The US and EU are also placing sanctions on the Russian central bank. Experts quoted by the Financial Times seem to believe that this is more impactful than the SWIFT disconnect:
’Josh Lipsky, a former IMF adviser now at the Atlantic Council think-tank, said earlier the US imposing sanctions on the Russian central bank would be an “extraordinarily significant and damaging move to the Russian economy”.
’“A G20 central bank has never been sanctioned before. This is not Iran. This is not Venezuela. So to shut off their central bank from the international financial system, or at least the dollar and euro economy, is a massively destabilising move potentially,” said Lipsky.
’Edward Fishman, a former US official now at the Center for a New American Security, said it would present a “devastating blow” to the Russian economy that would eclipse the significance of a ban on Swift.’
Maybe I’m stupid but did he not calculate the cost of this? Their stock market crumbled, the ruble crumbled, SWIFT kicked out. All that for Ukraine? What is so valuable there to him, I really still don’t get it. Is he just a crazy person? So what if Ukraine joins NATO. Is NATO going to launch an offensive on Russia? No. I don’t understand how his mind works.
Ukraine is/was on track to become a petrostate for Europe, which is a big threat for Russia. Add to that all the other points and he has somewhat „good reason“. Russia is also kinda on a decline polulation wise so he must act sooner rather then later. One thing no one notes is that Crimea gets most of its sweet water from Ukraine (which was cut off of course). That was quite the issue, but it seems they advanced now to the location where it was cut off so that’s solved I guess.
Don't know where GP is from, but "Süßwasser", which translates to sweet water is the German term for water from lakes and rivers in comparison to salty water from the sea. Might be the same in related languages.
Fun idea you got, but not exactly, in some european languages, "sweet water" refers to drinking water, as opposed to what would be "salt water", water from seas and oceans.
Acqua dolce in Italian is literally sweet water opposed to acqua salata, salt water. It's a common mistake to translate literally expressions and grammatical constructs from one's native language to a foreign language. I probably did it this reply without noticing it: it's long enough to contain some bug.
I would not say it's common: I'm a native (American) English speaker and I've never heard the word before! I would just guess it's some kind of flavored water before reading this thread.
>All that for Ukraine? What is so valuable there to him, I really still don’t get it.
I think Russia agreed with China to pull this wild experiment off with invading Ukraine in order to see how far US and its allies are willing to go to sanction Russia and to see if two of them(Russia and China) can survive and prevail together. This mentality "me against the world" is extremely irrational from diplomatic and economic point of view but it can work out because Russian and Chinese economy can complement, synergize and eventually survive and live together. Russia has 6,400 nuclear warheads—the largest stockpile of nuclear weapons in the world so no way anybody can compete with them militarily. Also they have $600bn+ in national reserves in USD, gold and other assets so this vast amount of sanctions won't hurt them at least not in the short term. Btw Taiwan could be next.
Won't the bulk, or minimally a good chunk, of those non-rubble reserves be blocked now?
From the below on response was "$130 bln is gold, kept in Russia. $60 bln is renminbi, kept in China. All the rest - in G-7 countries"
Seems fluid and not totally clear the details yet. But from the below FT reporter. article is slightly vague since sanction rules are still being written. But on Twitter they wrote clearer that those assets will not be accessible.
---
A US official declined to say if the US would sanction the central bank by adding it the Treasury’s “Specially Designated Nationals” list, which Fishman described as “the single most impactful sanction that you could apply to Russia, and you could do it with a stroke of the pen.”
“It would render a sizeable chunk of their foreign exchange reserves unusable overnight,” Fishman said.
"The move would ban US entities from dealing with the central bank, which would mean that everyone would be “skittish about moving any assets on behalf of the Russian central bank”, he said.
You really trust CCP? Russia and China have common enemy. US. No one else really matters to them because US is the only "West" superpower excluding India which is economically lagging quit a bit behind US and their competitor China.
This has nothing to do with trust; China would back Russia if it were in their interest, but it looks like they are hanging back, probably because it looks like it is blowing up in Russia's face.
That rhetoric makes me uneasy. Isn’t the US an enemy of China the choice of the US? My understanding is that until Trump overnight declaration of economic war and Biden continuing it China was maybe not an ally but a strong economic partner. Don’t tell me being authoritarian automatically makes it an enemy otherwise so would be Saudi Arabia with the Yemen situation being worse than anything in China.
The play between the West and China is not so direct it is more played indirectly. So US/EU will not ask/impose China something nor China will support Rusia against US/EU directly. Everything will happen indirectly and none of these two sides will risk the chance of a direct question where the answear could be NO thus making them act directly => collapsing global economy.
So if China wants to support Occident they will do it indirect and the same will go for US/EU: they will not ask China directly to ban Russia but more suggest that China should not be very active to support Russia.
Is there any reason to think he's a geopolitical idiot? I wouldn't exactly go praise his actions at a dinner with political donors (cough cough), but his history doesn't strike me as one from someone who doesn't know how to play politics and power. Is there precedent for stupid actions? Obviously looking at it from the lens of a dictator's self-interest, not my Westerner's ideals of morality. I can see this being a self-destructive mistake from an otherwise intelligent autocrat. Could also be the descent of his sanity but I'd like to know why that'd be believable, and hopefully that isn't the case as it'd make him that much more dangerous with regards to the likelihood of.. well, flipping the table.
Russia cannot accept Ukraine to be in NATO hands. Just like US wasn’t able to allow Cuba to be in Soviet hands or how China would go to war if Hong Kong decided to want independence. It’s maths really, Putin or not it would be the same.
But dear MrRiddle: Ukraine wasn't even near getting Nato membership, was it?
Or do you have secret information that Nato would overnight change its rules to allow countries with disputed borders to join?
The problem with Ukraine seems to be that it was a successful democracy on the border of Russia and that due to the historically close connections between Russia and Ukraine, Russians could easily see themselves in Ukrainians.
What makes you think that Ukraine was an example of successful democracy. I don't have this feeling of "successful democracy" even for some neighboring EU countries such as Romania, Bulgaria and to some extent Greece (since the debt issue and the subsequent change in government). Quite the contrary, to me it feels that it is all smoke and mirrors propelled by mass media to convince the people that they live in an actual democracy. Under the smoke it is all business and geopolitics.
Nemtzov said in 2014, literally, "Putin is deranged and you should know that".
This is why he was killed in 2015, mostly. Because even then that was the truth.
All those discussions about morals, mistakes and the descent of sanity are beside the point.
How do you define an autocrat as "irrational" if not as one that's "lost sanity"? I interpreted your comment as meaning that, as well as this quote of being "deranged".
Sanity (Oxfod, 2nd def) :
>the state of being sensible and reasonable
Morality is indeed besides the point, I just added it as I feel dirty suggesting he's rationale 3 days after invading Ukraine without amending the idea.
As for mistake, I think speaking of a political mistake is relevant if we should consider your explanation wrong, i.e. he's sane/rational autocrat whose invasion backfired more than expected, should that be the case.
I guess that's the source of our disagreement as I don't agree with that despite living in a free democracy with no intention of leaving such a system (CC: my prior comment w.r.t. Western ideals).
