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of banana-republic dollars and oily/gassy russian rubles....
The most likely outcome is that Russia’s bloated wartime public sector will block any downsizing, but high interest rates will bring down inflation. In an economy subordinate to political imperatives, there are few incentives for sustainable development. Sooner or later, this will hurt the well-being of ordinary Russians. In other words, temporary fixes and a decline in living standards will add to the political and economic headwinds facing the Kremlin. But given the existing safety margins and the nature of Western sanctions, it could take Russia many years to reach the end of its ability to muddle through such challenges.
GUS: THIS IS A GLIB CONCLUSION BY AN EXPERT (FORMERLY WORKING FOR RUSSIA CENTRAL BANK BUT DEFECTED TO THE WEST), ALEXANDRA PROKOPENKO, WRITING FOR THE CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT FOR INTERNATIONAL PEACE (READ AMERICAN EMPIRE HEGEMONY THINK-TANK FOR PSYCHOLOGICAL WARFARE).
PROKOPENKO IS USED BY VARIOUS NEWS OUTLETS AS A CRITIC OF VLADIMIR PUTIN. AS A FINANCIAL WIZZ, ONE OF HER LATEST CALCULATION IS THAT RUSSIA IS SPENDING 8 PER CENT OF ITS BUDGET ON WEAPON INDUSTRIES AND THIS IS NOT SUSTAINABLE… I’VE GOT NEWS FOR HER: AMERICA IS OFFICIALLY SPENDING 12 PER CENT OF ITS OWN BUDGET ON THE PENTAGON AND FROM TIME TO TIME VOTES SOME “EXTRA” CASH FOR ITS WEAPON INDUSTRIES THAT IS NOT INCLUDED IN THE OVERALL PENTAGON BUDGET. ADDING ALL THE DISCRETIONARY MONEYS, THE US SPENDS MORE THAN 15 PER CENT OF ITS BUDGET ON WEAPONS AND ACCORDING TO SOME ECONOMISTS, 21 PER CENT OF EMPLOYMENT IN THE USA RELY ON THE “AMERICAN INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX”.
SAY, 90 PER CENT OF THE CASH JUST VOTED FOR “UKRAINE, TAIWAN, ISRAEL AND WOOP-WOOPLAND” IS GOING TO THE AMERICAN MANUFACTURERS OF ARMAMENT.
THIS IS NOT SUSTAINABLE AS THE CASH COMES FROM AN INCREASE IN THE AMERICAN ALREADY MASSIVE DEFICIT. JUST THIS EXTRA CASH REPRESENTS ABOUT TEN PER CENT OF THE US DEFICIT INCREASE BY ONE TRILLION DOLLAR EVERY 100 DAYS…
MEANWHILE, DESPITE WHAT THIS CARNEGIE CHICK SAYS, ALL THE WEAPON MANUFACTURE IN RUSSIA IS PAID FOR BY REVENUES. SURE, THE REVENUES ARE HEAVILY RELIANT ON OIL AND GAS. SO WHAT? TRADE WITH CHINA AND INDIA CAN ONLY INCREASE AND THE VALUE OF THE DOLLAR — AGAINST LOCAL CURRENCIES AND GOLD — CAN ONLY GO DOWN.
BUT WE ALL KNOW — WE ALL SHOULD — THAT THE PSYCHOLOGICAL WARFARE AGAINST RUSSIA IS DESIGNED TO CAJOLE THE AMERICAN PUBLIC INTO BELIEVING THAT RUSSIA’S ECONOMY IS A BASTARD CASE. EVEN THIS CHICK COMES TO THE CONCLUSION THAT IT WILL TAKE YEARS FOR RUSSIA TO BITE THE DUST…
SO THE CARNEGIE WHATEVER PUSHES ITS ANI-RUSSIA POISONOUS WARES IN EUROPE, IN THE USA, AND WHEREVER IT CAN, ADDING FIDDLESTICKS TO THE OTHER AMERICAN THINK-TANKS THAT HELP PROPAGATE FALSEHOODS.
