to tainted war “funding”… maybe cut their annual import/exports in half, might fall below Turkey for economic size… have to wait and see.
The EU won’t ever rely on Russia for oil/gas again, they’re too busy trying to switch to solar/wind etc and alternative oil/gas energy sources too… and most of Russia’s oil and gas wells are connected to pipelines going to EU or in that direction… meaning Russia is going to have about half its energy income cut off minimum, by the time they could figure out how to transport the oil elsewhere, the wells will be offline and it’ll cost too much to restart them (especially without western oil and gas companies telling them how to do it or without the turbines and pumps etc).
Remember, the US started pumping oil when Russia went after Georgia and that crushed the Russian economy by killing the price of oil. So this isn’t the first time Russia basically got spanked for invading another country.
About 1/3 of their exports of energy products go to China, India will likely take up some of the available oil and gas… so I guess about half their ~$160B in energy exports will likely dry up.
No more western hydraulic turbines, airplane parts, CPUs, high tech services, auditing services, etc means lots of the Russian companies will implode thanks to lack of professionalism and lack of anyone checking the books to keep them investment-worthy, they’re already corrupt and willing to take whatever when they think they can get away with it, not to mention there’s no other way to get ahead. With a decent number of their citizens already leaving to find professional work elsewhere, the brain drain will be bad for a few decades until Putin and his Moscow hoard are either dead (two decades for that to maximum or less if Putin is already cancer and dying as reported by reports on his health by the CIA people who didn’t want to be named lol) or otherwise gone from politics, minimum of about 2 decades for the majority of the USSR people to die off but more likely 3-4 decades to really get rid of that mindset the USSR enforced on purpose to deprive people of their own will-to-power, assuming they got enough taste of it before this Russia being cut off from the West that is happening… where you could buy anything to where you are lucky to be able to buy something you want that might be modern… nothing wrong with second, secondhand stuff.
Their trade deficit will likely go to neutral vs making money off of energy exports, they were making about $110B more per year off of energy exports than imports… likely most of that was going directly to oligarchs, so not much to drive the economy forward or make improvements to education or healthcare, etc.
This means they don’t have any direct way to make a import/export profit and will be crippled for the foreseeable future… basically a dependent of China.
Russia is just a Mafia state
In some capacity, this type of system is necessary in developing countries. The majority of people are simply too ignorant to make good decisions, and there is no "deep state" to right the ship. In Book Six of The Republic, Plato describes Socrates trying to get Adeimantus to see the flaws in democracy by comparing a society to a ship. Socrates asks: if you were heading out on a journey by sea, who would you ideally want to decide who was in charge of the vessel? Just anyone or people educated in the rules and demands of seafaring? The latter, of course, says Adeimantus, so why then, responds Socrates, do we keep thinking that any old person should be fit to judge who should be a ruler of a country?
Socrates’s point is that voting in an election is a skill, not a random intuition. And like any skill, it needs to be taught systematically to people. Letting the citizenry vote without an education is as irresponsible as putting them in charge of a trireme sailing to Samos in a storm.
Ancient Athens had painful experience of demagogues. For example, the louche figure of Alcibiades, a rich, charismatic, smooth-talking wealthy man who eroded basic freedoms and helped to push Athens to its disastrous military adventures in Sicily. Socrates knew how easily people seeking office could exploit our desire for easy answers. He asked us to imagine an election debate between two candidates, one who was like a doctor and the other who was like a sweet shop owner. The sweet shop owner would say of his rival: Look, this person here has worked many evils on you. He hurts you, gives you bitter potions, and tells you not to eat and drink whatever you like. He’ll never serve you feasts of many and varied pleasant things like I will.
Socrates asks us to consider the audience response: Do you think the doctor would be able to reply effectively? The true answer — "I cause you trouble, and go against your desires in order to help you" — would cause an uproar among the voters, don’t you think?
We have forgotten all about Socrates’s salient warnings against democracy. We have preferred to think of democracy as an unambiguous good – rather than a process that is only ever as effective as the education system that surrounds it. As a result, we have elected many sweet shop owners and very few doctors.
Approximately 100 years are required for democracy to become functioning. Systematic corruption is pervasive. Twenty years were spent by the United States to rebuild Afghanistan's military into a robust and autonomous fighting force. But the Afghan military collapse began far before President Biden's September 11 declaration that the United States would withdraw. Commanders inflated the number of soldiers in order to siphon off resources, and men on the battlefield frequently lacked ammunition, supplies, and even food. Individual outposts in rural locations where army and police units were besieged by Taliban fighters and promised safe passage if they surrendered and left their equipment behind gradually ceded control of routes and eventually entire districts to the rebels.
Many of these former Russian republics are currently mafia states. Read about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Bere...sinessman) In 2000, he made the mistake of openly challenging Vladimir Putin, someone Berezovsky had played a big role in helping to get elected president. When Putin threw down the hammer, Berezovsky was forced to flee Russia. In Russia, after shock therapy, First it was the mafia, then the police, then the federal government, and then the competition for market share began between gangsters, police, and the Agency. As the police and the federal government became more competitive, gangs were forced out of the market. In many instances, though, rivalry gave way to cooperation, and the services themselves became gangsters. Once a crime lord attains sufficient wealth, they become oligarchs. The oligarchs' economic power buttresses the political power of the Russian president, and the president's power buttresses the economic power of the oligarchs — like a medieval king getting tribute from his aristocracy in exchange for his protection. It's an arrangement that the West is now fighting to disrupt.