Narcissist, certainly; immoral and corrupted, most likely; but still possibly rational [0], I see no reason they'd be de facto irrational despite how I feel about them. Born autocrats (or born in a line of succession) are a different story, but I'd argue it would even be unlikely for a commoner to ascend to absolute power without starting off as a rational, calculated and intelligent person (tho ofc not impossible, there are obvious cases). Not that there is any guarantee they'll necessarily remain so, seems unlikely after years or decades being surrounded by sycophants.
I'm not seeing any difference if one was born and nurtured into autocracy, or just happened to have it land in their hands. I'd say in either case the pressures are such that the resulting behaviour can not even be named as selfishness. It's just survival, and society needs/development/etc/etc be damned.
Survival breeds sycophants, ...
Shit, why am I reciting stuff from 8th century BC here?
Nazi Germany against the world was irrational but still Hitler did it. Now imagine Hitler having 6,400 nuclear warheads like Russia has them today. What would and who would stop Hitler? I think Russian government took a wild gamble taking in consideration their military supremacy and their ability to survive alone with the help of "friendly" China.
my take is, he is testing the nato.
it was originally there to oppose the warsaw pact, which broke with the soviet union.
so what is natos purpose?
we have seen time and again that nato bases are set up to opose the russian federation.
then whats it gonna do if i poke it in a country that is formally not yet a member?
everybody is trying to get putin "back" to the table, they dont realize he already memorized what is on it and is not interested in anything that is being offered there...
If there is anything we can take out of the current conflict is that being a NATO member as a country is exceedingly important. I am unsure Russia would have made all the moves it made against Ukraine if the latter were a NATO country.
Also, mr P managed to do what the US hasn't achieved - make Germany put a ridiculous amount of money in the defense budged - exceeding the 2% of the GDP that was asked by the US in the past.
Every way you look at the current situation it is undescribably stupid and dumb, I don't care about "super sekrit intelligence information", the backlash from the US and the EU to the Ukraine invasion is incredible and continues mounting up. All that mr P can hope right now is that he doesn't end up in jail for life at the end of this whole debacle.
I doubt that, otherwise he could back out now and that would be enough to prove that he will invade other countries to back up "Russian interests". Looks like he's all in this time though. Maybe he has a terminal disease and just doesn't care?
He's 69. In ten years he could be backstabbed or forced to leave. There is a tradition of that sort of things in the SSSR. If he wants to be reminded as a father of the country by doing something more substantial than rebuilding the might of Russia (which he did) this is the time to do it.
Off-topic: when reading the wikipedia articles that talk about "hot topics", if you want to see a less biased version, it pays to check edit history. In this case the page was last changed in November 2021 [0], before a set of changes occured starting at 21st Feb 2022. So... Be careful to at least notice the propaganda when it is happening.
(I don't have a proof of course, ymmv, and all that...)
Anyone remember cuban crisis during the cold war? In fact, even today US is still sanctioning Cuba despite it no longer have USSR backing or any ability to threaten US.
You underestimate how much threat a hostile neighbor poses.
The reason people are saying platitudes about solidarity while watching people die from a safe distance, is because the nuclear threat is credible.
And the nuclear threat is credible, because the leader appears crazy or at least inexplicable.
As long as everyone else is not that crazy and cannot appear so, MAD is inoperative.
So in that case, why not take over the world? It just has to be in small enough steps that none of them justifies nukes individually. That's it, that's the constraint.
> What is so valuable there to him, I really still don’t get it.
The gas pipelines. Gazprom is a key element of his kleptocratic rule. I don't think it's a coincidence that he waited so many years to "solve" the Donbass, but a few months after it became clear that NordStream2 will likely never become operational, suddenly he went balls-out. From a security standpoint he could have simply deployed in the key regions and dared anyone to fight back, like Erdogan has done over the Syrian regions he wanted to annex. Instead Putin is trying to take the whole thing, because he wants to control the pipelines all the way.
One think I really, really hope will come out of this, regardless of the outcome - to cut back dependence on any Russian import including gas and oil to ideally 0 across whole Europe. It doesn't make sense to cut one's branch off by paying him to build & maintain his army.
If it costs more, well damn that's the price for freedom I guess right now, still acceptable given circumstances.
I've been saying it for years, also here repeatedly - Russia and its current 'leader' is by far the biggest threat to European free western society we value so much here. Even the most stubborn and russia-invested ones are getting the memo now.
>If it costs more, well damn that's the price for freedom I guess right now, still acceptable given circumstances.
Without Russian energy supply Europeans will be heating their houses with freedom. And European industry will also be using freedom as fuel. There is no alternative to this in any foreseeable future.
Norway has been holding back oil production. If needed we can essily ramp it up quite a bit for a few years.
And, as I mentioned the other day, I at least would be positive to sell at a lower prices to friendly countries in Europe until we get this situation under control.
The counter-argument is that, often, it's more effective to coopt your opponent rather than to fight him. I reckon that giving them NS2 would have avoided this war - at worst they'd have taken just the Donbass like they took Crimea.
...Keep your enemies closer aside, one does not hop into bed with a hostile power and just expect things to go well. They will not hesitate to pull out of the arrangement when it hurts the most. In fact, one can practically count on it in most cases.
Russia has terminal demographics. Russia’s borders as they are today are impossible to defend let alone with a soon to be rapidly shrinking military. If they don’t take regions they can defend far easier with few troops then they never will. Russia has been invaded enough times across the North European Plain and Hordelands and they have a long memory, and at least the leadership has little conscience. I can’t read Putin’s mind either, but, perhaps he figured Ukraine would roll over and the US and Europe wouldn’t do anything.
He probably expected harsh sanctions and nothing more. Russia has a pretty massive war chest, and the US will suffer from shutting out Russian oil.
But Putin was exactly right that NATO will not respond militarily. And he is exactly right to think NATO was delusional and did not expect him to invade.
> And he is exactly right to think NATO was delusional and did not expect him to invade.
NATO has anticipated an invasion for years (making it less likely to happen or succeed is why they’ve been heavy backers of Ukraine's massive defense buildup over the last decade), and the US administration particularly has been calling out this invasion long before it launched.
> the US will suffer from shutting out Russian oil.
The US is a net exporter of oil. Some say it's a temporary effect of COVID, but the switch happened in November 2019, before COVID hit, and if you look at the graph, net imports have been in a decade long decline.
If you take everything hegemonic powers say at face value, all politics and all history is utterly incomprehensible.
If you look at what NATO actually did, it’s very difficult to take them seriously. They bluff on a near constant basis, especially about Russia. But, realize they weren’t sending any troops to Ukraine because they are too arrogant to even believe their own claims. Also, Biden refused to reassure Putin that Ukraine was not invited to NATO. If they were so confident of a Russian invasion but they were still so willing to be petty and stubborn, then blood is on their hands all the same. It simply doesn’t add up.
Of course they never actually believed Iraq had WMDs either, but did that matter? If anyone knows how this works, it’s Putin. If you didn’t notice, he accused Ukraine of manufacturing WMDs in his invasion announcement speech. Does that mean he actually believes it? No. He was mocking the eternally hypocritical lying Western elites. He knows how they operate and he knows others know how they operate, and he operated accordingly.
> But, realize they weren’t sending any troops to Ukraine because they are too arrogant to even believe their own claims.
Uh, no, they pulled their troops training Ukraine’s forces out because they did believe their own claims. As they stated many times alongside saying Russia was going to invade, they were not going to commit troops to fight such an invasion (or even to evacuate their own citizens) because they have no mutual defense treaty with Ukraine and did not wish to escalate any invasion of Ukraine into a World War.