FURTHERMORE, THE MANUFACTURE OF WEAPONS IS FAR MORE ECONOMICAL AND FAR MORE EFFECTIVE IN RUSSIA THAN IN THE USA WHERE OFFICIAL CORRUPTION AND KICKBACKS ARE RORTING THE SYSTEM OF GOVERNMENT AND ACQUISITION (APPARENTLY, A BAG OF 100 RIVETS IS BOUGHT FOR $60,000 BY THE US GOVERNMENT).
PRESENTLY, EVEN DARPA WOULD BE FALLING BEHIND THE RUSSIAN TECHNOLOGICAL THINKING IN REALISTIC INVENTIONS OF WARFARE AND SCIENTIFIC DEVELOPMENT…
YES, RUSSIA COULD FAIL IN THE FUTURE, LIKE EVERYONE ELSE… BUT MOST LIKELY THE USA THAT WILL BITE THE DUST BEFOREHAND, WHILE EUROPE WILL BECOME INSIGNIFICANT AS IT ALREADY IS NOW…
UKRAINE WILL HAVE TO MAKE A DEAL WITH RUSSIA, DESPITE THE WEST….
MAKE A DEAL PRONTO BEFORE THE SHIT HITS THE FAN:
NO NATO IN "UKRAINE" (WHAT'S LEFT OF IT)
THE DONBASS REPUBLICS ARE NOW BACK IN THE RUSSIAN FOLD — AS THEY USED TO BE PRIOR 1922. THE RUSSIANS WON'T ABANDON THESE AGAIN.
THESE WILL ALSO INCLUDE ODESSA, KHERSON AND KHARKIV.....
CRIMEA IS RUSSIAN — AS IT USED TO BE PRIOR 1954
TRANSNISTRIA WILL BE PART OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION.
A MEMORANDUM OF NON-AGGRESSION BETWEEN RUSSIA AND THE USA.
EASY.
THE WEST KNOWS IT.
READ FROM TOP
FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW....
SEE ALSO:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLm61m8hIx4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okYw7Mb3WK0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slzS7pxavi0
- By Gus Leonisky at 24 Apr 2024 - 6:17am
- Gus Leonisky's blog
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the defeat of ukraine is coming....
BACK IN FEBRUARY, BIG SERGE WROTE HIS ARTICLE "Russo-Ukrainian War: The Deluge..." SINCE THEN, UKRAINE HAS BEEN LOSING AT AN ACELERATING PACE...
As the calendar barrels into another year and we tick away the days of February, notable anniversaries are marked off in sequence. It is now 2/22/2022 +2: two years since Putin’s address on the historic status of the Donetsk and Lugansk regions, followed on 2/24/2022 by the commencement of the Special Military Operation and the spectacular resumption of history.
The nature of the war changed dramatically after a kinetic and mobile opening phase. With the collapse of the negotiation process (whether thanks to Boris Johnson or not), it became clear that the only way out of the conflict would be through the strategic defeat of one party by the other. Thanks to a pipeline of western support (in the form of material, financial aid, and ISR and targeting assistance) which allowed Ukraine to transcend its rapidly evaporating indigenous war economy, it became clear that this would be a war of industrial attrition, rather than rapid maneuver and annihilation. Russia began to mobilize resources for this sort of attritional war in the Autumn of 2022, and since then the war has attained its present quality - that of a firepower intensive but relatively static positional struggle.
The nature of this attritional-positional war lends itself to analytic ambiguity, because it denies the most attractive and obvious signs of victory and defeat in large territorial changes. Instead, a whole host of anecdotal, small scale positional analysis, and foggy data has to suffice, and this can be easily misconstrued or misunderstood. Ukraine’s supporters point to nominally small scale advances to support their notion that Russia is suffering cataclysmic casualties to capture small villages. This suggests that Russia is winning meaningless, pyrrhic victories which will lead to its exhaustion, so long as Ukraine receives everything it asks for from the west. At the same time, the Z-sphere points to these same battles as evidence that Ukraine can no longer hold even its most heavily defended fortress cities.