Democracy is a complete failure without the Republic understanding that the rules and laws must be there to prevent evils and abuses and corruption and pervasive of intents… I wish more people understood Socrates and philosophy!!! Should be like all types of tests questions concerning socrates and democracies in histories… if you fail too many of the questions, your vote doesn’t count! Lol intelligence matters! Probably the most important piece of information to look at right now is well the Russian people are doing?
Corruption is widespread
One of Russia's greatest impediments to quicker economic growth is the fact that businesspeople lack confidence in the courts and that property rights remain inadequate. The result is that successful businesspeople are extremely reluctant to spend and instead take a defensive stance to safeguard their present enterprises rather than expansionist stances to increase their businesses. This mentality operates as a growth inhibitor, and once a business reaches a scale where the owner can make a comfortable living, it ceases to expand
Enterprises cannot rely on the rule of law to protect their transactions or prevent attempts to extort/bribery from corrupt officials. The news that Vladimir Putin, the Russian tsar of recent days, plans to endlessly hold on to power is not surprising. However, this is very worrying for Putin’s sacrifice - mainly the Russian people and Western democracies. The average nominal monthly wages fell below $450 per month in 2016, and tax on the income of individuals is payable at the rate of 13% on most incomes. Approximately 19.2 million Russians live below the national poverty line. This all-embracing Russian poverty is everywhere: in people’s houses, clothes, the cars they drive, the food they eat, and the entertainment they have.
Preliminary Rosstat figures show Russian gross domestic product (GDP) growth in the first three months of 2019 was just 0.5 percent year-on-year, a figure well below even the most cautious forecasts. This has been attributed to to three factors — weak consumption as consumers had to absorb the pension age increase and a higher VAT rate, as well as much more unpredictable warmer winters that lower utilities output, a big contributor to the GDP number, as well as slower growth of state military orders.
Foreign direct investment (FDI) has fallen to next to nothing, and if the money reinvested by foreign companies already working in Russia (which counts as FDI) is discounted, then actually FDI is negative as some smaller foreign investors have left Russia as the economy becomes increasingly moribund. The VAT hike also hit wages as the increase in nominal wages of just 5.5 percent year-on-year in the first quarter was almost entirely eaten up by the similar increase in inflation.
Putin’s supposedly transformative national spending projects worth an eye-watering $390bn have largely failed to materialize. His promises of economic modernization and raised living standards must be set against a consecutive five-year fall in real wages and cuts to state pensions. Putin is already feeling the squeeze after state pollster VTsIOM reported that trust in the president fell to its lowest level in almost two decades, to 31 percent in May whereas it used to be over 70 percent ten years ago.
The slow pace of progress in the implementation of the national projects led Putin to chew out deputies on live TV and has fuelled tension between the various branches of government. The Kremlin has put a lot of store in the national projects which is the state's leading investment programme, but critics say not enough attention has been paid to improving the business environment and state-led investment by itself will not be enough to spur growth to get to the 3 percent GDP growth target by 2021. At most, the programme may increase Russia’s economic potential by 0.5 percent, the International Monetary Fund said.
Russian proverb: “Ne podmazhesh — ne poedesh”. Means “if you don’t grease the wheels, the cart won’t go”. And boy, do you need the grease when living in this country…
A gift to a doctor is not just a gratitude, it’s the assurance that (s)he will pay enough attention to your health issues. Same with nurses, if you want them to change bed and clean urinals after your severely ill relative — you need to be extra “grateful” to them. The fact that all these people must do that for free because that is their direct job and they are getting paid for it is totally ignored. Same applies to universities and colleges — you can buy your spot there and\or keep paying teachers to pass exams. Same applies to the army — parents pay enormous buybacks to allow their kids to dodge the humiliating service in Russian army.
As BNE IntelliNews recently argued, corruption is the system in Russia, but it is a little more sophisticated than that. Putin is increasingly leaving the apolitical parts of the economy to the state apparatus to run, where market forces and the rule of law are supposed to apply, but he keeps control over those parts of the economy where the state makes and spends the most money, and where only his personal rules of the game apply. His state capitalism alternative is probably founded in a belief that the rule of law is insufficient to stop corruption in Russia – or at least it can’t be put in place fast enough for him to use it as a way of transforming the country.
Conclusion
The total “pay-to-win” culture in Russia leaves no question why the most powerful people in the country steal billions of budget money and people are somewhat okay with that: they do the same everyone else does, only on a bigger scale. Russia will likely not be a major player in the future if they do not invest in its people. However, the fact that the world is closing in on them may provide some motivation. Additionally, they only have a decade's worth of energy resources to sell.
