The European Union is preparing to lift its anti-Russian sanctions in the Polish corridor of Suwalki whereby to allow the supply of essential goods to the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad.

To put on a good showing, the EU emphasized that this exemption does not apply to the export of goods to other destinations.

The Suwalki Corridor was going to be used anyway to supply Kaliningrad, as stipulated in the pertinent International Treaties.

 

https://www.voltairenet.org/article217544.html

 

This has avoided a bit of someone's blood on the walls (not Putin's blood mind you)...

 

MEANWHILE, Gus thinks that Putin is brave to go to the G20 meeting.... There would be some assassination attempts on his person — possibly more in a week than on Castro in 50 years (200+).... Be careful, Vlad... beware of plane crash, Bali belly and poisoned umbrellas....

 

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The war in Ukraine has been catastrophic for world food prices, writes Vijay Prashad. But the problem didn’t start then. 

 

By Vijay Prashad
Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research

 

 

The United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund, or UNICEF, reports that, every minute, a child is pushed into hunger in 15 countries most ravaged by the global food crisis.

Twelve of these countries are in Africa (from Burkina Faso to Sudan), one is in the Caribbean (Haiti) and two are in Asia (Afghanistan and Yemen). Wars without end have degraded the ability of the state institutions in these countries to manage cascading crises of debt and unemployment, inflation and poverty. Joining the two Asian countries are the states that make up the Sahel region of Africa (especially Mali and Niger), where the levels of hunger are now almost out of control. As if the situation were not sufficiently dire, an earthquake struck Afghanistan last week, killing over a thousand people – yet another devastating blow to a society where 93 percent of the population has slipped into hunger.

In these crisis-hit countries, food aid has come from governments and the U.N.’s World Food Programme (WFP). Millions of refugees in these countries are almost entirely reliant upon U.N. agencies. The WFP provides ready-to-use therapeutic food, which is a food paste made of butter, peanuts, powdered milk, sugar, vegetable oil, and vitamins. Over the next six months, the cost of these ingredients is projected to rise by up to 16 percent, which is why on June 20, the WFP announced that it would cut rations by 50 percent.

This cut will impact 3-of-every-4 refugees in East Africa, where about 5 million refugees live. “We are now seeing the tinderbox of conditions for extreme levels of child wasting begin to catch fire,” said UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell.

Clearly, the spike in hunger is related to the food price inflation, which itself has been exacerbated by the conflict in Ukraine. Russia and Ukraine are the world’s leading exporters of barley, corn, rapeseed, sunflower seed, sunflower oil and wheat, as well as fertilizers.

While the war has been catastrophic for world food prices, it is an error to see the war as the cause of the spike. World food prices began to rise about 20 years ago, and then went out of control in 2021 for a range of reasons, including:

1. During the pandemic, the severe lockdowns inside countries and at their borders led to majordisruptions in the movement of migrant labor. It is by now well-established that migrant labor – including refugees and asylum seekers – plays a key role in agricultural production. Anti-immigrant sentiment and the lockdowns have created a long-term problem on large-scale farms.
2. A consequence of the Covid-19 pandemic was thebreakdown of the supply chain. As China – the epicenter of a considerable volume of global manufacturing – pursued a zero-Covid policy, this set in motion a cascading problem for international shipping; with the lockdowns, ports closed and ships remained at sea for months on end. The return of international shipping to near normalcy and the return of industrial production – including fertilizers and food – has been slow. Food supply chains withered due to the logistics problems, but also due to staff shortages at processing plants.
3. Extreme weather events have played a major role in the chaos of the food system. In the past decade, between 80 and 90 percent of naturaldisasters have been due to droughts, floods, or severe storms. Meanwhile, over the past 40 years, the planet has lost 12 million hectares of arable land each year to drought and desertification; during this period, we have also lost a third of our arable land to erosion or pollution.
4. Over the past 40 years, global meat consumption (mostly poultry) increased dramatically, with theincreases set to continue rising despite some indications that we have reached “peak meat consumption.” Meat production has an enormous environmental footprint: 57 percent of total emissions from agriculture come from meat, while livestock production takes up 77 percent  of the planet’s agricultural land (even though meat only contributes 18 percent  of the global calorie supply).

