121–130 of 205 posts
Call it what you want. Russia is switching from export to internal consumption. Getting something like 30 years mortgage on house, was unheard of until recently. If West can run quantitative easing for 15 years, why not Russia?
Is it the West or specifically the US. United States can do this because of the dollar's role in global economy: essentially everyone else will be paying for it.
Obviously, Russia can't do that. But might you have had something else in mind, since you've said "West" and not specifically "the US"?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>they are the only ones who genuinely are pushing for annexing what they call “so called ‘ukraine’” due to their strong nationalist beliefs. Basically they are the most ideologically aligned with Putin but also the most critical of his failures. The only loud protest voices coming out of russia seem to be complaining about loses, poor soldier conditions, not killing Ukrainians fast enough etc. Even so called ru oppos…
> The only loud protest voices coming out of russia seem to be complaining about loses, poor soldier conditions, not killing Ukrainians fast enough etc The loudest protest voices I'm hearing are Navalny and Yashin, both very against Russian aggression, both imprisoned for it. Which voices are you referring to? > Even so called ru opposition turned out to be all in on helping russian soldiers (TV Rain) TV Rain didn't…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I doubt that countries bordering Russia are keen to have failed chaotic states with economic problems on their borders. The refugee situation that will create is pretty intense.
I will reiterate. Baltic states, Poland, Ukraine, Georgia, are constantly harassed and reminded that Russia doesn't really see them as sovereign states. They fly bombers into their airspaces (oops), deploys military manoeuvres at their borders, rambles about aiming their nukes at the capital cities. It actually invaded Ukraine for the second time in a decade! And even as this is all going on, Russia happily says, "he…
For example, the most hawkish interview with Dugin (Pozner is the interviewer) is from 2014. The interview is in Russian and Dugin is clearly enraged about the Maidan events, so he is more straightforward than in English interviews.
If the English subtitles are correct, Pozner explicitly asks which countries should be part of the "Greater Russia". Dugin unambiguously excludes the Baltic states, Poland and Finland.
He wanted the eastern Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia, Kazakhstan in a Eurasian union.
So if even the hawk who is always cited as an expansionist does not want Latvia/Finland/Poland, who does?
The U.S. does military manoeuvres and close fly-by missions in the South China sea.
The people in charge in Russia grew up during the cold war and believe that NATO is a threat. It does not matter to them what people on Twitter who were born in 2000 think.
I don't think either that NATO is a threat in the case of Russia (unlike for Kosovo, Iraq, ...), but they don't care. If someone is in the business of foreign policy, he has to take the opponent's thoughts into account.
Russia's unlimited expansionism is a narrative that is supposed to obfuscate the mistakes that foreign policy has made since 2008.
Call it what you want. Russia is switching from export to internal consumption. Getting something like 30 years mortgage on house, was unheard of until recently. If West can run quantitative easing for 15 years, why not Russia?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Sanctions only affects the people, not the governments, Western sanctions have demonstrably prevented the Russians from obtaining equipment vital for their military-industrial complex. Right now there were supposed to be hundreds of Armatas and SU-57s, but all the Russians have are a dozen prototypes of each.
They got their drones from Iran, so no, it doesn't work Worse, they formed a new economic alliance called BRICS
BRICS isn't new and it basically only exists on paper. We're talking about a supposed alliance whose two largest members, India and China, are currently engaged in a conflict over Kashmir.
Speaking of India, as much as they're happy to continue buying Russian oil, they already anticipated Russia's inability to produce modern fighter jets and cancelled their order.
One reason that sanctions haven't had an apparent immediate effect is that the Russian economy was already in a slow downward spiral. The Russian economy peaked in 2013 and has been going down hill since then. The Russian society has already been hardened by these 9 years of "hard times" and not to forget the much harder times in the 1990s. Another reason is that Western companies stopped their sales in Russia while…
> The Russian economy peaked in 2013 and has been going down hill since then Do you have anything substantial to back this claim? Cuz to me (actually living in Russia) it seems like exactly the opposite - the economy had been slowly decomposing up until the financial crisis of 2014, when the exchange rates had shifted so that roubles became cheaper. Until then it was extremely hard to build a sustainable business in…
PPP is effectively a currency conversion rate, it's not a meaningful metric by itself anymore than $1USD ~= 1000won or ~= 100 yen tells you anything about the South Korean or US or Japanese economies.
So I'm assuming you're comparing nominal GDP versus GDP by PPP. To a first approximation, nominal conversion rates give you an idea of how an economy can interact with others on a trade basis, whereas PPP conversion rates give you an idea from the perspective of a domestic consumer. For what you tend to use total economic size for, nominal GDP tends to be a better reflection of the size of the economy, whereas PPP works better for something like GDP per capita.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, and consider the effect that it has on the rouble: with lots of sales (of mostly energy) but nowhere to spend that money the rouble is actually likely to appreciate rather than depreciate. I'm referring here to the premature celebration of the "death of the rouble", you may remember this narrative. This is still a bit obfuscated by the ongoing sale of the Russian foreign reserves (the ~50% that wasn't frozen).…
Heh. I sometimes wonder how vulnerable the US would be to a squeeze appreciating USD. You could probably even get large parts of the US political class to go along with it, as (in the short term) they'd be benefiting relative to their countrymen.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Everyone involved in a war is a loser. It really shows how immature humanity is that we still start new wars.
Yes and no. For most of history, conquest of pre-industrial agrarian societies was generally an excellent idea...politically and economically, that is. See any good history of (say) the economics of the Roman Empire. Or the British Empire. That's part of why WWI was so hellishly destructive for Europe - national leaders, military planners, educated elites, etc. really didn't get that modern(-ish) industrialized warfa…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Even the nukes, scary as they could be, are less of a threat when the individual actors are smaller and weaker. They may not even be able to maintain these nukes. And even if they are capable of using them, they are at a more precarious position than eg. Putin at the helm of Mighty Russia. I'm not sure "the people with nukes would be in a precarious position" is the comforting statement you intended it to be.
Big, united Russia with lots of nukes can afford to use them much more than 5 small, weak post-Russias, each with some nukes. If nothing else, these post-Russias would struggle to afford even more to upkeep and upgrade the stash of nukes. And would be easier to neutralize too...
Again, not comforting. "Might as well use them on !"