The embedded corruption is a huge problem in Russia that not even Putin can fix. The slow pace of progress in the implementation of the national projects led Putin to chew out deputies on live TV and has fueled tension between the various branches of government. The Kremlin has put a lot of stock in the national projects, which is the state's leading investment program, but critics say not enough attention has been paid to improving the business environment, and state-led investment by itself will not be enough to spur growth. The program may increase Russia’s economic potential by 0.5 percent, the International Monetary Fund said. As I have said before, Putin is increasingly leaving the apolitical parts of the economy to the state apparatus to run, where market forces and the rule of law are supposed to apply, but he keeps control over those parts of the economy where the state makes and spends the most money, and where only his personal rules of the game apply. His state capitalism alternative is probably founded on a belief that the rule of law is insufficient to stop corruption in Russia – or at least it can’t be put in place fast enough for him to use it as a way of transforming the country.
Yeah, it’s pretty humorous to me to see Russians complain about foreign banks seizing their reserves and about sanctions seizing their properties/yachts when that pretty much happened by default mode against every single owner of a company that didn’t fully support Putin for the last three decades! Now we have billionaire oligarchs in Russia “murdering” their families and committing suicide by guns or knives, and business people don’t seem to have any faith in the justice system there, hmm! It seems like Putin’s Russia is his playpen of supporters and dead people who didn’t get the memo to only support the guy, aka don’t try to coup d’etat because the secret police have your cellphones bugged, idiots. Lol
American CIA operatives and the spies for centuries before them, acted mostly just like the Russians-Kremlin still does, with killings of foreign presidents and up & coming politicians before they get to power… so the only question in my mind is how long can Putin/Kremlin get away with it before the shitshow shows up on their own door in response to their shitshow in some other places, based on ******* on Ukraine and what I see happening — they have about 10yrs before the Kremlin basically implodes unless they get access to a lot more natural resources to sell off from the Russian motherland, you just can’t sustain bribery when your import/exports are negative for the whole country.
Arguably that is the plan that the exploitative West (aka bankers and rich elites who don’t care about the future and just want to rake in the wealth, not the average human that is) hatched long ago and they love Russia for its raw resources, nobody can stand up and say this is polluting our future, stop it… in Russia, you do that and you don’t wake up from a drinking party with “friends”, oh that guy who showed up that almost nobody knew might not have been a friend… another alcoholic stat, such a sorry state of humanity the newspaper reads. In Soviet Russia, you try to kill alcohol before alcohol kills you, never knowing how is a friend and who is a spy sent to kill you if you don’t play the party line. In modern Russia, well they’re bringing back the Soviet red flag to support the war, so it’s the same.
The Donbas region was all Putin really wanted for the Crimea land bridge, since it was useless without the river-diverted water channel to it. Crimea being a sorta resort in waiting for the rich Oligarchs lol. Of course that was cover for oil and gas resources being taken since when was there a war without oil/gas being a direct driver for the reason/justification for invading??? Since, like I said, the Russians are selling out their resources without any long term plan… think about their position in a decade, no internal cheap energy, so they become another dependent state on other countries’ energy resources… You think the massive country is poor now, wait until it is energy dependent on other countries and their import/export balance is a few hundred billion in the negative each year. They’ll be selling all of their gold minings just to pay the interest on their loans… like every other state dependent on the IMF/World Bank.
That is actually the war Russia is fighting against when it says the West is against them, and they always have been… why they dislike the West, because it always leads to the same lack of sovereignty, as they say. They want full sovereignty to be whoever they want and take whatever they want etc, be as rich as they want, etc. buy whatever they want (assuming they don’t just kill whoever has it if that is cheaper).
That’s also why this war happened to be the stupidest thing I’ve seen Russia do throughout their history of blunders and miscalculations. They had successfully deployed their banks into Europe and they were expanding ever more each year, making the possibility of a financial powerhouse and intellectual property focused Russia a thing… well, they could have become broadly diversified nation they need to become to support a population their size without becoming a failed state dependent on other states for energy and food.
I think Russia was castrated because they were beating the European banks… they took the bait at the Putin level to go steal “defenseless” Ukraine’s resources and Russia miscalculated why USA/EU would help defend Ukraine going forward. The trap was laid over the last 14yrs and Russia (cough Putin) didn’t think the west cared about Ukraine enough to back them in a war with Russia, the great savor of the sovereign world!? Or whatever they think they are.
Arguably, Russia could have become a powerhouse for international shipping (energy resources to transportation services), grain exports to processed food exports, car manufacturing from letting other car companies build their manufacturing there etc… and now they are castrated from those by the aspects of insurance and banking that they hadn’t gotten into yet.
It’s doubtful that they will now be integrated into the western banking system at any level of cooperation… the whole “New World Order” was based on allowing for the development of civilization without the border and destruction of cities and entire regions when someone wanted resources or a bit more empire, they were supposed to go after the resources through open markets… back when the bankers (state controlling oligarchs/rich ass idiots sitting on their estates wondering what they wanted to take or how to steal it if it wasn’t for sale) all agreed to stop trying to annihilate each other using other countries’ mercenary armies or their own citizens, if they had an army worth a damn.
Russia and China didn’t have the same intercontinental warfare experiences, they both seemed to walk away from the post war experience assuming it was the other “army” against them and not the multitude of countries and influences and markets that otoh forced Europeans to realize the single-state dynamics (and associated thinking perspectives) are too internal-or-external (nothing else can be considered, definitely not bad decisions by a dumbass leader) to be constructive for long term development… democracies are slight better in that politics that would be wars turn into political campaigns to win a dumbass election.