The world food market was already stressed before the conflict in Ukraine, with prices going up during the pandemic to levels that many countries had not seen before. However, the war has almost broken this weakened food system. The most significant problem is in the world fertilizer market, which was resilient during the pandemic but is now in a crisis: Russia and Ukraine export 28 percent  of nitrogen and phosphorus fertilizer as well as 40 percent  of the world’s exports of potash, while Russia by itself exports 48 percent of the world’s ammonium nitrate and 11 percent of the world’s urea.

Cuts in fertilizer use by agriculturalists will lead to lower crop yields in the future unless farmers and farm companies are willing to switch to biofertilizers.

Due to the uncertainty of the food market, many countries have established export restrictions, which further exacerbates the hunger crisis in countries that are not self-sufficient in food production.

Despite all the conversations on self-sufficiency in food production, studies show that action is lacking. By the end of the 21st century, we are being told, 141 countries in the world will not be self-sufficient and food production will not meet the nutritional demands of 9.8 out of the 15.6 billion people projected to be on the planet.

Only 14 percent of the world’s states will be self-sufficient, with Russia, Thailand and Eastern Europe as the leading producers of grain for the world. Such a bleak forecast demands that we radically transform the world food system; a provisional set of demands is listed in “A Plan to Save the Planet,” developed by Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and the Network of Research Institutes.

In the short-term, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres has made it clear that the conflict in Ukraine and the sanctions against Russia must be ended so that these key producers of food and fertilizer can resume production for the world market.

 

A recent study conducted by the Brazilian Research Network on Food and Nutrition Sovereignty and Security (Rede Penssan) notes that nearly 60 percent of Brazilian families do not have access to adequate food. Of the country’s 212 million people, the number of those who have nothing to eat has leapt from 19 million to 33.1 million since 2020.

“The economic policies chosen by the government and the reckless management of the pandemic lead to the even more scandalous increase in social inequality and hunger in our country,” said Ana Maria Segall, a medical epidemiologist at Rede Penssan. But, only a few years ago, the United Nations championed Brazil’s Fome Zero and Bolsa Família programmes, which cut hunger and poverty rates dramatically.

Under the leadership of former presidents Lula da Silva (2003–2010) and Dilma Rousseff (2011–2016), Brazil met the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Goals.

The governments that followed — of Michel Temer (2016–2018) and Jair Bolsonaro (2019–present) — have reversed these gains and brought Brazil back to the worst days of hunger, when the poet and singer Solano Trindade sang, “tem gente com fome” (“there are hungry people”):

there are hungry people
there are hungry people
there are hungry people

…

if there are hungry people
give them something to eat
if there are hungry people
give them something to eat
if there are hungry people
give them something to eat

 

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is a senior non-resident fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest book is Washington Bullets, with an introduction by Evo Morales Ayma.

This article is from Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

 

READ MORE:

 https://consortiumnews.com/2022/07/01/hunger/

 

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REE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,5

 

Western elites can’t decide if they should sanction or seduce Africa in their attempts to counter Russia and China

 

In a scramble for influence, the US and its allies are reaching for both the carrot and the stick at the same time

 

BY Rachel Marsden

 

 

In trying to find ways to effectively counter Russia and China’s partnerships in Africa, Washington – and its Western followers – is not content to just go for the honey or the vinegar – so officials are resorting to both at the same time.

Typically, the Western modus operandi has been to establish a footprint in the target foreign country through military intervention under a security pretext with the hope of eventually pivoting to an economic one. Recent history suggests that elites haven’t quite been able to make the transition before their plans go pear-shaped. Unable to get their hands on the prize – typically, the country’s natural resources – they eventually either get kicked out (as was the casewith France in Mali), or end up cutting their losses (like the US did in Afghanistan). 

Russia and China have been able to effectively exploit the void created by misguided Western foreign military adventures. In the case of Mali, Russia offered the transitional government military helicopters, radars, and weapons, in addition to “soldiers and trainers” reportedly operating in the African country (according to reports, these are from the Wagner private security company, but officials have distanced themselves from the group). Moscow is now parlaying that foothold into expanded cooperation.