If they hadn't believed Russia would invade, their troops would have still been there when they did.
> But, realize they weren’t sending any troops to Ukraine...
I do realize that.
> ... because they are too arrogant to even believe their own claims.
No. I'm afraid you got this backwards. The NATO countries quite literally removed their troops from Ukraine instead of sending in new ones precisely because they believed that Russia is going to invade.
During an invasion if there are NATO troops in Ukraine said troops would engage with the Russian troops. This can lead to an escalatory spiral and we end up with a nuclear confrontation. This is why what little NATO troops there were in Ukraine were withdrawn.
> If you look at what NATO actually did, it’s very difficult to take them seriously.
I'm sure NATO is very worried about you not taking them seriously. What exactly are you expecting from them?
> If they were so confident of a Russian invasion but they were still so willing to be petty and stubborn, then blood is on their hands all the same.
That's twisted again. The blood is on Putin's hand and the Russian state's hand.
You talk like Putin is some kind of god? He's a piece of shit bully. What if he take Ukraine? it will cost him the confidence of his people as they start starving from being cut off from Capitol unless they're willing to become a vassal state to China. He has a good tactical game but his strategic game is a failure unless he pulls out now.
No I don’t. Clearly Putin has little chance to succeed. But that doesn’t mean his best move was capitulation to the incorrigible Western liberal consensus which was clearly too arrogant to even plan for the possibility that anyone would disobey their incessant cravings for domination. I think his speech made very clear where he stands. And while some of it represented unhinged nationalist ideals, every single one of his criticisms of hypocritical Western liberal leaders was spot on.
The consensus in this thread is that Putin has gone crazy. But I think there's a rational angle that we must accept.
What's the cost of this to Putin? Think about it carefully -- for Putin himself, there is more or less only an upside.
1. China unfortunately is choosing to side with Russia. Realistically, we can't do much to interfere with trade between China and Russia. That means that sanctions that we're going to impose will have less of an effect.
(I hope this doesn't read as political flamewar, since it's my intent just to state the facts.)
2. I am rooting for Ukraine, and I think they have a chance at victory. But the reality is that the battle is far from over. And in the worst case, if Putin loses, he still has the option of employing a tactical nuke as a last resort. My point here is that even in the worst case for Putin, he still believes he can win, no matter what.
I'm hoping that Putin will lose, and does try to use a nuke, because that seems the most likely path to Putin finally being assassinated. But until that moment comes, we're witnessing the outcome of an unhinged person who is also acting rationally. (Both can be true simultaneously.)
China was siding with Russia right up until Russia started invading. Since then, China has been uneasy with this move.
Some of their state owned banks have suspended financing of Russian resources purchases [1]
And they really disliked Russia's declaration of the independence for the separatist regions in Ukraine. As a country with several separatist regions (including Taiwan), China simply can't agree with with the concept that an external country can declear one or more of it's regions as independent.
Wouldn't the result of Russia losing all it's allies be an even more unstable situation? Assuming others follow suit to China, tho I have no idea how realistic that is, for instance India isn't close to China AFAIK. Barring an internal coup, in the desperation of getting truly economically and politically isolated I could imagine an angry autocrat going for an true all-in.
> The consensus in this thread is that Putin has gone crazy.
I mean... Does anyone else remember the time (2004/5?) Putin stole a $25k Superbowl ring from a Patriot just because he knew he could get away with it (notably, while also observing "I could kill someone wearing this")? This is pretty much the same exact thing on a broader scale.
The global community should no longer stand open belligerence like this and I'm glad we're cutting them off from the world. Let's see how long they last in financial isolation.
It's too bad that the story that @Pornhub blocked Russia was fakenews, as that would have been hilarious.
I did NOT hear about that. But, in the grand scheme or things, having a $25k ring confiscated is on par with customs confiscating laptops as you cross the border. And no one is upset about that.
holy crap, that plays into my theory that he is testing the nato, really the world.
i mean, he can get away with this much, what else are they gonna let him do until they realize he is not interested in talks?
In Germany our freshly elected politicians are making fools of themselfs calling out for Putin to return to the negotiation tables... they say "we are waiting for you mister putin"... while he thinks "keep on waiting then, ill have my way with eastern europe"
>I'm hoping that Putin will lose, and does try to use a nuke
That doesn't end (nor start for that matter) with a nuke. You can bet Russians (and basically anyone alive) would prefer the scenario where he remains their autocrat than one where he triggers their apocalypse if not everyone's.
Hope I'm wrong to believe in mutually assured destruction, and hopefully we won't get to test the theory at all.
Learned behavior. He took Crimea without firing a shot. Took Georgia and it didn’t even make the 6 o’clock news. Slowly expanded his empire while the West was preoccupied with Iraq and Afghanistan.
Even up until the tanks started rolling in did Europe not even consider the possibility of invasion to be real. Just last Monday was the Ukrainian President asking for calm and not to overreact.
Yes. I think there was also a severe miscalculation how the invasion would be internationally received. Putin has been extremely successful at distracting and dividing the western world with troll farms and reactionary political movements. But violating long respected international law with an overt invasion cannot be postmodernly relativized away. And Russia going back to doing exactly what Soviet Russia did - subjugate and impoverish client states to implement crony totalitarianism - inflames a lot of cultural memories. The modern world makes the contrast even starker - at least the European countries behind the Iron Curtain had been liberated from Nazi Germany with Soviet Starvation being a step up. This is a direct attack on a modernizing democracy to drag it backwards to the "good old days".
I think he knew there would be a great cost. Indications are they were preparing.
But maybe underestimated the entire cost… how in lock step NATO and other nations would be.
Even if victorious, he seems to have underestimated the Ukrainians.
I think he expected a VERY quick victory, that doesn’t seem to be on track so far…
Militarily I have no idea why they haven’t established air superiority or even softened up the opposition for a while before committing to a ground war….
Not that I'm an expert on this topic, but my guess is that Putin lives in a self-produced information bubble. He's superficially well-informed but relies way too much on intelligence reports, which can completely misrepresent what's going on when you look at them in isolation. His mindeset is "me against others" and "Russia against the rest of the world." He is surrounded by Yes-sayers as advisers and some oligarch friends who are probably also not particularly connected with reality and more interested in real estate, superyachts and Gazprom stocks. Lack of good advisers is a huge problem.
Given this background and a certain lack of empathy and sense of right and wrong, from Putin's perspective the past actions appear reasonable. He successfully prevented Ukraine from joining NATO and the EU and involved it into a useless war in the Donbas region. Now things weren't moving on from this point and the situation in the Donbas region was a constant source of concern. So he apparently decided to "solve" the Donbas problem once and for all, perhaps as part of his legacy, and miscalculated. From a pure military perspective the decision might seem reasonable. Ukraine's military is badly outnumbered and still has not much of a chance in the long run. He probably thought it's going to be a quick rush into the capital, installing a puppet regime, and he's done. Western military analysts thought the same.