The best system I’m not sure what the best option is for the future… ultimately, and I mean this philosophically, its the option that gives the most energy to the individual who uses it for good but I have never been able to define that good in terms of the civilization and individual… they seem at odds with each other. Give more energy to individuals, independent of civilization that is, and it increases their odds of expanding more life but ultimately it has to be pollution free or it all is a short term gain that faults too soon in the future.
Now importing gas and oil from Russia is seen in Europe as supporting the invaders and their plans are to cut it off as soon as possible… Germany in particular will be hurt from a lack of cheap energy and Europe will have to speed up transitioning away from fossil fuels, but the truth is it was going to happen anyway and Russia saw that happening to them due to running out of oil completely in a decade and it decided to invade Ukraine to get more oil and gas reserves in the Donbas region… now they will likely have enough oil for multiple decades because they can’t sell it. Russia ends up being as dumb as the US in going after oil in their wars, while trying to ignore the other costs…
The human potential, losing population and anyone with a brain, cost for Russia is huge and will only grow as the sanctions bite into Russia over the next decade, the lasting effects on Moscow will be the death of a decent economy for the next president of Russia… which, by design, will result in Russia being less of a threat militarily and economically… no more Russia branch banks in Europe, no more oligarchs spending their billions either but its a win for Europe as their banks will have no competition from Russians who had finally figured out how to move into that sector after decades of always being at the bottom of the pack. Now they aren’t even in the pack, too many sanctions to even run their banks and if the rebuilding effort does strip the oligarchs of their assets, the banks are going to be effectively controlled by westerners once more.
So, a win for Russia in Ukraine covers up the wholesale asset stripping from Russia at fire-sale prices of everything Russians had acquired in Europe and their reserves in central banks too, which was the real aim of getting Russia to invade in the first place. Baiting them with a weak Ukraine — while the US/NATO trained their troops and dropped in enough antitank weapons to stop the invasion during the two months leading up to the invasion that the bluff was called on Russia to backdown due to their stupidity… which resulted in everyone who thought Russia wasn’t going to invade being turned into idiots in politics circles and those people had to give up their power now that they basically made their countries weak by relying on Russian oil/gas.
Someone had planned this out but the masters of this war are more likely western bankers, as they love wars for this asset stripping and the fire-sales. Once you stop thinking in terms of battlefields and deaths, there’s really only bankers and military industrials waiting to capitalize on the longer term “cold war” fronts.
Cough cough, Russia loses 3 decades of growth they had from the collapse of the USSR… and another 3 decades at minimum to their actions of invading another country.
Here’s to hoping Russia gets its act together before it is just another name for pissing away the future.
They will deprive China of being able to rely on Russia to defend themselves against the West. Divide and conquer, China has been increasing military spending for a decade and it shows… military weapons, size of the Navy… but they are still in the 20th century thinking… Russia has been trying to outthink the 20th century to get ahead but they don’t have enough insight to think about the world that exists today and how to win in it…
China will happily bleed them of raw resources for their billion-plus people. Sad these leaders fail to see the present or future problems… oligarchs are a dying breed, mostly due to the competition they face, this only gets worse with every new technological development cycle… more people compete and more technology is available for competition to outcompete the old dogs who just use manual labor.
If you read the “great reset” you understand how insane it’ll be in another two decades with robotic manufacturing and material processing… Russia falls apart as the world passes it by with Russia going after the resources, it’ll be a bloodbath until Russia is banned from the ability to party in the West…
The West has wanted the small parts of the world to fully go western that hadn’t, like Cypress and Monaco. Now those places will become desolate and dangerous even for the few Russians who make it there because the oligarchs will mostly be stuck in Russia and no other Russians will be able to afford traveling.
Putin could have engaged Ukraine as their western Allie and become European through Ukraine but Putin and his oligarchs didn’t want to give up their fake little empires of Russian resources. I spent most of yesterday reading through too many articles on Ukraine's war with Russia...
https://www.theguardian.com/business/202...sia-suffer
Russian generals keep making the same mistakes over and over again, Putin is trying to switch to a long haul war but they keep supplying Ukraine with tanks and armored vehicles every time the Russians retreat... Now about half Ukraine's armies tanks are Russian, over 400 of them... over 600 armored vehicles. Polish Krab tanks have 3x the precision of the Soviet tanks and just got added to Ukraine's army frontlines, upgrading the distance 2x and precision 3x of their attacks to outcompete anything Russians have...
Quoting the above article: “Nato is a $40tn economic bloc while Russia is a $1.7tn economy,” he says. “Nato is spending 2% of its income on the military, which means whatever Russia spends, Putin doesn’t stand a chance.” as the whole article points out the scale of Russia's failure to think long term and failure to capitalize on the last two decades to grow its economy and manufacturing potential, failing to comprehend that Russia's largest asset, energy in gas and oil, was the single largest vulnerability to the viability of the Russian state... Putin went all into a fight that he thought Ukraine's politicians were holding an empty hand in, NATO/US backing the Ukrainian hand means Russia sent their troops into a hell hole of a trap, prepped by 8yrs of training exercises in the East of Ukraine that effectively resulted in the blockage of Russia's flash invasion, and the three-day invasion didn't quite go according to plan.