“We paid special attention to the practical aspects of organizing deliveries from Russia of wheat, mineral fertilizers and petroleum products that are so much needed by the people of Mali today in conditions of illegitimate Western sanctions,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said during a press conference, in May, with his Malian counterpart, Abdoulaye Diop. France and the US sanctioned the country in the wake of delayed elections following two coups, all under the watch of Paris' Operation Barkhane and the EU’s training missionheadquartered in the capital, Bamako. 

And now Washington is forging ahead with a new tool to threaten African countries that defy its interests. The ‘Countering Malign Russian Activities in Africa Act’ would target African governments, officials, and businesses doing business with Russia, qualified as “manipulation”and “exploitation” of Africans to Russia’s benefit. The plan is in the same spirit as the ‘Countering Russian Influence in Europe and Eurasia Act of 2017’ and the ‘Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act’, targeting Iran, Russia, and North Korea… but which also risksthreatening India for purchasing a S-400 Russian missile defense system.

The same act was leveraged to halt the construction of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline for the transport of Russian gas into Western Europe under threat of American sanctions – effectively opening up a potential new market for US liquified gas exports.

At the same time, the Western G7 bloc has proposed a $600 billion plan to build foreign infrastructure in Africa and Latin America, with Washington pledging $200 billion and the EU another $300 billion, and private businesses expected to get on board to invest. What are they going to do – sanction some of these countries and then demand that they take Western cash? How awkward. 

The idea is to counter China’s Belt and Road project, albeit a decade late and hundreds of billions of dollars short. The message here is clear. These countries can either deal with Russia, China, and other American adversaries and get buried in sanctions, or else they can accept this wonderful opportunity to let Washington and its Western allies into the country to build nice things. 

A long-standing US criticism of China is that it exploits its Belt and Road project to ‘debt trap’ countries and impose its influence. But it’s not like Washington’s intent towards underdeveloped countries is purely altruistic.

For an example, look to how the US-funded Marshall Plan for post-WWII Europe helped establish CIA front companies around the continent. Or when Washington funds ‘civil society’ projects in underdeveloped target countries that end up being exposed as operations to subvert the government – one such example being a Twitter-like social media project in Cuba, funded by USAID and uncovered by the Associated Press in 2014. 

 

Speaking at the G7 Summit in Germany, US President Joe Biden said that investment projects include an industrial-scale vaccine manufacturing facility in Senegal, a global subsea telecommunications cable passing through the Horn of Africa, new solar projects in Angola, and a nuclear reactor plant in Romania. But at best, it’s playing catch-up with the $59 billion spent by China last year alone on the 144-country venture. 

Only time will tell how much of the announcement is window dressing and marketing – a valid concern given that this is the second year in a row that the proposal has been tabled at the G7 Summit, only to be rebranded and recycled a year later with little else happening in the interim. 

“These strategic investments are areas of – critical to sustainable development and to our shared global stability: health and health security, digital connectivity, gender equality and equity, climate and energy security,” Biden said, evoking all the warm and fuzzy buzzwords expected of him. But the true measure of the initiative will be in whether it can successfully replace Washington’s strategy of setting fire to foreign nations for the primary purpose of being able to step in afterwards and offer to help clean up. 

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

 

 

READ MORE:

https://www.rt.com/russia/557982-us-push-china-from-africa/

 

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By News Desk - July 07 2022

 

Turkish customs authorities released a Russian cargo ship on 6 July after it was detained several days prior due to allegations that the ship was carrying grains ‘stolen’ from Ukraine.

Turkish customs seized the Russian-flagged Zhibek Zholy cargo ship at the request of Ukrainian authorities who alleged that 7,000 tons of grains were being illegally exported from territories controlled by Russian armed forces.

“Ignoring the appeal of the Ukrainian side, the ship was released on the evening of 6 July,” the Ukrainian foreign ministry said.

Zhibek Zholy left Turkey’s northwestern port of Karasu after receiving approval to sail from Turkish authorities.

Kiev has summoned the Turkish ambassador to Ukraine to provide an explanation of the result of the Turkish customs inspection. According to Reuters, the meeting has not taken place yet but the summons has been issued.

Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu spoke with his Ukrainian counterpart on the morning of 7 July.

Ukrainian officials spoke to Middle East Eye, saying they believe the ship will likely sail to Russia or to another port in Ukraine that is under control of Russian armed forces.

Investigators inspected the ship on 4 July to determine if the grain was stolen or not.

Moscow has denied all allegations of the theft of wheat from Ukraine.

“The ship really is Russian-flagged, but I think it belongs to Kazakhstan and the cargo was being carried on a contract between Estonia and Turkey,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told reporters.

Lavrov recently visited Turkey on 8 June to discuss mutual cooperation for easing the food crisis, namely through the implementation of a UN plan for a “food corridor” in the Black Sea, whereby ships carrying grain exports can safely sail.

The two ministers declared that the main problem obstructing the safe shipment of grain exports were the mines placed in the sea by Ukrainian forces and Azov Battalion militants.

Lavrov criticized Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for refusing to discuss the clearing of mines.

“We state daily that we’re ready to guarantee the safety of vessels leaving Ukrainian ports and heading for the [Bosphorus] gulf, and we’re ready to do that in cooperation with our Turkish colleagues,” Lavrov said. “To solve the problem, the only thing needed is for the Ukrainians to let vessels out of their ports, either by de-mining or by marking out safe corridors … nothing more is required.”

The two officials declared that the Russian and Turkish navies are ready to contribute to the de-mining process, and that Russia would not use the clearing of mines as a pretext to launch attacks on Ukraine.

The pressure from Kiev has put Ankara in a tough position as it seeks to play a mediating role between Russia and Ukraine, in addition to cooperating with Russia in the plan for the ‘food corridor’.

The Zhibek Zholy was celebrated as the first commercial ship to leave the ports of eastern Ukraine since the outbreak of the war.

 

 

READ MORE:

https://thecradle.co/Article/News/12777

 

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FFREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW..................

 

BY RUSSELL BENTLEY

 

I first went to Mariupol in March, 2022, in the early days of the Special Military Operation, while active combat operations were still ongoing in the city center. Wagner, the Chechens, and my comrades from Vostok were doing the heavy work there back then, and heavy work it was.

I first went to Mariupol in March, 2022, in the early days of the Special Military Operation, while active combat operations were still ongoing in the city center. Wagner, the Chechens, and my comrades from Vostok were doing the heavy work there back then, and heavy work it was. More than half of the city was damaged or destroyed in the fighting, before it finally ended with the surrender of the last remaining Azov* nazis hiding out in the Azovstahl steel plant on May 16th, 2022. A few days ago, I went back to Mariupol, and it was truly amazing and inspiring to see. Not just the "re-building" of the city, but a literal rebirth.

Thousands of families now have new, modern apartments to live in, schools, hospitals, churches, government buildings and social centers have been repaired or in most cases built anew from the ground up. The Azovstahl steel plant that was owned by the Ukrainian billionaire Renat Akhmetov, which was the worst polluter of Mariupol and the Azov Sea, will be (mostly) torn down with the exception of a small part which will be turned into a museum to commemorate the Heroes who fought and died liberating Mariupol from eight years of occupation by the nazis of the 21st century. The rest of the plant territory will be turned into seaside parks and boardwalks, where nature and beauty will return to reclaim what was once a toxic and grimy industrial zone and horrific battlefield. Not rebuilt, reborn.

And what Russia has done, and is doing, in Mariupol, we are doing and will do on all the territory liberated from the fascist quisling regime that is now in power in Kiev. The lands and people we liberate will not be made back "as good" as they were before the war, they will be made better, better than they have ever been. That is the meaning of progress, that is the meaning of liberation. Roads, homes, schools, hospitals, all social infrastructure, modernized and upgraded, by the Russian Federation, to welcome back our Slavic brothers and sisters to the Russian Orthodox world they have been a part of for more than 1,000 years. What we have done and are doing with Mariupol and Ukraine, we will do with the world - a new world, based on equality and mutual respect for all nations, based on cooperation and compassion, not conflict and cutthroat competition. The war going on today between Good and Evil is for the future of Humanity, and we are all on one side or the other. Choose wisely, and let's join together and do what must be done.

