An “informed source” has told RIA Novosti that the Kalashnikov company has been tasked with coordinating efforts to produce all the necessary supplies the Russian Army needs for Putin’s war in Ukraine.
FTX is a major event for crypto. That much is certain.
There are allegations of massive fraud which some are saying rival or even exceed that of Bernie Madoff.
However, how much impact FTX has beyond crypto is still very much uncertain (although the Ukraine angle is intriguing, and if the US ever mounted a serious investigation of the role of certain US citizens in Ukraine's ongoing corruption could be quite consequential).
Being primarily an analyst, while I strive to keep things timely, I find I get better substance if I let a news story play out somewhat before wading in. There are a couple of articles farther back in the archives where, upon reflection, I realize I would have done better to have waited for the facts to mature a bit more before writing about it.
Ukraine is not and never has been an "honorable" conflict. On either side.
Realpolitik does not do honor. It merely counts pros and cons, wins and losses.
The only honorable Russians in this whole bloody business are the ones who fled rather than obey Putin's mobilization order. They at least had the morals (and instinct for self-preservation) to declare themselves quit of the whole bloody business.
Wishing NATO's destruction is no doubt quite fashionable in certain circles. However, given that NATO has kept European nations including Russia from engaging in their historically favorite pastime of all out war, I'm rather less sanguine about the notion. And while even Putin could have made an argument that NATO was an obsolete anachronism, a holdover from the Cold War, it was Putin himself who ended that argument when he invaded Ukraine.
In that moment, he reminded Europe why NATO mattered and gave it an entirely new lease on life. Not exactly Putin's brightest move.
And just what might the U.S.'s favorite pastime be??? Let's see, We are basically in the Ukraine right now, with so called advisors there and the the 101 Airborne ready to go in at a moment's notice. We left Afghanistan after 20 years of fighting. Since WWII we have fought in Korea ,Vietnam and Iraq. We have supported or indirectly been at war in Kosovo, Bosnian and Herzegovina and Croatia, Somalia, Haiti, and Libya and Yemen!!!!!! Come on Peter, don't be so naive. We really are not that different than Russia.
I don't recall saying the US was much different from Russia. However, there have been exactly two systems of treaties which have held the countries of Europe back from total war since the rise of modern nation states: Bismarck's interlocking treaties and NATO.
Ironically, if NATO ever were to collapse one of the major losers would be Russia. NATO's Article V guarantee only works if a NATO member is attacked--which means NATO is hardly likely to ever invade Russia (the politics just don't work out that way). If NATO goes away then Paris, Berlin, and Moscow get to go back to shooting the holy hell out of each other as they have done for at least three centuries before 1945.
And France has enough nuclear weapons to end Russia all by itself in that scenario.
As I said, there are no white hats here. Not Russia, not NATO, not the US.
But that doesn't make the current situation the worst case scenario. A Europe without NATO is almost certainly a more violent, more bloody, and more dangerous place than a Europe with NATO.
Someone who genuinely wants peace does not recklessly advocate for things which can only lead to more war.
Putin invaded in self-defense. We hate him because the plan was to carve up the USSR and loot the place, but Putin stood up in time to save the Russian nation. Our own Bolsheviks will never forgive him for this and have escalated for 30 years. We are morally and financially bankrupt, our institutions captured and no longer legitimate. Putin is the white hat here, and we cannot but cheer for him.
If you're going to argue Putin's side, the least you can do is attempt to get the history straight.
Putin's invasion of Ukraine was a ham-handed effort to return Ukraine to Moscow's orbit, in order to add Ukraine's geography to Russia's historical defensive doctrine of using land and Russian winters to break an invader's logistics--a doctrine which worked well both during the Napoleonic Wars and WW2.
Putin's mistake was failing to grasp the reality that Moscow's insistence on controlling swaths of European terrain puts it in inevitable conflict with the other loci of power in Europe: i.e., London, Paris, and Berlin (with Brussels a proxy for Berlin in the past and potentially Paris in the future). NATO binds those three loci against Moscow--that was its primary reason for being, and when Germany was added to the alliance Moscow formed the Warsaw Pact to provide a counterweight.