Why he's been so extremely fixed on keeping Ukraine out of NATO can probably only be explained with his KGB background and the corresponding mindset. There are superficial justifications, it is a prima facie reasonable standpoint of Russia to be against this, but nevertheless Putin seems to be fixated on this in an abnormal way. It is clear that NATO membership of Ukraine would not pose a threat to Russia. However, you could just as well ask why Putin hasn't diversified Russia's economy, made the country a close ally and trade partner of the EU, and helped turning mother Russia into a prospering modern democratic state. This wouldn't have been hard, Russia has all the potential you could imagine - rich of resources, longstanding integration into Europe, excellent scientists and engineers (before the brain drain). The answer is probably that Putin is a paranoid poison murderer and filthy rich ex-KGB officer who came to power more or less by accident. He's simply not good presidential material. Normally this isn't a problem (most presidents aren't), but when a "president" becomes a dictator and is surrounded by Yes-sayers in an information bubble it certainly is a problem.
I heard a pretty good radio program today on NPR. A guy was a foreign exchange student in Russia in the 90's and he went back to interview the lady he lived with, a CPA. She referred to him as her American son, and he to her as his Russian mother. She talks about why she loves Putin. The main topic was on Putin's popularity with Russians.
The TLDR is, Russia was shit before Putin came to power, and now, Russia is not shit for average Russians. Putin gets credit for that.
He did calculate the cost of this, and gave the order regardless. This is the most worrying part of the current events, because it implies that more is to follow, and not just in Ukraine.
As far as what is and isn't what's valuable, you're ignoring the ideological dimension. Putin's favorite philosopher is is Ivan Ilyin, whose take on politics was basically Eastern Orthodox fascism. Ukraine itself, to Russian nationalists, is the single largest chunk of land that is "rightfully theirs". If Putin can pull the invasion off, he'll be a hero with that crowd.
It is intentional that they are not going to show on the news Putins reasons for invading. You won’t see him speaking and you won’t see quotes from him because they don’t want him to sway you even a little bit to his side. They might cherry pick 2-3 seconds to “catch” Putin saying something that will portray him negatively but they will never allow his reasoning to be spread. This keeps him an enemy. You might wonder why isn’t every country against this, and it because they do allow him to speak and at minimum create doubt in peoples mind on who is the bad guy. For instance, it’s unlikely you would have heard how Ukraine cut off water to Crimea which Russia took over previously, literally forcing people to starve because no water for crops. You probably wouldn’t have heard that Putin is comparing Ukrainians to Nazis in their treatment of Russians in Ukraine. If you heard only what Putin was saying and not what our media was saying you might even consider them the good guys. The problem is who is telling the truth here? The US explicitly said weeks before invasion that Russia is going to conduct a false flag operation as justification. Did that operation occur? I don’t know, because as I said we literally get no explanation presented to us by our media and that is the way they prefer it. Feeling for your enemy would make NATO and the US look like the bully, if their citizens were to believe Putin’s explanation or even see them to understand them.
I'd avoid the meme that Putin is acting irrationally or crazy.
He is looking at the west build a fortress around Russia through NATO. Look at US reaction to Cuba and now imagine Cuba having a 100x more tactical and strategic geography in relationship to the US.
Months ago Russia asked that Ukraine and Georgia be excluded from NATO. We ignored him. A better approach would have been to negotiate and demand that they become permanently neutral countrys. Now we're here. Yes Putin owns all this bloodshed but it is naive to say that we the west did everything to avert this situation.
No one is "building a fortress around Russia", least of all the Western allies. The Russian western border is a small part of their territorial limits.
Ukraine is an independent country and can decide who they want to ally with, clearly it's not Russia.
He got pissed off when Ukrainians elected a leader that was not a puppet of Russia. Now he is exacting revenge because he doesn't have a tacit Russian territory like with Belarus any more.
When Finland and Sweden decide they need the defensive advantages of NATO is he going to invade Scandinavia too? Should they be force to be "permanently neutral" as well?
NATO membership is a red herring. But I agree that "we" made a lot of bad moves in the past decade: if you keep poking the bear, at some point he's going to react somehow.
The only one poking "the bear" is Putin. He hates that his country is withering on the vine. He can't see that it's his own authoritarian policies that are slowly killing his country.
If it’s a red herring then why was Biden so stubborn in refusing to give assurances that Ukraine was not invited into NATO? We are talking about war. There is never an excuse to come short of doing everything possible to prevent it. But Biden refused. How do you explain that?
Because why should he? Ukraine is a sovereign nation and should make up its own mind. I'm personally unsure why they didn't just declare themselves a neutral country like Switzerland, but here we are.
In all fairness, Ukraine is orders of magnitude easier to invade than Switzerland. Just because you're neutral, doesn't mean you're not a target - and Switzerland had for decades pretty robust defense mechanisms (eg. https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/hidden-devices_switzerland-to-d...).
If you’re so into Ukraine making up it’s own mind, what do you think of Western leaders toppling its democratically elected government in 2014? This is commonly known history. Hypocrisy like this has defined the West’s efforts towards global domination for over half a century, and it’s a primary reason Putin would have understandably needed every bit of reassurance that could have been provided. But Biden refused. The arrogance knows no bounds.
Russia literally signed Ukrainians independence in 1991, although they didn't have much room to despute that.
Ukrainians wanted deeper ties with Europe in 2014 and now they are literally fighting for it.
NATO explicitly mentioned that no countries are allowed that have border disputes, that's why Russia started a gray zone war immediately after in 2014.
And now they are in full war mode, trying to force their will on a country that wants to be a democracy with the 2nd democratically elected president.
Biden wasn't even elected president in 2014 and Yanukovych ( who got overthrown) was literally a member of the Russian communist party, born in Russia. And not at all democratically elected as you are suggesting.
The Maidan movement might have had public support, but behind the scenes EU and US actors were definitely jockeying to choose who to support. There are documents and even intercepts showing that. And after the world stopped caring, the new regime turned out to be not particularly less corrupt than the previous one - hence Ukrainians voting in complete outsiders like Klitschko (a boxer) and Zelenskiy (a tv comedian), who in turn sold out very quickly too to various interests. Zelenksiy is balls-out pro-NATO, but without this war he risked being thrown out, after his offshore funds were found in one of the various PanamaPapers-like leaks. He managed to lose pretty much all political capital and support he had in a matter of months, and his Nato obsession was seen as a bit humiliating really.
> NATO explicitly mentioned that no countries are allowed that have border disputes, that's why Russia started a gray zone war immediately after in 2014.
That has more to do with those regions being largely Russophone, and the Ukrainian government being too weak to regain control over them. If that was the only obstacle to join the Alliance, don't you think Zelenskiy or his predecessors would have just renounced them? Surely that's a price worth paying for a permanent security upgrade for the rest of the country.
No, the reality is that even the alliance never really wanted Ukraine to join. There are already enough members to contain Russia militarily if needs be. Same goes for the EU, which is already pretty big with 27 members and stalling pretty much all requests for further accession (not just Ukraine but Serbia and others too). But dangling carrots in front of people is how you make them do your bidding, so such requests are never formally rejected, just stalled forever.
> Ukrainians wanted deeper ties with Europe
Putin likely doesn't care about that, he cares about the leverage Ukrainians have over the precious Gazprom product that helps him stay in power.
One of the reasons that Putin now picked a war, was that joining NATO/EU was now anchored in the Ukrainian law - https://www.voanews.com/a/ukraine-amends-constitution-to-cem... . Occupying those areas would immediately halt any possability to enter the NATO, which is what Putin wanted to prevent.
By coïnsidence, the occupied territories were also nearby the Black Sea. Which was very important for Russia's naval fleet.