The fact that the Kremlin still thinks this is a winnable war speaks of how mentally limited they are in seeing the larger picture of what they lost when they started the invasion of Crimea and Ukraine... Much like the invasions of Ukraine/Crimea centuries ago https://www.smithsonianmag.com/hist...de...180949969/ it always has been and will be a fight between what are "Russian Nobility" who think they own the peasants and the peasants who realize their only chance for freedom is to fight back... This time NATO is backing the peasants who are fighting for their land.
Fascinating history going on and repeating... This time the numbers of "peasants" seem to be too great for the nobility to suppress once more, so the democratic process proceeds towards the less corrupt forms of governance -- Commercism lol, so corrupt it should be stopped too but that requires so many more laws and regulations and pollution detection and responsibilities, etc. all the things that take time and technology to uphold... almost the exact opposite of what China and Russia are using technology for, so it basically seeds the self-destruction of pollution into the future that was the downfall of the Aztecs (mercury poisoning), Romans (lead pollution), and modern day (plastic pollution everywhere, individual countries like Russia and China have exceedingly high pollution in other realms...)... All seems like a shitshow now that I can use my brain again to think about all of it!
Russia has now put themselves back to before the collapse of USSR in terms of relations with Europe and sped up the retreat from fossil fuels by two full decades by the Europeans… this will give Russia (I mean Moscow’s idiots selling out the raw resources from the whole of Russia to the rest of the world) a life line for another few decades as they were set to run out of their oil and gas anyway by selling it to Europe, now they will have their own oil for a few more decades if they don’t solve their logistics problem of sending it across the entire country to Asian countries on the east coast.
I’d argue Putin is literally just reacting to the western powers excluding his direct involvement in the world economy — because his economy was failing and he only had a decade of energy resources to sell, as his country wasn’t moving outside of its backwardness and embedded corruption. So, leave the idiots too their idiocy and you often get wars
So, they’ll still be exporting wheat and gold to anyone who will take it to keep their economy going… likely falling to around the GDP of Mexico, so barely hanging on to a top G20 economy spot but they could slip beyond that with enough countries banning their products due to tainted war “funding”… maybe cut their annual import/exports in half, might fall below Turkey for economic size… have to wait and see.
The EU won’t ever rely on Russia for oil/gas again, they’re too busy trying to switch to solar/wind etc and alternative oil/gas energy sources too… and most of Russia’s oil and gas wells are connected to pipelines going to EU or in that direction… meaning Russia is going to have about half its energy income cut off minimum, by the time they could figure out how to transport the oil elsewhere, the wells will be offline and it’ll cost too much to restart them (especially without western oil and gas companies telling them how to do it or without the turbines and pumps etc).
Remember, the US started pumping oil when Russia went after Georgia and that crushed the Russian economy by killing the price of oil. So this isn’t the first time Russia basically got spanked for invading another country.
About 1/3 of their exports of energy products go to China, India will likely take up some of the available oil and gas… so I guess about half their ~$160B in energy exports will likely dry up.
No more western hydraulic turbines, airplane parts, CPUs, high tech services, auditing services, etc means lots of the Russian companies will implode thanks to lack of professionalism and lack of anyone checking the books to keep them investment-worthy, they’re already corrupt and willing to take whatever when they think they can get away with it, not to mention there’s no other way to get ahead. With a decent number of their citizens already leaving to find professional work elsewhere, the brain drain will be bad for a few decades until Putin and his Moscow hoard are either dead (two decades for that to maximum or less if Putin is already cancer and dying as reported by reports on his health by the CIA people who didn’t want to be named lol) or otherwise gone from politics, minimum of about 2 decades for the majority of the USSR people to die off but more likely 3-4 decades to really get rid of that mindset the USSR enforced on purpose to deprive people of their own will-to-power, assuming they got enough taste of it before this Russia being cut off from the West that is happening… where you could buy anything to where you are lucky to be able to buy something you want that might be modern… nothing wrong with second, secondhand stuff.
Their trade deficit will likely go to neutral vs making money off of energy exports, they were making about $110B more per year off of energy exports than imports… likely most of that was going directly to oligarchs, so not much to drive the economy forward or make improvements to education or healthcare, etc.
This means they don’t have any direct way to make a import/export profit and will be crippled for the foreseeable future… basically a dependent of China.
Russia is just a Mafia state
In some capacity, this type of system is necessary in developing countries. The majority of people are simply too ignorant to make good decisions, and there is no "deep state" to right the ship. In Book Six of The Republic, Plato describes Socrates trying to get Adeimantus to see the flaws in democracy by comparing a society to a ship. Socrates asks: if you were heading out on a journey by sea, who would you ideally want to decide who was in charge of the vessel? Just anyone or people educated in the rules and demands of seafaring? The latter, of course, says Adeimantus, so why then, responds Socrates, do we keep thinking that any old person should be fit to judge who should be a ruler of a country?