Putin tried to buy the Ukrainian government off in 2013, only to have that effort backfire bigly. No matter how one chooses to frame the Maidan Protests or the US State Department's involvement in positioning Yatsenyuk as the man to take over the Ukrainian presidency, the reality is that Victoria Neuland's scheming not only worked, but effected a lasting change in the orientation of Kyiv towards the West rather than towards Moscow. Putin got outmaneuvered by the US Department of State.
Moreover, Putin never needed to invade Ukraine. He already had the economic leverage to negotiate a neutral Ukraine, and he has completely wasted that leverage. While the EU is going to suffer quite a bit from the abrupt loss of Russian natural gas, if the EU remains intact until next spring Putin's economic leverage will be gone for good, without him ever having attempted to use it.
For Putin the final indignity is that, having wasted so many initial advantages, he invaded Ukraine with a strategy that was almost farcically incompetent. He failed to allocate enough troops, he failed to allocate enough supplies, and he failed to concentrate his forces effectively, with the result being first the retreat from Kyiv after the invasion column ran out of fuel and then food, then the retreat from Kharkiv as the Russian Army ran out of just about everything including soldiers, and now the retreat from Kherson because Ukrainian attacks on Russia's supply lines (including the creative use of asymmetric tactics to damage the Kerch Bridge, a major choke point on supplying Kherson via Crimea).
Putin is wasting Russian lives by persisting in a war of attrition NATO is happy to let him fight, especially since even if Russia conquers Ukraine, Russia is not likely to pacify Ukraine, which means the Russian Army will be bogged down in Ukraine for the next several years--time Russia does not have given the current collapsing state of both its economy and its demographics.
I don't cheer on anyone who glorifies war over peace, and that includes the NATO leaders who are quite happy to enable Putin's game of death. However, I am also cognizant that it is Putin who holds the key to peace, for it is Putin who has the ability to order Russian troops back to Russia proper. Given that Putin has made it quite clear that his ultimate goal is the conquest of all of Ukraine, if the Ukrainians stop fighting Ukraine ceases to exist--that makes asking the Ukrainians to stop fighting a rather tall order.
The only white hats are the ones who seek to avoid war. In Russia, the only ones who qualify are the ones who reject Putin's mobilization order. Everyone else is damned to wear a black hat.
Your arguments vilifying Putin are credible and informed . I learn a lot. However would it not be prudent to include some counterbalance regarding NATO expansion since 1990, 15 to 30 member states, including all Warsaw Pact countries, with two of them sharing a border with Russia? Now Finland seeks membership, with its 830-mile Russian border. Do NATO exercises regularly conducted in the Black Sea not indicate aggressive actions toward Russia? Azov Battalion atrocities in the Donbas seem worth a mention, as do the failed Minsk Agreements. Putin has demanded that Ukraine not be allowed to join NATO. The world witnessed Russia slowly amass troops for the special military operation, yet even then Biden and Zelensky refused to utter that pledge. Where were U.S. diplomatic efforts to avert this conflict? Yep plenty of black hats to go around.
“Rabbit hole” pondering: could this be a globalist ploy to further decimate western resources, economies and populations while fomenting the breakup of Russia?
Re your "rabbit hole" pondering: No, it's not a globalist ploy, for the simple reason that globalism is waning, and regionalism is ascendant. Any globalist ploy to destroy the global economy and break up existing nations is globalist suicide, and nothing but.
Globalism is waning? It doesn’t feel that way in the USA at least concerning the current party in power. If realigned regionalist governments are to occur here, and that may well be on the horizon, IMO they will come to fruition likely through violent upheaval. Strange times ahead.
So much has been written about the unwisdom of NATO's expansion into former Warsaw Pact countries (and former parts of the USSR) that there is little more to be said. In geopolitical terms, it was reckless.