 

https://sputnikglobe.com/20231020/like-a-phoenix-from-the-ashes-inside-mariupols-rebirth-1114368181.html

 

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Putin's Audacious Building Boom in Mariupol, Donbas - Why It's Important

CHARLES BAUSMAN

 

 

Blog housekeeping: It has happened every of the 4 Falls that we have been here. Energy levels in Russia seem to fluctuate more than in the West. Russians, like the French, take their vacations very seriously, and seem to do absolutely nothing from late July to early September. They likewise enjoy an obscenely long winter break, from lat Dec. to mid-Jan, and again from late April to mid-May. Autumn and early winter however are a flurry of activity and energy, with another burst in late winter and late Spring. I was prevented from writing much here, or even tweeting as much as I would have liked due to getting pulled into various projects and activities, but I fully plan to return to it in the new year.

There is growing interest in moving to Russia from Westerners, and honestly, even I am surprised, the more I dig into this story, how compelling the case is, once you unpack it. This is driving demand for hourly consulting on the various aspects of moving here, and I have decided to start offering that service in the new year. If this is of interest to you, get in touch with me directly here on Substack, or Twitter, or let me know in the comments.

In my last article about the Donbas and why I think it will eventually attract many immigrants from the West, I touched on the massive rebuilding in Mariupol, which I visited in October, and I want to return to it before too much time passes because it has major implications. Putin brought it up Thursday at a press conference, and it really is an extraordinary phenomenon.

Incidentally, a few weeks ago I made a very brief trip to Crimea, visiting the capitol, Simferopol, and Metropolitan Tikhon’s remarkable Christian-historical-archeological “theme-park”, New Khersones, which is next to Sevastopol, Russia’s main naval base, and just opened its doors about 3 months ago. I was in Crimea just long enough to realize that it too will be a remarkably attractive place for Westerners to settle in, and its story compliments neighboring Donbas and Mariupol. It is all basically the same region, with similar histories, climates, and prospects. One could write a great deal about the opportunities, history, and towns of Crimea, which are fascinating. With the completion of a new highway around the Azov Sea, New Khersones will be about 4 hours drive from Mariupol.

Now, as for the building boom in coastal Mariupol, the second largest city of Donetsk Republic, after Donetsk city – it really is huge, and the first thing I thought when I saw it was, why in the world isn’t Russia talking about this more? Why hadn’t I heard about it? And then I remembered why – because Russia is terrible at the Infowars – something you come to realize living here, watching them miss opportunity after opportunity. If they just put smart Westerners in charge of their propaganda efforts they would get a very different result – but they don’t and won’t. Despite looking similar to us, Slavs are quite different from Western Europeans in how they think, and this is very important to understand if you are thinking about moving here.

 

There must be some factory in Russia pumping out these outdoor weight-training parks very inexpensively. I have seen them in Moscow, Nizhny Novgorod, and now Mariupol. Why pay for a gym when you can have the same thing free in the fresh air? Free-weights and everything. Real, pro-social policies in action. Many such examples.

When I say huge I am not exaggerating. Driving around downtown Mariupol, it seems every other building is freshly rebuilt, with entire neighborhoods being completely new, with the new from-scratch buildings far superior to the old building stock. One encounters new parks, new roads, new medical facilities, new universities, and a few high value cultural buildings – like the historic dramatic theater in the center of town.

Civilians fled in advance of the battle for the city in May 2022, but now Russia claims the population is back up to around 300,000, close to its pre-war level of about 450,000, and growing quickly. Here is a wiki-style list of objects built and when, and what is still ahead, and it is rather impressive. It comes from a Russian alternative to Wikipedia which got started about 10 years ago. I don’t know how large or successful it is, but here is a real life demonstration of how useful it is. Win for Russia to realize they have to create their own parallel data infrastructure.

I have no idea how complete and exhaustive that list is, and indeed, trying to get some hard data, both from the Donetsk government or researching Russian media on the internet, yielded very little. It seems no one really knows – certainly the Russian media has not reported on this in depth – well except Mr. Putin, because his analysts must have prepared some data for his statements about it in the press conference – but who knows if even they got it right.

We have become somewhat numbed by people throwing around stats and big numbers and the enormity of what is transpiring only dawned on me when one of our hosts handed me a 100 page internal document listing about 150 buildings and other things repaired or rebuilt since 2022. It had before and after photos of each site, what was done, how much was spent, when work began and when it was completed, who did the work, and so on. Flipping through this list, seeing building after building (and they are not small) you start to realize that this is very unusual indeed.