Socrates’s point is that voting in an election is a skill, not a random intuition. And like any skill, it needs to be taught systematically to people. Letting the citizenry vote without an education is as irresponsible as putting them in charge of a trireme sailing to Samos in a storm.
Ancient Athens had painful experience of demagogues. For example, the louche figure of Alcibiades, a rich, charismatic, smooth-talking wealthy man who eroded basic freedoms and helped to push Athens to its disastrous military adventures in Sicily. Socrates knew how easily people seeking office could exploit our desire for easy answers. He asked us to imagine an election debate between two candidates, one who was like a doctor and the other who was like a sweet shop owner. The sweet shop owner would say of his rival: Look, this person here has worked many evils on you. He hurts you, gives you bitter potions, and tells you not to eat and drink whatever you like. He’ll never serve you feasts of many and varied pleasant things like I will.
Socrates asks us to consider the audience response: Do you think the doctor would be able to reply effectively? The true answer — "I cause you trouble, and go against your desires in order to help you" — would cause an uproar among the voters, don’t you think?
We have forgotten all about Socrates’s salient warnings against democracy. We have preferred to think of democracy as an unambiguous good – rather than a process that is only ever as effective as the education system that surrounds it. As a result, we have elected many sweet shop owners and very few doctors.
Approximately 100 years are required for democracy to become functioning. Systematic corruption is pervasive. Twenty years were spent by the United States to rebuild Afghanistan's military into a robust and autonomous fighting force. But the Afghan military collapse began far before President Biden's September 11 declaration that the United States would withdraw. Commanders inflated the number of soldiers in order to siphon off resources, and men on the battlefield frequently lacked ammunition, supplies, and even food. Individual outposts in rural locations where army and police units were besieged by Taliban fighters and promised safe passage if they surrendered and left their equipment behind gradually ceded control of routes and eventually entire districts to the rebels.
Many of these former Russian republics are currently mafia states. Read about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Bere...sinessman) In 2000, he made the mistake of openly challenging Vladimir Putin, someone Berezovsky had played a big role in helping to get elected president. When Putin threw down the hammer, Berezovsky was forced to flee Russia. In Russia, after shock therapy, First it was the mafia, then the police, then the federal government, and then the competition for market share began between gangsters, police, and the Agency. As the police and the federal government became more competitive, gangs were forced out of the market. In many instances, though, rivalry gave way to cooperation, and the services themselves became gangsters. Once a crime lord attains sufficient wealth, they become oligarchs. The oligarchs' economic power buttresses the political power of the Russian president, and the president's power buttresses the economic power of the oligarchs — like a medieval king getting tribute from his aristocracy in exchange for his protection. It's an arrangement that the West is now fighting to disrupt.
Democracy is a complete failure without the Republic understanding that the rules and laws must be there to prevent evils and abuses and corruption and pervasive of intents… I wish more people understood Socrates and philosophy!!! Should be like all types of tests questions concerning socrates and democracies in histories… if you fail too many of the questions, your vote doesn’t count! Lol intelligence matters! Probably the most important piece of information to look at right now is well the Russian people are doing?
Corruption is widespread
One of Russia's greatest impediments to quicker economic growth is the fact that businesspeople lack confidence in the courts and that property rights remain inadequate. The result is that successful businesspeople are extremely reluctant to spend and instead take a defensive stance to safeguard their present enterprises rather than expansionist stances to increase their businesses. This mentality operates as a growth inhibitor, and once a business reaches a scale where the owner can make a comfortable living, it ceases to expand
Enterprises cannot rely on the rule of law to protect their transactions or prevent attempts to extort/bribery from corrupt officials. The news that Vladimir Putin, the Russian tsar of recent days, plans to endlessly hold on to power is not surprising. However, this is very worrying for Putin’s sacrifice - mainly the Russian people and Western democracies. The average nominal monthly wages fell below $450 per month in 2016, and tax on the income of individuals is payable at the rate of 13% on most incomes. Approximately 19.2 million Russians live below the national poverty line. This all-embracing Russian poverty is everywhere: in people’s houses, clothes, the cars they drive, the food they eat, and the entertainment they have.
Preliminary Rosstat figures show Russian gross domestic product (GDP) growth in the first three months of 2019 was just 0.5 percent year-on-year, a figure well below even the most cautious forecasts. This has been attributed to to three factors — weak consumption as consumers had to absorb the pension age increase and a higher VAT rate, as well as much more unpredictable warmer winters that lower utilities output, a big contributor to the GDP number, as well as slower growth of state military orders.
Foreign direct investment (FDI) has fallen to next to nothing, and if the money reinvested by foreign companies already working in Russia (which counts as FDI) is discounted, then actually FDI is negative as some smaller foreign investors have left Russia as the economy becomes increasingly moribund. The VAT hike also hit wages as the increase in nominal wages of just 5.5 percent year-on-year in the first quarter was almost entirely eaten up by the similar increase in inflation.
Putin’s supposedly transformative national spending projects worth an eye-watering $390bn have largely failed to materialize. His promises of economic modernization and raised living standards must be set against a consecutive five-year fall in real wages and cuts to state pensions. Putin is already feeling the squeeze after state pollster VTsIOM reported that trust in the president fell to its lowest level in almost two decades, to 31 percent in May whereas it used to be over 70 percent ten years ago.