I do think that you are mistaking the importance of Ukraine for Russia (otherwise they wouldn't have gone to war). They gave Ukraine their autonomy, which they already couldn't deny fyi, in the expectation that they wouldn't go away from Russia. Which was at the time a reasonable expection ( puppet governement + many Russia/Ukraine relatives on both sides). I wouldn't underestimate the will to fix those "historic regrets" for a dictator.
Either way, Russia is already (partially) moving it's attention to Asian gas exports instead of Europe. So I'm not convinced that keeping Ukraine ( and going to war for it) would make much sense on a long term plan, if it's gas related.
Nordstream II was already outside of Ukraine influence and now it's probably totally broken.
Edit: The POV of Turkey might be aligned with what i think:
> Sanctions against Russia wouldn’t work. They only postpone problems. It is better to listen to other side and understand their strategic concerns. Russia feels threatened by NATO. Putin wants to redraw borders and renew strategic alliances 30 years after the USSR’s collapse.
> There is never an excuse to come short of doing everything possible to prevent it.
That's your point of view. In practice, a proxy war can be beneficial for a nation-state. Obviously it won't benefit the proxy-state's own citizenry, but hey, they are not your voters! Look at the actual effects: the world is now economically bombing Russia, Biden was weak and now gets to look tough, and if you try to take a nuanced stance you'll be booed from the room.
> How do you explain that?
I might be wrong but IMHO the point really isn't NATO membership, but dropping American objections to NordStream2. Everything else was just stuff thrown on the table as a negotiable chip.
Proxy wars are horrendous and completely inhumane. But yes, they can be “effective.” However, they are bad for all working people of both nations. Americans who drive to work will feel the pain.
> Months ago Russia asked that Ukraine and Georgia be excluded from NATO. We ignored him.
I don't think this holds up to scrutiny for a few reasons. Ukraine was not invited to join NATO, Zelensky's government fearing the escalation of Russia's incursions into the East started the process of asking for admission last June. Russian units have been operating in the East for years, and they took Crimea. If you read Putin's speech from early this week he laid out a revanchist case for recapturing old Soviet/Russian Imperial territory. He even laid claim to the whole of Ukraine, failing to note that the western portion only became part of the USSR because of WWII and had previously been part of other political entities. He's been carving up neighbors for years, so it's no wonder that the neighboring state might want to join NATO.
> He is looking at the west build a fortress around Russia through NATO. Look at US reaction to Cuba and now imagine Cuba having a 100x more tactical and strategic geography in relationship to the US.
Wouldn't it be more similar if the Cuban missile crisis had taken place in Quebec or something? Or would that still have been better tactically and geographically better for D.C., than a NATO Ukraine is for Moscow? Terrain looks a lot easier there.
And nato was created to control and prevent the influence/expansion of USSR. Russia is not that threat anymore, so no major reason for nato to exist at all, let alone expand in Ukraine.
LOL NATO has every reason to exist as proven by what just happened. They can at least act as a united front and send unlimited arms and supplies to Ukraine.
> And nato was created to control and prevent the influence/expansion of USSR.
It was built to provide collective regional security, in large part by binding the Western powers, who have frequently had disputes and divisions progress to war among themselves, together in an alliance wherein that would not occur. The USSR was a major immediate concern at the time NATO was formed, but regional security concerns did not evaporate when the USSR did.
And probably reinforced the idea of a EU defense system as well. The EU can't rely on US military support indefinitely, particularly since that support may vanish at the whim of the American voters.
I'm not sure if you've noticed, but Russia just invaded Ukraine, which seems like exactly the sort of behaviour that would suggest some sort of check on Russia was required...
He is irrational. For some stupid reason, he thinks that NATO/USA wants to invade Russia. When you listen for such things in the music of politics, you won't hear anything like that. It's always Russia being the aggressor. Putin wants the USSR back and always has. Look at his speeches about the topic down through the years. He is getting old and knows this might be his last chance to get part of that dream done.
Bingo. This is the answer. Putin’s speech was pretty unhinged but his tactics are the smartest maneuvers he could have made outside of full capitulation to the incorrigible Western liberal consensus. Yes, he may fail in the end. But the other options are absolutely miserable. As with all war, the ultimate losers are the working people of every nation involved, and the US has considered them no less than Putin has.
And guess what one of China's main focuses was? To take it back. Now that is theirs, do you think they would allow someone to take it? Do you think China would allow Taiwan to work against their interests?
You realize that US was incredibly close to nuke Cuba? Lucky for both US and Cuba, Cuba is an island so blockade was possible.
Now imagine Cuba having land border and is positioned on coast between DC and NYC.
China regained Hong Kong through negotiation and by the terms of the original treaty. They already "allow" Taiwan to work against some (not all) of their interests.
Russia has land borders with several NATO states, so I don't see how the Cuba comparison is relevant.
However, in terms of a "buffer zone", strategic geography; leading to a nation that's "self-sufficient in terms of resources and territory". In my view, annexation of Crimea fits that strategic idea more than to believe that it was an ideological move to regain long-lost land.
Plus, with 40% of the world's grain export, Ukraine is a fertile target for Russia.
Crimea was both - it was a very potent ideological move that boosted Putin internally, but it is also the main Russian naval base on the Black Sea for a good reason.
Russia also exports food, so it doesn't really need a "breadbasket" region. Ukrainian heavy industry (which is mostly in the East!) is a more lucrative prize. But there's really no economic justification for a grab for the entirety of Ukraine. Donbas alone would be a net sink for a very long time.
There's plenty of (internal) political reasons, though. Especially if you accept that Putin really believes the tripe that he is saying about Russia and Ukraine, which I'm increasingly convinced is the case.
Thank you for expanding on this. I was not focused on the strict translation of the term. Perhaps I did have a different interpretation of the term. However, I am not able to find supporting arguments for that nuanced interpretation. So, I have to concede to your logic. Appreciate the discussion.
Several US politicians (Marco Rubio for example) have gone on Twitter/major news outlets saying that this isn’t the same semi-rational Putin from 5 years ago. Alluding to possible medical/psychological issues.
It could be geographic considerations. The USSR/Warsaw Pact had pretty secure boarders, but that ended when the Soviet Union fell apart. If Putin can get control of Ukraine, that would put the Carpathian mountains between him and an invasion from southern Europe.
Northern Europe is still wide-open terrain, but if can get control of the Baltics and eastern Poland, he can constrict land invasion routes to the bottleneck between Kaliningrad and Slovakia. Getting control of Kazakhstan (which, not coincidentally, is also suddenly awash with Russian troops) would similarly give him the ability to dominate other formerly Soviet countries and put mountains between Russia and invasion from the south.
He doesn't want NATO on his door step any more than we would want Mexico to ally with Russia. Ukraine and Russians share a somewhat similar history and the Russians see relative prosperity in Ukraine as a newly capitalist society. This does not reflect well on Putin. This is one of many reasons, including but not limited to: the money and resources Ukraine would bring and control of the gas lines that lead directly into the heart of the EU.
Russia is wealthier than Ukraine whether you go by total GDP or GDP per capita and whether you go by nominal GDP or GDP adjusted for purchasing power. Just looking at the maps at the tops of these next 2 pages was enough to verify that:
But if he annexes Ukraine or installs a puppet regime there, doesn't he get NATO on his doorstep anyways? Romania and Poland are both NATO members IIRC.
Nonsense. There is already about equal distance to Moscow from Latvia, a Nato and EU member, as there is from Ukraine. Despite, Ukraine was not really ever even close to Nato membership to start with. Western political alignment is completely separate from military alignment, although Putin has now made it absolutely clear these must go hand in hand for those sovereign countries he consider's "Russian vassal states."
Putin's Nato card is a ruse. The European part of Russia was actually mostly surrounded by neutral states, only sharing border with Nato in Norway and the Baltics before the war. Now Putin might be even turning formerly neutral Nordic countries towards Nato - any sovereign state will always choose alliance over Russian occupation at a moment's notice. Ukraine was not even close to Nato membership and still very connected to the Russian sphere of influence before the Crimean occupation. Now the only way out of this mess is for Ukraine to either integrate more tightly to West or Russia to completely annex them, thus gaining four new Nato members on its border.
The Cold War is simply over, but the Putin regime does not really seem to have understood it. International commerce despite of military-political differences is the only sustainable way forward. China knows this, and Russia should take a hint.
please. this is not the same thing. a similar thing might be to consider mexico allying with brazil.
there’s no sense in attempting to understand putin’s motivations. the KGB/FSB are number one with regard to disinformation and confusion. every armchair geopolitician will have their own pet-theory about the motivating factors for the aggression on ukraine.
in time, we’ll find out, i’m sure. the best anyone can do right now - if at all possible - is to help those displaced from ukraine, and put pressure on our politicians to invoke tougher sanctions on russia.
as tough as it might be for all the regular humans, i’m happy to see russia cut off from SWIFT.
I was thinking that as well. Ukraine doesn't bring a whole lot to the table from a military perspective and just doing cold calculations. I personally feel like we should be arming them to the teeth and should have been for a while. I'm glad they've been able to hold out so far, but it's still very early
They haven’t been “holding out” from Russia. Working Ukranians have been fed up with the EU’s mingling in their governmental affairs and favorable towards Russia. Of course that will no longer be the case now, but realize the West has been stoking this war for many years even if Putin officially started it.
They absolutely have. That's why they declared independence in 1991.
> Working Ukranians have been fed up with the EU’s mingling in their governmental affairs and favorable towards Russia.
This is simply 100% nonsense. "Working Ukranians" have been employed en masse by Western European companies, with more joining every year. There is a small minority in a relatively small region of Ukraine that was favorable towards Russia, but even those have now decided that Russia is not their friend. Note that these are what you would call 'Ethnic Russians' and even for many of them this has gone way too far. People want peace and stability, not war.
> Of course that will no longer be the case now.
At least you realize that.
> Realize the West stoked this war even if Putin started it.
On the contrary, Putin would have had this war, because his country is failing and he wants to look successful and strong, rather than preside over the bankruptcy of his country. Ironically, that's exactly where it is headed now, the number of friends remaining is pretty close to zero, we'll count Lukashenko for 0.5 because he relies on Putin to stay alive.
What the West did was too little, arming Ukraine further and stationing troops there earlier would have precluded this war.
Sure, just like in Afghanistan there is a relatively tiny subset of educated urban elites employed by Western businesses and nonprofits. And, just like with Afghanistan, the American media coverage of that group would have you believe nobody else lives there, but of course that is simply ridiculous.
I agree that stationing troops there earlier would have almost certainly prevented the war, but that would have required NATO to see beyond its own arrogance for once, and if that were possible then the situation wouldn’t have come that far to begin with.
That said, preventing wars by flooding the globe with American military bases is a definition of insanity that hasn’t exactly worked out so far. I think you may want to reconsider the logical conclusion of your proposal.
> Sure, just like in Afghanistan there is certainly a relatively tiny subset of educated elites employed by Western businesses and nonprofits.
I think you are underestimating Ukraine severely. It is roughly at the level of Romania or Bulgaria.
> But, just like with Afghanistan, the American media coverage of that group would have you believe nobody else lives there, which is ridiculous.
I don't need American media coverage for countries that are much closer than America to learn about them. It's closer than the typical holiday destination from here.
> I agree that stationing troops there earlier would have likely prevented the war, but that would require NATO to see beyond its own arrogance for once, and if that were possible then the situation wouldn’t have come this far to begin with.
The prevailing idea at the time was not to provoke Putin, which retrospectively was the mistake that made this possible.
> That said, preventing wars by flooding the globe with American military bases is a definition of insanity that hasn’t exactly worked out so far. I think you may want to reconsider the logical conclusion of your proposal.
Those bases are in large part there because the countries themselves want those bases there.
For Putin having Ukraine part of NATO is as dangerous as it was for the US to have Russian missiles in Cuba. It's something he is not willing to risk.
So almost any price is worth it for him.
And his proposal, for Ukraine to be a kind of neutral zone, was not for Putin, it was for the USA and Ukraine.. so that Ukraine could survive as an independent country.
Mearsheimer is West point graduate and air force officer...
His biases are if anything pro USA.
I would agree that makes sense from Puntin's world view. But not for anyone else's including a lot of Russians.
I watched the the start of the video, apparently a country simply being allied with the west and the US is an "existential threat" to Russia.
Ukraine or Georgia are not going to invade Russia after joining NATO, they simply don't want be a part of the next Russian empire dreamt up by a tyrannical regime.
This has now come to pass, a Russian puppet government lost power in Ukraine, Putin saw his power slipping away and invaded.
And NATO is supposed to be the aggressor and the cause of this?
These are still impotent sanctions. Only select Russian banks are excluded from SWIFT with many carveouts: oil, gas, wheat, fertilizer companies all excluded for example. Sanctions on Russian banks will go into effect in 30 days. The world, especially Europe, is still dependent on Russian natural resources.
Putin knows this. His enemies are weak and fighting runaway inflation. They do not have the appetite for war.
Putin will not tolerate having another enemy on his border. I presume he also expected for Ukrainians to capitulate faster. He has been demanding for Ukraine to remain Kremlin friendly or at least neutral since 2014.
As far as geopolitical YOLOs go, it was a decent bet. He took Crimea with little pushback, I presume he expected he could oust Zelenskyy swiftly or at least return Ukraine to a state of neutrality with little meaningful fallout from a weak West.
A video you should watch which elucidates why Putin is hostile towards a potential EU/NATO candidate being right at his doorstep:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrMiSQAGOS4
"If you want to wreck Russia what you should do is tell them to try and create a greater Russia. It will lead to no end of trouble. I think Putin is much too smart for that." - John Mearsheimer 2015
Wowza. That aged like milk. Really glad this guy didn't have a hand in our foreign policy. His apologist attitude towards autocrats is pretty gross too.
"I believe he is sowing divisions in The West that will manifest over time. If he is smart he will sit back and continue to pull levers as he has over the past year or so, and in the end ... he will get what he wants." - John Mearsheimer 2022
Yep. I didn't know who John Mearsheimer was an hour ago, now I actively dislike him. Pretty impressive how consistently he's been wrong about Putin and his intentions over the years.
(1) You're assuming Putin is trying to create a greater Russia. There is no evidence for that yet. Putin has been pounding the table about security guarantees. The Ukraine terrorism rhetoric seems mostly to gain popular support within Russia. In that video, Mearshiemer posits that Russia will level Ukraine in the process without intent to occupy it properly... what are we seeing now?
(2) The sanctions have tons of carveouts and are still toothless. We need more.