The list was about 60% high-rise apartment buildings – but I found the other items more illustrative of how comprehensive the rebuilding is:

Parks, kindergartens, statues, fountains, band-shells, banyas (public bath-houses, a uniquely Russian phenomenon and a stark civilizational advantage over the West), doctor’s offices, schools, warehouse complexes, indoor gyms, hospitals – and not small – they looked like fancy, cutting edge specialized hospitals, libraries, a LOT of playgrounds, “palaces of culture” – a Soviet term meaning “community or neighborhood cultural centers”, movie theaters, “multi-functional centers” – government offices where citizens can come to deal with all aspects of the sprawling Russian bureaucracy with which they may need to interact – now highly digitized, indoor swimming pools, monuments, general landscaping, bus-stops, roads, government offices, hotels, university dormitories, gas pipelines, sewage systems, tramlines and tram depos, digital billboards … I could go on but you get the idea I think.

Perusing this list of 150 “objects” was already making my eyes glaze over and wondering when we would have lunch. And this was just 150 of a total of 2000! So yeah, its a big project. I asked for a copy of the list – nyet – not allowed, secret, classified, whatever, so I made the above notes. This gets back to the whole Infowars thing – it just doesn’t work the same in Russia.

The brand-new Mariupol naval academy. An entirely separate category of spending in and around the city, not reflected in the above data, comes from the military.

On top of this top-down construction, citizens can apply for government payouts to undertake repairs themselves, receiving between $US100 – $US 450 / square meter of damage depending on how bad it was. According to the government 4162 apartments have been renovated this way, with payouts totalling $US132 million (at current rates). Due to purchase power parity, this would be similar to perhaps $US 0.5 billion in the US.

Some more stats, this time fresh from the government in Donetsk, so as of today. I was unable to find this data on the Russian internet, so this blog is the only place it is available, which is a little surreal:

• Total apartment buildings in Mariupol: 3029
• Destroyed or damaged apartment buildings: 1998. 1637 of these salvagable, 361 unsalvagable.
• To date, 1480 apartment buildings have been either newly built or repaired, comprising 80,000 apartments.
• Population before the SMO: 430,000
• Current population: 300,000
• Abandoned homes and apartments (i.e. their owners have fled and are not returning to claim them.): 5197. They will be distributed to the public who can demonstrate need.

Mariupol boosters in the Russian media claim that it is already one of the most modern and desirable places to live in Russia, an example for other cities. In addition to the rebuilding, social services have returned, – schools, universities, medical services, pensions, social security, etc.

The next thought I had re the boom was, is this really prudent? Isn’t the war still quite hot? What if a barrage of NATO missiles or drones made it through Russia’s formidable missile defence systems? Would it not be better to wait a few more months? So I pestered our hosts about this over the course of a few days, and after some difficulty, got the following explanation pieced together from different answers from various people : Yes, that is a risk, but when weighed against the advantages of pressing ahead already a year ago, it became clear that moving forward was the right decision. What are those advantages you ask?

 

 

Real estate deficit spending strongly stimulates economy because large sums to into workers salaries and building supplies companies, many of them local. In economy-speak, the velocity of money is very high when it is spent this way, generating a lot of economic activity – much more than just handing out subsidies, pensions, etc. This helps take the local economy off of life support, which is also very expensive for Russia.It is interesting that the money is flowing into Mariupol via major Russian cities and provinces – obviously a way to boost these local economies. 

 

It is powerful propaganda because it shows in deeds what Russia will likely do for other damaged towns and cities in Novorossiya. I can attest that the locals we talked to in Mariupol where absolutely thrilled, barely able to believe that finally a government was doing something for them, after the disastrous reign of untrammeled oligarch plundering over the last 30 years. Apparently the propaganda is working, as large numbers of those who fled are returning.

 

 

3. Massive public works, infrastructure, and building projects play to Russia’s strengths. Energy intensive – inexpensive in Russia compared to the West. Steel, concrete, asphalt, wood, stone, plastics, piping, tractors, cranes, trucks, fuel – and the hordes of disciplined construction brigades from Central Asia -Russia has it all in spades. And a happy freedom for stifling regulations, legal, insurance costs, etc. Russia can do this much, much cheaper than Europe, for example.
4. It is powerful propaganda because it telegraphs to the world and to the home front a great confidence that the likelihood of a reversal on the battlefields is neglible.

And regarding the NATO missiles and large drones, our hosts argued that there simply aren’t very many of them, that they are very expensive, and that it wouldn’t make sense to expend them on random civilian infrastructure. The less expensive smaller drones would also not be an effective weapon for damaging civilian infrastructure.

 

I asked the priests at New Khersones park, the same question, and they explained that construction had started long before the start of the SMO, but that there had been some scary moments, but so far so good.

One aspect of this war destruction which I don’t see much discussion of is that the late soviet prefab residential blocks damaged by the fighting were some of the ugliest, most soul-crushing, unpleasants dwellings for humans ever built, and at the end of their life cycle. Destroying them and making room for new buildings using new technologies is a good thing. That said, the new construction isn’t winning any design awards – it is has to be built quickly and inexpensively, but as you can see from the photos here, it is a vast improvement.

 

This is one aspect of the disaster which was Communism which is not appreciated enough – how intolerably ugly most Soviet-era, and many post-Soviet, buildings are. Indeed, much of what was built after communism is also a disaster, especially private homes, but one does see a steady improvement and growing sophistication and improvement in taste. One could see this as a drawback, but is it not also an opportunity, for the entrepreneur who is able to build aesthetically attractive homes and communities will certainly attract an enthusiastic clientele. Over the coming decades Russia plans to build 50 small cities of about 50,000 inhabitants from scratch, some of them far from the current ugliness.

So we’ve established that it really is very large, and that, counterintuitively, it makes sense to embark on it before the war’s end, but why is it important, beyond another propaganda play or economic boost in this interminable war?

 

Mariupol has a pleasant shore and beaches – with a climate similar to coastal Connecticut or New Jersey.

A downtown civilian pier.

Putin seems to think it’s important. He was talking it up at one of his periodic marathon 5 hour press conferences two days ago (no Western leader does anything remotely similar, although the questions are quite softball) – announcing ambitious plans to build a new highway encircling the entire sea of Azov, not to mention rebuilding all of the roads in Donbass, many of them destroyed by fighting. He also announced that Russia plans to build or rebuild another 20,000 buildings, in addition to the 1,700 in Mariupol. Asked whether Russia can afford this, he said he was certain it could, and that a complete reconstruction of damaged buildings and infrastructure would be completed by 2030.

A massive new cathedral being completed in downtown Mariupol. Construction began in 2014, 8 years before the SMO.

But he didn’t articulate what I find so striking about modern Russia, something I only gradually came to be aware of when I started writing about the move-to-Russia phenomenon – that is the untapped economic potential of this enormous, and relatively empty country. This is the piece that I think most observers are missing. People tend to think of Russia as a safe haven perhaps from destructive social trends in the West, an idiosyncratic place, not easy to understand, with an exotic (to us) Christianity, a rich culture – but one doesn’t think of it as an economic tiger, on a par with the more dynamic economies of Asia. But it increasingly looks like this economic potential is being released, and certainly, on paper, it seems inevitable. One only has to look back at Russia’s startling economic growth before the revolution, mirroring America’s at the time, to appreciate what could be.

One of the fancier new residential buildings. Apartment interior below. I asked approximately what an apartment like this would cost – about $US100,000.

And this, I think, will be the main reason people to move here eventually – for the economic opportunity.

It turns out that Russia can afford to completely rebuild a 430,000 population city like Mariupol. And claims it can do the same in other cities. One sees dramatic improvements in infrastructure and social services everywhere – in big cities and small. Eventually one realizes that that humans, when not held back by venal corporations and governments, are amazingly productive, and that things can move very fast with the right government policies. Think of what China has achieved in the past decades, or Germany’s economic miracle during and after the 3rd Reich, and a similar boom in the US after WW2.

That, for me, was the message of Mariupol. It is a pattern one sees again and again across this vast country, and an economic reality which most observers are missing.

https://www.unz.com/article/putins-audacious-building-boom-in-mariupol-donbas-why-its-important/

 

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