And yet "something" needed to be done vis-a-vis the former Warsaw Pact countries, for the simple reason that while Russia's government might have collapsed, Russia itself still possessed (at the time) all the elements for an eventual return to "great power" status in Europe. If the former Warsaw Pact countries were not a part of NATO, some form of central European alliance would have been almost inevitable both to keep those countries free from Russian domination down the road and also to form a buffer between Russia and NATO, and thus give Russia a bit of breathing space militarily.
As for the pledge for Ukraine not to join NATO: while it was fashionable to talk about Ukraine joining NATO, no serious preparations were underway to bring Ukraine formally into NATO. Partly this was because, outside of the "collective defense" aegis, there was no great urgency. Ukraine had been in partnership with NATO since soon after independence, in 1992.
The partnership was deepened and formalized in 1997 with the Charter on a Distinctive Partnership between the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and Ukraine
If, in more than 20 years of that "distinctive partnership" Ukraine had not acceded to full NATO membership, it is ludicrous to presume that it was about to happen now "just because."
Note that the "distinctive partnership" predates Putin even as Prime Minister (he wasn't appointed to that post until August 1999). So Putin has ALWAYS had to contend with the geopolitical reality of a close relationship between Ukraine and NATO that falls short of full membership.
We should also note that, until 2012, Putin was quite happy to participate in Nunn-Lugar "threat reduction" programs, and quite happy to accept funding under those auspices.
Consequently, Putin's eleventh-hour insistence on Ukraine never acceding to full NATO membership was ALWAYS a non-starter, and Putin had to have known that. For such a pledge to have any meaning NATO would have to have also terminated the "distinctive partnership" arrangements that have been in place for over two decades--and that, remember, predate Putin.
While I agree more should have been done diplomatically, it is not hard to fathom why the US/NATO was slack in this regard: they were/are confused over "why now?"
Why not in 2017, when the Ukrainian Parliament enshrined in legislation a national security strategy oriented towards full NATO membership?
Why not in 2019, when the Ukrainian Constitution was amended to further this objective?
Why not in 2020, when Zelensky approved an updated National Security Strategy again reiterating the goal of eventual NATO membership?
Keep in mind that, with Russia having rather illegally annexed Crimea in 2014, Ukrainian membership in NATO is IMPOSSIBLE. Such "external territorial disputes" have to be resolved first, per NATO policy.
So while a neutral Ukraine IS probably the best way to build lasting peace in Eastern Europe, the reality in 2022 is that Putin was demanding a pledge for something that was not about to happen and which COULD NOT HAPPEN so long as Ukraine maintained its claim on Crimea. Putin was demanding a pledge that neither NATO nor Ukraine could give without unwinding their existing formalized relationships which predate Putin.
Do I think NATO should invite Ukraine into the fold? No. One thing Putin's war makes clear is that Ukraine is decades away from being able to contribute to the common defense of any of its neighbors. On that basis alone Ukraine is not qualified to be a part of NATO. Geopolitically, Ukraine in NATO potentially puts NATO forces less than 300 miles by road from Moscow.
However, since Ukraine was not about to be invited into the fold, the strategic outlook for Russia regarding Ukraine has not appreciably changed since Putin first rose to power, and only slightly changed in 2017, 2019, and 2020 as Ukraine has started shaping its national security strategy to be in alignment with NATO.
If Putin invaded Ukraine to keep Ukraine out of NATO he was responding to a threat that did not exist, and could never exist for several more years at least.
I appreciate your evaluation of the NATO - Ukraine sticky wicket. There seems to be a lot of US hot air being released on the matter. After Russia annexed the four (historically Russian leaning) areas of the Donbas, did Ukraine submit a streamlined urgent
membership application for immediate NATO inclusion ?
I look forward to your assessment of the US/ Ukraine/ FTX imbroglio.
I've been watching the FTX implosion with interest. Haven't decided if there's a decent article in it yet.
There's a lot of knee jerk posturing on ZeroHedge over it at the moment, though.