What I intend to argue here is that 2024 will be highly decisive for the war, as the year in which Ukrainian strategic exhaustion begins to show out at the same time that Russia’s strategic investments begin to pay off on the battlefield. This is the way of such an attritional conflict, which burdens armies with cumulative and constant stressors in a test of their recuperative powers. Wear and tear and the raging of the waters will erode and burden the dike until it bursts. And then the deluge comes.
Avdiivka: Tactical OvermatchThe signature operational development of 2024 is at this point clearly the complete Russian capture of Avdiivka. The strategic significance of Avdiivka has itself been subject to debate, with some dismissing it as little more than a dingy suburb of Donetsk, targeted to give Putin a symbolic victory on the eve of Russian elections.
In fact, Avdiivka is clearly a locale with great operational significance. A Ukrainian fortress since the beginning of the Donbass War in 2014, Avdiivka served as a keystone blocking position for the AFU on the doorstep of Donetsk, sitting on a major supply corridor. Its capture creates space for Russia to begin a multi-pronged advance on next-phase Ukrainian strongholds like Konstantinivka and Pokrovsk (more on that later) and pushes Ukrainian artillery away from Donetsk.
The subject that would seem to be of particular importance, however, was the manner in which Russia captured Avdiivka. The struggle amid the wreckage of an industrial city provided something of a Rorschach test for the war, with some seeing the battle as yet another application of Russian “meat assaults”, overwhelming the AFU defenders with mass amid horrific casualties.
This story does not hold up to scrutiny, as I would like to demonstrate from a variety of angles. First, we can try to gauge casualties. This is always difficult to do with a high degree of accuracy, but it would be useful to look for abnormalities or spikes in Russian loss patterns. The most widely accepted source for this would be the Mediazona casualty tracker (an explicitly anti-Putinist media project operated out of the west).
When one goes to examine the Mediazona counts, an interesting discrepancy manifests itself. The summary text notes that a four-month battle for Avdiivka has recently concluded, and Mediazona states: “We are seeing significant growth of Russian casualties since mid-October.” This is actually quite odd, because their data shows the literal opposite. Since October 10 (the day of the first major Russian mechanized assault on Avdiivka), Mediazona has counted an average of 48 Russian casualties per day, which is actually significantly less than the burn rate earlier in the year. In contrast, Mediazona counted 80 casualties per day on average from January 1 to October 9. This period, of course, includes heavy fighting in Bakhmut, so if one takes the period between the end of the Battle of Bakhmut and the beginning of the Battle of Avdiivka (May 20 to October 9) one finds an average of 60 Russian casualties per day. A time series of Mediazona’s weekly confirmed casualties also shows a downward trend, making one wonder how they can feel comfortable claiming that the action in Avdiivka has raised the burn rate.
READ MORE:
https://bigserge.substack.com/p/russo-ukrainian-war-the-deluge
GUSNOTE: SINCE THEN, THE NUMBER OF RUSSIAN CASUALTIES PER DAY HAS GREATLY DIMINISHED, WHILE THE UKRAINIAN SUFFER AROUND 900 DEAD PER DAY.... THE WEST SHOULD FORCE UKRAINE TO MAKE A DEAL, BUT THERE IS MONEY TO BE COLLECTED BY THE AMERICAN MILITARY INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX FOR MAKING WEAPONS.... AND AMERICA STILL WANTS TO DESTROY RUSSIA...
MAKE A DEAL PRONTO BEFORE THE SHIT HITS THE FAN:
NO NATO IN "UKRAINE" (WHAT'S LEFT OF IT)
THE DONBASS REPUBLICS ARE NOW BACK IN THE RUSSIAN FOLD — AS THEY USED TO BE PRIOR 1922. THE RUSSIANS WON'T ABANDON THESE AGAIN.
THESE WILL ALSO INCLUDE ODESSA, KHERSON AND KHARKIV.....
CRIMEA IS RUSSIAN — AS IT USED TO BE PRIOR 1954
TRANSNISTRIA WILL BE PART OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION.
A MEMORANDUM OF NON-AGGRESSION BETWEEN RUSSIA AND THE USA.
EASY.
THE WEST KNOWS IT.
READ FROM TOP
FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW....
bidenomics BS.....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kT--yH18JaA
READ FROM TOP
FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW....