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?
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?