Massive story!
FTX is a major event for crypto. That much is certain.
There are allegations of massive fraud which some are saying rival or even exceed that of Bernie Madoff.
However, how much impact FTX has beyond crypto is still very much uncertain (although the Ukraine angle is intriguing, and if the US ever mounted a serious investigation of the role of certain US citizens in Ukraine's ongoing corruption could be quite consequential).
Being primarily an analyst, while I strive to keep things timely, I find I get better substance if I let a news story play out somewhat before wading in. There are a couple of articles farther back in the archives where, upon reflection, I realize I would have done better to have waited for the facts to mature a bit more before writing about it.
What can we Americans do to support the honorable Russians in this conflict? NATO delenda est.
"Honorable Russians"?
Ukraine is not and never has been an "honorable" conflict. On either side.
Realpolitik does not do honor. It merely counts pros and cons, wins and losses.
The only honorable Russians in this whole bloody business are the ones who fled rather than obey Putin's mobilization order. They at least had the morals (and instinct for self-preservation) to declare themselves quit of the whole bloody business.
Wishing NATO's destruction is no doubt quite fashionable in certain circles. However, given that NATO has kept European nations including Russia from engaging in their historically favorite pastime of all out war, I'm rather less sanguine about the notion. And while even Putin could have made an argument that NATO was an obsolete anachronism, a holdover from the Cold War, it was Putin himself who ended that argument when he invaded Ukraine.
In that moment, he reminded Europe why NATO mattered and gave it an entirely new lease on life. Not exactly Putin's brightest move.
And just what might the U.S.'s favorite pastime be??? Let's see, We are basically in the Ukraine right now, with so called advisors there and the the 101 Airborne ready to go in at a moment's notice. We left Afghanistan after 20 years of fighting. Since WWII we have fought in Korea ,Vietnam and Iraq. We have supported or indirectly been at war in Kosovo, Bosnian and Herzegovina and Croatia, Somalia, Haiti, and Libya and Yemen!!!!!! Come on Peter, don't be so naive. We really are not that different than Russia.
I don't recall saying the US was much different from Russia. However, there have been exactly two systems of treaties which have held the countries of Europe back from total war since the rise of modern nation states: Bismarck's interlocking treaties and NATO.
Ironically, if NATO ever were to collapse one of the major losers would be Russia. NATO's Article V guarantee only works if a NATO member is attacked--which means NATO is hardly likely to ever invade Russia (the politics just don't work out that way). If NATO goes away then Paris, Berlin, and Moscow get to go back to shooting the holy hell out of each other as they have done for at least three centuries before 1945.
And France has enough nuclear weapons to end Russia all by itself in that scenario.
As I said, there are no white hats here. Not Russia, not NATO, not the US.
But that doesn't make the current situation the worst case scenario. A Europe without NATO is almost certainly a more violent, more bloody, and more dangerous place than a Europe with NATO.
Someone who genuinely wants peace does not recklessly advocate for things which can only lead to more war.
Thanks for the clarification.
Putin invaded in self-defense. We hate him because the plan was to carve up the USSR and loot the place, but Putin stood up in time to save the Russian nation. Our own Bolsheviks will never forgive him for this and have escalated for 30 years. We are morally and financially bankrupt, our institutions captured and no longer legitimate. Putin is the white hat here, and we cannot but cheer for him.
If you're going to argue Putin's side, the least you can do is attempt to get the history straight.
Putin's invasion of Ukraine was a ham-handed effort to return Ukraine to Moscow's orbit, in order to add Ukraine's geography to Russia's historical defensive doctrine of using land and Russian winters to break an invader's logistics--a doctrine which worked well both during the Napoleonic Wars and WW2.
Putin's mistake was failing to grasp the reality that Moscow's insistence on controlling swaths of European terrain puts it in inevitable conflict with the other loci of power in Europe: i.e., London, Paris, and Berlin (with Brussels a proxy for Berlin in the past and potentially Paris in the future). NATO binds those three loci against Moscow--that was its primary reason for being, and when Germany was added to the alliance Moscow formed the Warsaw Pact to provide a counterweight.
Putin tried to buy the Ukrainian government off in 2013, only to have that effort backfire bigly. No matter how one chooses to frame the Maidan Protests or the US State Department's involvement in positioning Yatsenyuk as the man to take over the Ukrainian presidency, the reality is that Victoria Neuland's scheming not only worked, but effected a lasting change in the orientation of Kyiv towards the West rather than towards Moscow. Putin got outmaneuvered by the US Department of State.
Moreover, Putin never needed to invade Ukraine. He already had the economic leverage to negotiate a neutral Ukraine, and he has completely wasted that leverage. While the EU is going to suffer quite a bit from the abrupt loss of Russian natural gas, if the EU remains intact until next spring Putin's economic leverage will be gone for good, without him ever having attempted to use it.
For Putin the final indignity is that, having wasted so many initial advantages, he invaded Ukraine with a strategy that was almost farcically incompetent. He failed to allocate enough troops, he failed to allocate enough supplies, and he failed to concentrate his forces effectively, with the result being first the retreat from Kyiv after the invasion column ran out of fuel and then food, then the retreat from Kharkiv as the Russian Army ran out of just about everything including soldiers, and now the retreat from Kherson because Ukrainian attacks on Russia's supply lines (including the creative use of asymmetric tactics to damage the Kerch Bridge, a major choke point on supplying Kherson via Crimea).
Putin is wasting Russian lives by persisting in a war of attrition NATO is happy to let him fight, especially since even if Russia conquers Ukraine, Russia is not likely to pacify Ukraine, which means the Russian Army will be bogged down in Ukraine for the next several years--time Russia does not have given the current collapsing state of both its economy and its demographics.
I don't cheer on anyone who glorifies war over peace, and that includes the NATO leaders who are quite happy to enable Putin's game of death. However, I am also cognizant that it is Putin who holds the key to peace, for it is Putin who has the ability to order Russian troops back to Russia proper. Given that Putin has made it quite clear that his ultimate goal is the conquest of all of Ukraine, if the Ukrainians stop fighting Ukraine ceases to exist--that makes asking the Ukrainians to stop fighting a rather tall order.
The only white hats are the ones who seek to avoid war. In Russia, the only ones who qualify are the ones who reject Putin's mobilization order. Everyone else is damned to wear a black hat.
Your arguments vilifying Putin are credible and informed . I learn a lot. However would it not be prudent to include some counterbalance regarding NATO expansion since 1990, 15 to 30 member states, including all Warsaw Pact countries, with two of them sharing a border with Russia? Now Finland seeks membership, with its 830-mile Russian border. Do NATO exercises regularly conducted in the Black Sea not indicate aggressive actions toward Russia? Azov Battalion atrocities in the Donbas seem worth a mention, as do the failed Minsk Agreements. Putin has demanded that Ukraine not be allowed to join NATO. The world witnessed Russia slowly amass troops for the special military operation, yet even then Biden and Zelensky refused to utter that pledge. Where were U.S. diplomatic efforts to avert this conflict? Yep plenty of black hats to go around.
“Rabbit hole” pondering: could this be a globalist ploy to further decimate western resources, economies and populations while fomenting the breakup of Russia?
Re your "rabbit hole" pondering: No, it's not a globalist ploy, for the simple reason that globalism is waning, and regionalism is ascendant. Any globalist ploy to destroy the global economy and break up existing nations is globalist suicide, and nothing but.
Globalism is waning? It doesn’t feel that way in the USA at least concerning the current party in power. If realigned regionalist governments are to occur here, and that may well be on the horizon, IMO they will come to fruition likely through violent upheaval. Strange times ahead.
So much has been written about the unwisdom of NATO's expansion into former Warsaw Pact countries (and former parts of the USSR) that there is little more to be said. In geopolitical terms, it was reckless.