The slow pace of progress in the implementation of the national projects led Putin to chew out deputies on live TV and has fuelled tension between the various branches of government. The Kremlin has put a lot of store in the national projects which is the state's leading investment programme, but critics say not enough attention has been paid to improving the business environment and state-led investment by itself will not be enough to spur growth to get to the 3 percent GDP growth target by 2021. At most, the programme may increase Russia’s economic potential by 0.5 percent, the International Monetary Fund said.
Russian proverb: “Ne podmazhesh — ne poedesh”. Means “if you don’t grease the wheels, the cart won’t go”. And boy, do you need the grease when living in this country…
A gift to a doctor is not just a gratitude, it’s the assurance that (s)he will pay enough attention to your health issues. Same with nurses, if you want them to change bed and clean urinals after your severely ill relative — you need to be extra “grateful” to them. The fact that all these people must do that for free because that is their direct job and they are getting paid for it is totally ignored. Same applies to universities and colleges — you can buy your spot there and\or keep paying teachers to pass exams. Same applies to the army — parents pay enormous buybacks to allow their kids to dodge the humiliating service in Russian army.
As BNE IntelliNews recently argued, corruption is the system in Russia, but it is a little more sophisticated than that. Putin is increasingly leaving the apolitical parts of the economy to the state apparatus to run, where market forces and the rule of law are supposed to apply, but he keeps control over those parts of the economy where the state makes and spends the most money, and where only his personal rules of the game apply. His state capitalism alternative is probably founded in a belief that the rule of law is insufficient to stop corruption in Russia – or at least it can’t be put in place fast enough for him to use it as a way of transforming the country.
Conclusion
The total “pay-to-win” culture in Russia leaves no question why the most powerful people in the country steal billions of budget money and people are somewhat okay with that: they do the same everyone else does, only on a bigger scale. Russia will likely not be a major player in the future if they do not invest in its people. However, the fact that the world is closing in on them may provide some motivation. Additionally, they only have a decade's worth of energy resources to sell.
The embedded corruption is a huge problem in Russia that not even Putin can fix. The slow pace of progress in the implementation of the national projects led Putin to chew out deputies on live TV and has fueled tension between the various branches of government. The Kremlin has put a lot of stock in the national projects, which is the state's leading investment program, but critics say not enough attention has been paid to improving the business environment, and state-led investment by itself will not be enough to spur growth. The program may increase Russia’s economic potential by 0.5 percent, the International Monetary Fund said. As I have said before, Putin is increasingly leaving the apolitical parts of the economy to the state apparatus to run, where market forces and the rule of law are supposed to apply, but he keeps control over those parts of the economy where the state makes and spends the most money, and where only his personal rules of the game apply. His state capitalism alternative is probably founded on a belief that the rule of law is insufficient to stop corruption in Russia – or at least it can’t be put in place fast enough for him to use it as a way of transforming the country.
Yeah, it’s pretty humorous to me to see Russians complain about foreign banks seizing their reserves and about sanctions seizing their properties/yachts when that pretty much happened by default mode against every single owner of a company that didn’t fully support Putin for the last three decades! Now we have billionaire oligarchs in Russia “murdering” their families and committing suicide by guns or knives, and business people don’t seem to have any faith in the justice system there, hmm! It seems like Putin’s Russia is his playpen of supporters and dead people who didn’t get the memo to only support the guy, aka don’t try to coup d’etat because the secret police have your cellphones bugged, idiots. Lol
American CIA operatives and the spies for centuries before them, acted mostly just like the Russians-Kremlin still does, with killings of foreign presidents and up & coming politicians before they get to power… so the only question in my mind is how long can Putin/Kremlin get away with it before the shitshow shows up on their own door in response to their shitshow in some other places, based on ******* on Ukraine and what I see happening — they have about 10yrs before the Kremlin basically implodes unless they get access to a lot more natural resources to sell off from the Russian motherland, you just can’t sustain bribery when your import/exports are negative for the whole country.
Arguably that is the plan that the exploitative West (aka bankers and rich elites who don’t care about the future and just want to rake in the wealth, not the average human that is) hatched long ago and they love Russia for its raw resources, nobody can stand up and say this is polluting our future, stop it… in Russia, you do that and you don’t wake up from a drinking party with “friends”, oh that guy who showed up that almost nobody knew might not have been a friend… another alcoholic stat, such a sorry state of humanity the newspaper reads. In Soviet Russia, you try to kill alcohol before alcohol kills you, never knowing how is a friend and who is a spy sent to kill you if you don’t play the party line. In modern Russia, well they’re bringing back the Soviet red flag to support the war, so it’s the same.
The Donbas region was all Putin really wanted for the Crimea land bridge, since it was useless without the river-diverted water channel to it. Crimea being a sorta resort in waiting for the rich Oligarchs lol. Of course that was cover for oil and gas resources being taken since when was there a war without oil/gas being a direct driver for the reason/justification for invading??? Since, like I said, the Russians are selling out their resources without any long term plan… think about their position in a decade, no internal cheap energy, so they become another dependent state on other countries’ energy resources… You think the massive country is poor now, wait until it is energy dependent on other countries and their import/export balance is a few hundred billion in the negative each year. They’ll be selling all of their gold minings just to pay the interest on their loans… like every other state dependent on the IMF/World Bank.