(1) I'm assuming nothing. In the context of the quote, Mearsheimer was directly stating the impossibility of an invasion of Ukraine by Russia. He has said as much on multiple occasions since. He was wrong. Period. Much of his political theorizing around Russia goes out the window with that assumption. For example, The West arming Ukraine was inarguably correct at this point. Ukraine is using those weapons to defend their sovereignty as we speak. Did that heighten tensions? I guess. Does blocking your face when someone punches you heighten tensions? I guess. Stating as much isn't exactly novel.
(2) Agreed. Keep an eye on Russian currency markets come Monday. Between removal from SWIFT and freezing central Russian bank assets, significantly painful sanctions are ramping up. The conflict has only been ongoing for 4 days.
"Putin again is much too smart to do that... what Putin is doing is he's basically in the process of wrecking Ukraine and he's telling the West in very simple terms you have two choices: you either back off and we go back to the status quo ante before February 22 2014 where Ukraine is a buffer state or you continue to play these games where you try and take Ukraine and make it a Western bastion on their doorstep in which case we'll wreck the country."
Well, for (1) there's that weird exchange where Russia's spy chief says/slips his (shaky) support about the entry of Donetsk and Luhansk to the Russian Federation before being corrected.
Putin is a rational actor. The western media will and does refuse to show any information that would even slightly justify Putin's actions, or even make his actions seem rationally evil, which is why so many people here are thinking he's a crazy power drunken fool. Did you see any of his speeches air in our media, even parts of it? Did you see any Russian press releases describing any amount of why or how? Did you see any explanation from China about why they support this and to what degree? Most likely you saw none of this, and therefore think Putin is a madman.
The war propaganda right now is incredibly dense from both sides, and each side sees only their side. But no, he's not a crazy person, he's the leader of Russia making a play.
Putin has nobody around him that he fully trusts, that trust him fully. It's all fear driven, so there isn't anybody that will tell him that something will not work. Yes men, all of them.
To sharpen the point a little, if anyone disagrees with Putin, they find themselves dead. So we're witnessing the outcome.
One unsettling thought is that Putin intentionally did this, and realized that this would happen -- and doesn't care.
The other unsettling thought is that China might be able to prop them up through this. Us disconnecting Russia is a massive opportunity for them. China even abstained from voting on the world stage when everyone was condemning Russia's actions.
So it's possible that external forces are giving Putin a picture of, "go through with this, and we'll come out of it strong together."
China's voting behavior in the security council has been consistently predictable, to the point that Chinese people would laugh at the abstentions at almost every noteworthy issue.
It would be interesting to know what the Chinese leadership think about the world's reaction to Russia's invasion of Ukraine and how that may affect their designs for Taiwan.
> Wondering when a Russian oligarch says “you know what I think we’d be better off without this guy alive.
And I think that Putin has clearly demonstrated how much more powerful the state is than the oligarchs (anywhere, not just Russia). Look up what happened to oligarchs who opposed Putin. See, e.g., https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Khodorkovsky
Didn't even seem to be that critical from what I gather he (16th richest man) got expropriated and thrown in jail for starting Open Russia Foundation whose mission was "to foster enhanced openness, understanding and integration between the people of Russia and the rest of the world", and I guess for "fund[ing] Internet cafés in the provinces, to get people to talk to one another. He funded training sessions for journalists all over the country. [In 1994] He established a boarding school for disadvantaged children and pulled his own parents out of retirement to run it. By some estimates, he was supporting half of all non-governmental organizations in Russia, by others, he was funding 80 percent of them."
I get that doesn't fly in an totalitarian state, but it seems like a far-cry from being an outright revolutionary like a Navalny. Man's got an interesting perspective from which to tweet about this whole mess (wish Twitter had an auto-translate feature rather than clickityclicking one by one).
A film is art by definition, even when it stinks to high heaven. And gosh, did those movies foul the place up... I don't think I've seen worse acting before or since, it's incredible how he managed to ruin even Ewan McGregor's craft.
I think he's gone mad. No one in his right mind would do what he did in this situation. I thought he was an authoritarian but rational person. Not anymore.
He's done pretty bad things before. Georgia in 2008. The endless attacks on his own citizens, institutions; poisoning dissidents and hunting them down across the globe. This is not overnight. I'm not sure why some people are giving him benefit of the doubt now for his long legacy of ruthlessness.
There is a difference between supporting an asshole or thinking that asshole being rational. I've never supported what he's done. But I did not think he will do what he did now. Ok I was wrong. Does that make you happy?
Not judging you, buddy. Just saying that his methods have always been relatively aggressive and crazy, in my opinion, even when they were on a smaller scale than this.
Again, prior instances have shown the same type of logic from him. If he miscalculated the response, doesn't mean he's a lunatic itching to nuke anyone and everyone. However, his past behavior has always shown that he is willing to do things that would be unthinkable in this day and age from a leader of one of the relatively friendly nations and key members on the international stage. So, the risk was always there for him to invite an aggressive international response. Yet, he saw himself as invincible as the leader of one of the superpowers.
If Mexico signed a military alliance with Russia and accepted to have russian military bases on its soil, what would be the reaction of the US? Of course, Russia is never going to invade a country twice bigger in terms of population than it.
It's a matter of threat management. Even if you know that the guy who's pointing the gun at your head isn't going to fire it, you'd prefer him to stop, or at least throw his gun. Once NATO will have cornered Russia with ultrasonic missiles, then the NATO's ultimatums will have much more power.
I'm against war, and I don't think personally that opting for an aggressive behavior toward our neighbors will wage peace. The US has a very long history of bombing every possible threat on the globe, either economical or military, so I guess your question is quite moot if you think a bit more about it.
But isn't he creating himself NATO neighbors by expanding his borders up to it? Whereas the alternative status quo is NATO not daring to add Ukraine to it's ranks. Tho I guess the calculation could've been that Ukraine was on track to become more powerful than he'd like it to be, economically or militarily, and thus wanted to cripple it while he was expecting it to be easy, both in terms of retaliation from the West and Ukraine's self defense.
A measly 6% in relation to USD (0) since this started. Shockingly little, I was expecting to see it cratered when I first check, like their stock market (1), i.e. ERUS at -34% (bottomed -42%).
Think you're right they must've been buying it up. Would make sense to bid up the currency and not the stock market too, can only imagine how bad the bank runs would be if the ruble craters on top of all this.
There has been pretty heavy buying, both on the stock and the money markets, to prop things up. The weird thing is that this allows Putin and his buddies to buy up large amounts of stock at a huge discount.
Plus they're actually able to ensure the rightfulness of their ownership in said stock, unlike other participants which can get expropriated should they decide it is in their interest [0]. Would also expect insiders won't be blissfully scamming a shareholder if said shareholder is the state (or a friend of).
Is that a strategy to make money long term or a necessity at this point? I kind of understand stock buybacks companies do but I'm not familiar with currency buybacks.
To keep people from selling the ruble and buying dollars and euros because they fear their money will become worthless.
If Russians stop accepting rubles and use foreign currency for transactions, the Russian govt stockpile of rubles, and it's ability to print more rubles, becomes worthless. They will need foreign currency to pay people.
Losing SWIFT access is bad but it's definitely not a death knell (estimated to cause around 5% GDP contraction initially but they could probably get by with the alternatives). The central bank thing seems much worse because an 80% collapse in the ruble would result in lots of angry Russians who had their savings wiped out. I read that Russia has a lot of its debt denominated in rubles so I guess it would be beneficial in that regard. Seems like Russia did not really prepare for this part or maybe I'm missing something.
SWIFT doesn't matter that much; the other financial stuff either.
The big deal is the loss of high or medium tech supplies for the foreseable future. You might not realise how the whole of Russia runs entirely on import of those. China, even if they wanted to, can not replace that.
If Putin doesn't end up hanging on some random light pole in next few days, RU will collapse.
Doesn't it just mean they'll pay extra (for the cost of evasion)? Apartheid South Africa still got oil when it was sanctioned, they just had to pay Marc Rich a 10% premium. Of course that's not great, especially when your currency and everything is collapsing, but still.
Is he really being portrayed as a buffoon, though? In my experience most people seem to respect that he is quite good at playing the power game. Lately he's definitely being portrayed as evil, for sure. But I wonder if maybe he miscalculated how this war would play out. Even skilled operators f*ck it up once in a while.
He's getting old. This is Putin's last opportunity to cement himself into history.
Putin still enjoys tremendous domestic support. He has no effective opposition. Putin wants to claim Ukraine. Ukraine can't fight Russia alone. Will the West fight harder for Ukraine than Russia/Putin?
What happens if Ukraine's leaders are assassinated?
Stronger sanctions against Russia? Europe still depends on Russian fossil fuel, as do China and others, so leverage is limited. Strangling European energy supply remains a weapon at Putin's disposal. Economic MAD, sure, but who's going to back down first? The autocrat, or the union of democratic states?
But does he really? The economic situation is not great, the Southern Ukraine border has been a mess for almost a decade, COVID wasn't exactly a success (their vaccine didn't perform as well as expected)... There has been a lot of grumbling over the last couple of years. In fact, I think he counts on this conflict to shore up his internal support significantly.
> He has no effective opposition.
Well, when he did, he made sure to kill or jail them, so that's not really an indicator I'd rely on.
I agree that there is a good chance things might not be as bad as they look for him, though. It's easy for us to talk tough in February, with Springtime on the doorstep and enough gas to last several months; the real challenge will be September / October.
Germany is much better connected to the gas pipelines of neighbouring European countries than it used to be, and Europe has extensive strategic reserves. The US does too and might be willing to share some of them. We’re also coming out of winter.
This is going to be hard, the cost will be heavy, but much, much heavier on Russia. But we’re at war, whether we like it or not, and we have to do this.
Unfortunately ability to start in power isn't all that linked to delivering good results to the public. There are examples where a dictator stayed in power for a long time after crashing the economy. Mugabe, for instance.
If he fails militarily, which he still might, the result of all this commotion will be that Ukraine will have much tighter ties to EU, NATO will be strengtened in the east, and Russia's economy will tank, for no geopolitical benefit.
I have insufficient data on Putin to even try in good faith to even try and analyze him, past and present.
But I did just finish catching up to current on the Revolutions podcast which covers 10 political upheavals defined in the podcaster’s terms as Revolutions under a broad label and what’s amazing to me is that any of the Revolutions that tended to center around strongmen also tended to outstay their welcome and any of the Revolutionary Big Cheeses that lived to old age tended to lose touch with their own inner circle. The monarchs or whoever was being overthrown were also not immune to this: if they were popular, it was often because people didn’t actually know them very well and they tended to lose popularity quickly when they made the worse blunders of their lives.
So, just a perspective, and maybe some of this is applicable to Putin, but again, I’m not in good faith going to try to make that call but leave it to those who maybe can.
Exactly. This situation was highly thought out and I'm sure he has at least one ace up his sleeve. Most likely in the form of controling natural resources to europe.
Seems like he expected Ukranian leaders to fold and get into negotiations in a matter of days. The longer they hold the harder it will become for Russia to reap any benefits from the conflict.
It's barely been 3 days. It's incredible how everyone (including leaders, allegedly even "operative" leaders like Putin with a paramilitary background) now expects wars to last a few hours. Even swift one-sided conflicts like Desert Storm and Desert Fox lasted a month or more! To expect less than a week from invasion to regime change in the capital is just stupid, if the Russian generals really worked on that basis they are not fit for command.
I read a story today that Russian soldiers were sending Ukrainian women photos on Tinder. The story alleged that they expected to be treated in a friendly way upon arrival. This may reflect the general sentiment in the Russian chain of command.
just a little salt here. the reason Lipsky doesnt want you to consider Iran, Venezuela, or even Cuba is precicely because these type of direct sanctions couldn't kill these countries. these sanctions alone didnt drive the capitulation of the CCCP either.
eventually globalism wins out. the idea of an untapped or taboo market is simply too offensive not to engage on some level. US companies get persistently caught with their hand in the $axis(evil) trading cookie jar and ITAR generally rewards them with a slap on the wrist.
Iran, Venezuela and Cuba are and were shitholes compared to todays Russia. The immediate QoL impact on the average Russian will be far bigger than it was for the average citizens of those countries.
This surprised me, so I checked. Moscow + St. Petersburg metro areas are 25+ million. They're actually 17% of the population, which is still pretty low considering their importance; Moscow's GDP alone is listed as $1 trillion, while Russia as a whole is $1.48 trillion. So the 20 million people in Moscow hold a lot more power, relatively, than the far-scattered 120 million
One detail in the case of Venezuela is that most sanctions were to individual people and companies associated with the government, not to the entire population.
> [Under Obama] Iran made a fortune out of its nuclear deal — halting but not abandoning its pursuit of nuclear weapons — and used the windfall to fund terrorism in the Middle East.
I'm sure they'd love a restart under the same terms.
There will be no restarting - they are even closer to having nuclear arms than before because we abandoned the deal. It wasn't a perfect deal, but it was real progress and would have significantly slowed nuclear development (experts say ~15 years instead of 2 years).
It's hard to have any deal when repubs have pledged to abandon it (regardless of what it is) when they have control again.
The modern schizophrenia of the US political system is making things difficult for the whole world. It used to be that US foreign policy could be considered fundamentally consistent across administrations, on the big topics; now, every 4 years, it's a coin toss.
Honestly, having lived in the Middle East for 22 years, I’m not sure what Iran-sponsored terrorism is being talked about here. The only plausible thing is the Yemeni conflict, and that’s more about US allies Saudi and UAE bombing the shit out of a poor country (Yemen).
> The Trump presidency. A man who exploited the worst of America, trashed alliances, cosied up to despots yet was a symptom of a system already poisonous.
"Made a fortune" describes the lifting of sanctions as part of the deal; Iran got a variety of its frozen assets back. That we wasted that leverage (and years of multi-national diplomacy) by blowing up the deal unilaterally for no good reason is not Iran's fault.
An op-ed is a type of article. The relevant paragraph was describing Obama's time in office. Do I have to qualify there is plenty of bad things said about Trump [and other x-presidents] in the article too?
’Josh Lipsky, a former IMF adviser now at the Atlantic Council think-tank, said earlier the US imposing sanctions on the Russian central bank would be an “extraordinarily significant and damaging move to the Russian economy”.
’“A G20 central bank has never been sanctioned before. This is not Iran. This is not Venezuela. So to shut off their central bank from the international financial system, or at least the dollar and euro economy, is a massively destabilising move potentially,” said Lipsky.
’Edward Fishman, a former US official now at the Center for a New American Security, said it would present a “devastating blow” to the Russian economy that would eclipse the significance of a ban on Swift.’