Russo-Ukrainian War 2014-23 and Invasion

[Solmyr]

So that's what WWI looked like. Is that drum fire?

There's a photo going around with a Russian truck carrying a Maxim machine gun. They really are breaking out every old piece of equipment. In before they start digging trenches.

[celedhring]

I posted that one before! 

The guy looks like an irregular, so I assume it's from the republics. They have been photographed with really antique equipment before (moshin-nagants).

[celedhring]

A guy in Spanish EUOT has a friend with family in Berdyansk. According to her:

- The boat blowing up could be heard throughout the city.
- Russian solders are wantonly pillaging food, drinks, appliances. They are also "bothering" women
- Food is becoming scarce in the city, and it doesn't look like the Russians have any intention of supplying the civilians.
- Internet, water are working.

Grim.

[Solmyr]

Btw, the scary part about Shoigu and apparently Gerasimov missing is that they are the other two guys with the nuclear briefcases. And there needs to be approval from two out of three for launching. So Putin now possibly holds all three briefcases.

[Zanza]

Here in Spain most of our gas comes from Algeria, and it's been reliable. Italy also receives significant amounts of Gas from there.

Reliability was (and currently is) not the problem with Russian gas. 

Then why bring up the issue of political stability in Northern Africa?

I guess for natural gas we need to buy it from places outside Europe as there just isn't enough here. For now, Algeria is stable, Qatar etc. as well. But when discussing to build major new capacity for strategic reasons, I would rather invest into hydrogen production in Europe or building solar farms in the fairly empty parts of Southern Spain then risk being exposed to the next inevitable Arab Spring.

[Sheilbh]

In Germany that seems to be mainly metallurgy, where gas is used to melt ores, and chemical processes, e.g. producing ammonium for fertilizer etc. Fairly limited to these energy intensive industries.
The high price of oil (especially diesel) has a much broader impact on all sectors of the economy. 

Yes - although oil is far more fungible so I think Germany is relatively rare in Europe in using lots of Russian oil as well as gas so is disproportionately impacted. But it's ultimately possible to replace Russian oil in a way it isn't gas because of the pipelines/LNG capacity.

Also oil prices are high but they're similar to what we had during the 2000s - we're not at unheard of levels there. While with gas I think we are at pretty unprecedented levels because of the war but also because of surging demand in China, India and the rest of Asia (which is not going to decline any time soon - and they are not going to care about the fact it's Russian gas either). I think the feed through of that into chemicals, into metal production is going to start to be felt as a separate pressure by the end of the year (unless things are somehow resolved quickly).

At least here that's already being implemented. Mainly tax reductions on energy etc.

Yeah there's some measures here too. I don't think what I've seen being discussed is going to be anywhere near enough - my suspicion is that they're basically going to reduce a very, very big increase in the cost of living to a very big increase in the cost of living and I think that will impact the support for sanctions. But also within Europe I think it's worth doing something at the EU level - at least in terms of funding/common debt or the fiscal rules (basically similar to covid measures) because the impact is going to be distributed really unevenly.

The invisible hand of the market will do this anyway...

It will. But I think trying to position it as solidarity with Ukraine as being a responsible socially conscious person - like following annoying covid rules - is different, especially politically, than people being forced into changing this because of price rises. I think we should try to get ahead of this especially as support for taking a hit to support Ukraine is fairly high right now.

[celedhring]

Enemy at the Gates wasn't good enough for Vlad

Jimmy
@JimmySecUK
·
36m
Putin is making a live address. He's currently whining about how Hollywood refuses to make movies about the Russian contribution to defeating Nazi Germany and claiming "progressives" are trying to "cancel Russia".

[OttoVonBismarck]

Gas is a bit weird because it doesn't transport via ship as easily or cheaply as oil, so it actually matters quite a great deal what existing gas transport already exists. Oil is so fungible that the West refusing to buy Russian oil certainly creates some costs for everyone, but that oil will still get to market (and be sold and resold), which will IMO prevent oil prices from getting crazy.

Gas is different, Russia would love to sell all the gas it was selling to Europe to China or India if Europe decides to stop buying, but there are no pipelines connecting these countries, and pipelines don't build in weeks or months, they take years. LNG is obviously a technology and is used at commercial scale, but it is very inefficient per MCF of gas transported than is, for example, container ship oil shipping. This also means gas in general is less fungible.

The U.S. has vast gas reserves many of which it doesn't tap because our gas historically had gotten so cheap producers didn't want to flood the market, I imagine the vast reserves of our major gas leaseholders would happily be shipped to Europe via LNG but our producers wouldn't go in for it without really long term agreements, a lot of American gas producers wiped themselves out during the 2000s/2010s shale gas "boom", because they flooded the market with cheap gas that made a huge % of the new wells unprofitable. America doesn't have a command economy, our guys aren't going to bring it to market or sign on to a system of compressing it to LNG and shipping to Europe without major contractual agreements guaranteeing long term profitability.

[Eddie Teach]

Enemy at the Gates wasn't good enough for Vlad

Jimmy
@JimmySecUK
·
36m
Putin is making a live address. He's currently whining about how Hollywood refuses to make movies about the Russian contribution to defeating Nazi Germany and claiming "progressives" are trying to "cancel Russia".

Does Russia not have its own movie industry?

[celedhring]

Of course they do, and they're even more parochial than Hollywood, since they don't have a global audience.

Plenty of kickass Russian war movies.

[Legbiter]

Ukraine requests 500 javelin and stinger missiles per day

That's a lot of ammunition.

Need to distribute to them very widely and in bulk to a lot of units. No way the US is cranking them out at that rate currently.

[Zanza]

Yes - although oil is far more fungible so I think Germany is relatively rare in Europe in using lots of Russian oil as well as gas so is disproportionately impacted.

Just like with gas, Germany is of course the biggest consumer (although Netherlands imports even more oil from Russia, but I guess we buy their refined product then), but other EU countries are relatively much more exposed. Some quick overview here, but you find more detailed statistics elsewhere as well.
https://beyond-coal.eu/russian-fossil-fuel-trac

In the end, this needs a European solution as otherwise the richer countries will just buy all the non- Russian supply.

But also within Europe I think it's worth doing something at the EU level - at least in terms of funding/common debt or the fiscal rules (basically similar to covid measures) because the impact is going to be distributed really unevenly.

There is no way forward for the EU on stuff like this as long as there are undemocratic member states like Hungary, unequal representation in the EP and no QMV in Council on fiscal or foreign policy topics. I do not see that anytime soon.

[Duque de Bragança]

I wonder if those mega solar farms in Morocco, feeding the European Market, have become economic now.

Making the lights of Europe depend on the political stability of North Africa may not be a great idea.

I just wanted to write something similar. Let's develop our own capabilities, even if they might be slightly less efficient.

It's not just efficiency, space as well.
Far better to have a bunch of panels in a useless desert than in place of a forest.

The issue is the numbers haven't quite made sense yet. With the rise in energy prices they might well be.

Southern Spain (or Portugal) is not exactly forest land.
Very sunny Alentejo in Southern Portugal is sparsely populated but used to be a wheat region however.

[alfred russel]

I think the biggest flaw in Putin's strategic thinking, is he's looking at the board and valuing things that aren't actually that valuable. He is likewise not even trying to do things that would likely return far greater return on investment. China has become the world's clear second power through economic reforms, education, a growing middle class, and steadily diversifying competence in a range of important industries and technologies. This has been fueled by a market based economic system where the Communist Party puts its fingers on the scale here and there to boost domestic companies, and a robust effort to increase China's middle class which directly relates to more Chinese educated people which equates to more leadership in 21st century technologies of strategic importance.

China went from having a small economy and being relatively weak compared to its vast population and geographic size, to being the world's biggest economy, the charts have been posted--Chinese vs Russian GDP growth the last 30 years have been insanely divergent, Russia's has barely moved in comparison.

Putin thinks he can make Russia strong by "bolting on territory" to accrue more control of natural resources, but that will never deliver the sort of exponential growth China attained, it will just make Russia bigger, but not all that more powerful, that's in the best-case scenario where he is able to bolt on new land to Russia that is relatively passive at being part of Russia. When the bolted-on land gains you with it what might prove to be interminable independence and resistance movements...it becomes even more difficult for whatever natural resource extraction you can get from it to make up for the cost of perpetual pacification efforts.

He's essentially dreaming of a world where you can be a Great Power solely with extractive industries and virtually no systemic reforms to the country. It just simply doesn't make sense, and there is little evidence it can actually work. It certainly isn't a bad thing to control lots of natural resources, but to meaningfully get benefit from them, you have to sell them abroad, and when the value add that more advanced economies create from your natural resources is huge, you're really existing at the very bottom of the "food chain" in terms of realizing value from your resources.

The Gulf State model doesn't really scale up to Russian-sized countries, part of what makes that model a viable development path for the Gulf States is how tiny they are relative to the vast oil wealth they control, it lets them funnel a lot of money (relative to the size of their country) into modernization and development. Russia is so big that I just don't see that working, and it hasn't worked for 20 years--Putin has made Russia wealthier than it was, but it has been massively outgrown by China which largely isn't a pre-dominant exporter of a lot of natural resources (it produces plenty, but it also uses so many domestically that it isn't a huge net exporter.) Putin just really wants the world to work one way, and it doesn't. Even in a fantasy world where Putin could re-assert the USSR, I think it would be a rapidly shrinking power because his conception of how you make a country grow stronger doesn't produce results, and just increasing its acreage isn't going to be a game changer.

The biggest mistake he made was not pushing the issue in 2014. I don't know what the point of his current invasion is (or was, as things don't seem to be going according to script) but the idea of annexing all of Ukraine is laughable to an extent that I doubt that was ever the objective. But whatever he is trying to achieve, the time to push the issue was 2014 rather than 2022. In 2014 Ukraine was divided, the protest weakened president was pro russia in orientation, and there was at least an argument for intervention that wasn't 100% absurd. Taking Crimea and leaving the Donbass a frozen conflict just left Ukraine united in opposition to russia.

As for Russia and being an oil state: obviously the western model of democracy, open societies and education is the path to greater wealth and prosperity. Old Warsaw Pact countries see this and that is the appeal of the EU and why they have been abandoning Russia. But that model seems incompatible with how Putin wants to lead Russia, which is why I've been saying for years that the sanctions are in some ways an ally of Putin. When I work with Russians that are employed in Moscow for multinationals, they are educated, very european in outlook, and not fond of the Putin regime. They are the most significant threat to Putin's regime.

So if Putin is unwilling to westernize, the petrol state alternative is to some extent working. The country is hardly an economic global powerhouse, but its per capita GDP numbers are roughly in the range of eastern europe (and significantly better than Ukraine). His support prior to this misadventure was solid. Russia is a major player in the UN, is geopolitically relevant, and Russia has a central asia sphere of influence in the old soviet states. There is more than enough wealth being generated to keep himself and his allies living in top style.

[The Brain]

Enemy at the Gates wasn't good enough for Vlad

Jimmy
@JimmySecUK
·
36m
Putin is making a live address. He's currently whining about how Hollywood refuses to make movies about the Russian contribution to defeating Nazi Germany and claiming "progressives" are trying to "cancel Russia".

Someone was mean to Putin. And I think he's deluding himself if he thinks the West won't make movies about the Russian assault on Ukraine.