That is actually the war Russia is fighting against when it says the West is against them, and they always have been… why they dislike the West, because it always leads to the same lack of sovereignty, as they say. They want full sovereignty to be whoever they want and take whatever they want etc, be as rich as they want, etc. buy whatever they want (assuming they don’t just kill whoever has it if that is cheaper).
That’s also why this war happened to be the stupidest thing I’ve seen Russia do throughout their history of blunders and miscalculations. They had successfully deployed their banks into Europe and they were expanding ever more each year, making the possibility of a financial powerhouse and intellectual property focused Russia a thing… well, they could have become broadly diversified nation they need to become to support a population their size without becoming a failed state dependent on other states for energy and food.
I think Russia was castrated because they were beating the European banks… they took the bait at the Putin level to go steal “defenseless” Ukraine’s resources and Russia miscalculated why USA/EU would help defend Ukraine going forward. The trap was laid over the last 14yrs and Russia (cough Putin) didn’t think the west cared about Ukraine enough to back them in a war with Russia, the great savor of the sovereign world!? Or whatever they think they are.
Arguably, Russia could have become a powerhouse for international shipping (energy resources to transportation services), grain exports to processed food exports, car manufacturing from letting other car companies build their manufacturing there etc… and now they are castrated from those by the aspects of insurance and banking that they hadn’t gotten into yet.
It’s doubtful that they will now be integrated into the western banking system at any level of cooperation… the whole “New World Order” was based on allowing for the development of civilization without the border and destruction of cities and entire regions when someone wanted resources or a bit more empire, they were supposed to go after the resources through open markets… back when the bankers (state controlling oligarchs/rich ass idiots sitting on their estates wondering what they wanted to take or how to steal it if it wasn’t for sale) all agreed to stop trying to annihilate each other using other countries’ mercenary armies or their own citizens, if they had an army worth a damn.
Russia and China didn’t have the same intercontinental warfare experiences, they both seemed to walk away from the post war experience assuming it was the other “army” against them and not the multitude of countries and influences and markets that otoh forced Europeans to realize the single-state dynamics (and associated thinking perspectives) are too internal-or-external (nothing else can be considered, definitely not bad decisions by a dumbass leader) to be constructive for long term development… democracies are slight better in that politics that would be wars turn into political campaigns to win a dumbass election.
The best system I’m not sure what the best option is for the future… ultimately, and I mean this philosophically, its the option that gives the most energy to the individual who uses it for good but I have never been able to define that good in terms of the civilization and individual… they seem at odds with each other. Give more energy to individuals, independent of civilization that is, and it increases their odds of expanding more life but ultimately it has to be pollution free or it all is a short term gain that faults too soon in the future.
Now importing gas and oil from Russia is seen in Europe as supporting the invaders and their plans are to cut it off as soon as possible… Germany in particular will be hurt from a lack of cheap energy and Europe will have to speed up transitioning away from fossil fuels, but the truth is it was going to happen anyway and Russia saw that happening to them due to running out of oil completely in a decade and it decided to invade Ukraine to get more oil and gas reserves in the Donbas region… now they will likely have enough oil for multiple decades because they can’t sell it. Russia ends up being as dumb as the US in going after oil in their wars, while trying to ignore the other costs…
The human potential, losing population and anyone with a brain, cost for Russia is huge and will only grow as the sanctions bite into Russia over the next decade, the lasting effects on Moscow will be the death of a decent economy for the next president of Russia… which, by design, will result in Russia being less of a threat militarily and economically… no more Russia branch banks in Europe, no more oligarchs spending their billions either but its a win for Europe as their banks will have no competition from Russians who had finally figured out how to move into that sector after decades of always being at the bottom of the pack. Now they aren’t even in the pack, too many sanctions to even run their banks and if the rebuilding effort does strip the oligarchs of their assets, the banks are going to be effectively controlled by westerners once more.
So, a win for Russia in Ukraine covers up the wholesale asset stripping from Russia at fire-sale prices of everything Russians had acquired in Europe and their reserves in central banks too, which was the real aim of getting Russia to invade in the first place. Baiting them with a weak Ukraine — while the US/NATO trained their troops and dropped in enough antitank weapons to stop the invasion during the two months leading up to the invasion that the bluff was called on Russia to backdown due to their stupidity… which resulted in everyone who thought Russia wasn’t going to invade being turned into idiots in politics circles and those people had to give up their power now that they basically made their countries weak by relying on Russian oil/gas.
Someone had planned this out but the masters of this war are more likely western bankers, as they love wars for this asset stripping and the fire-sales. Once you stop thinking in terms of battlefields and deaths, there’s really only bankers and military industrials waiting to capitalize on the longer term “cold war” fronts.
Cough cough, Russia loses 3 decades of growth they had from the collapse of the USSR… and another 3 decades at minimum to their actions of invading another country.
Here’s to hoping Russia gets its act together before it is just another name for pissing away the future.
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