And yet "something" needed to be done vis-a-vis the former Warsaw Pact countries, for the simple reason that while Russia's government might have collapsed, Russia itself still possessed (at the time) all the elements for an eventual return to "great power" status in Europe. If the former Warsaw Pact countries were not a part of NATO, some form of central European alliance would have been almost inevitable both to keep those countries free from Russian domination down the road and also to form a buffer between Russia and NATO, and thus give Russia a bit of breathing space militarily.
As for the pledge for Ukraine not to join NATO: while it was fashionable to talk about Ukraine joining NATO, no serious preparations were underway to bring Ukraine formally into NATO. Partly this was because, outside of the "collective defense" aegis, there was no great urgency. Ukraine had been in partnership with NATO since soon after independence, in 1992.
https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/topics_80925.htm
The partnership was deepened and formalized in 1997 with the Charter on a Distinctive Partnership between the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and Ukraine
https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natolive/official_texts_25457.htm
If, in more than 20 years of that "distinctive partnership" Ukraine had not acceded to full NATO membership, it is ludicrous to presume that it was about to happen now "just because."
Note that the "distinctive partnership" predates Putin even as Prime Minister (he wasn't appointed to that post until August 1999). So Putin has ALWAYS had to contend with the geopolitical reality of a close relationship between Ukraine and NATO that falls short of full membership.
We should also note that, until 2012, Putin was quite happy to participate in Nunn-Lugar "threat reduction" programs, and quite happy to accept funding under those auspices.
https://newsletter.allfactsmatter.us/p/when-is-bioweapons-research-not-bioweapons
Consequently, Putin's eleventh-hour insistence on Ukraine never acceding to full NATO membership was ALWAYS a non-starter, and Putin had to have known that. For such a pledge to have any meaning NATO would have to have also terminated the "distinctive partnership" arrangements that have been in place for over two decades--and that, remember, predate Putin.
While I agree more should have been done diplomatically, it is not hard to fathom why the US/NATO was slack in this regard: they were/are confused over "why now?"
Why not in 2017, when the Ukrainian Parliament enshrined in legislation a national security strategy oriented towards full NATO membership?
Why not in 2019, when the Ukrainian Constitution was amended to further this objective?
Why not in 2020, when Zelensky approved an updated National Security Strategy again reiterating the goal of eventual NATO membership?
Keep in mind that, with Russia having rather illegally annexed Crimea in 2014, Ukrainian membership in NATO is IMPOSSIBLE. Such "external territorial disputes" have to be resolved first, per NATO policy.
https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/official_texts_24733.htm
So while a neutral Ukraine IS probably the best way to build lasting peace in Eastern Europe, the reality in 2022 is that Putin was demanding a pledge for something that was not about to happen and which COULD NOT HAPPEN so long as Ukraine maintained its claim on Crimea. Putin was demanding a pledge that neither NATO nor Ukraine could give without unwinding their existing formalized relationships which predate Putin.
Do I think NATO should invite Ukraine into the fold? No. One thing Putin's war makes clear is that Ukraine is decades away from being able to contribute to the common defense of any of its neighbors. On that basis alone Ukraine is not qualified to be a part of NATO. Geopolitically, Ukraine in NATO potentially puts NATO forces less than 300 miles by road from Moscow.
However, since Ukraine was not about to be invited into the fold, the strategic outlook for Russia regarding Ukraine has not appreciably changed since Putin first rose to power, and only slightly changed in 2017, 2019, and 2020 as Ukraine has started shaping its national security strategy to be in alignment with NATO.
If Putin invaded Ukraine to keep Ukraine out of NATO he was responding to a threat that did not exist, and could never exist for several more years at least.
I appreciate your evaluation of the NATO - Ukraine sticky wicket. There seems to be a lot of US hot air being released on the matter. After Russia annexed the four (historically Russian leaning) areas of the Donbas, did Ukraine submit a streamlined urgent
membership application for immediate NATO inclusion ?