Oh! My! God!How stupid can one human being possibly be? Especially one who rose to the presidency of an alleged superpower with nuclear weapons? Someone in the Kremlin with balls needs to hold an intervention with Vlad the Imp, because he’s imploding.
Departed Arizona Senator John McCain summed it up perfectly when he famously said Russia is nothing but a gas station with nukes. And Senator McCain was right. Other than vodka, which is mostly sold internally to keep Russian citizens too drunk to realize how fucked they are, their only viable export products are natural gas and oil. Surprise, how 70 years of government malfeasance will fuck up private industry.
Russia announced today that it was shutting off the gas mains to the nations of Poland and Bulgaria. The reason that they stated was that the two countries had failed to pay the tab in rubles, as required by the agreement.Â
Are they fucking kidding? Right now, the Russian ruble is worth less than a penny on the international market. In order to pay the Russians in rubles, the Poles and Bulgarians would need to send trains with about 7 boxcars full of rubles. Where are they supposed to come up with that kind of scratch?
Putin’s move was obviously retaliation against Poland and Bulgaria for their support of NATO sanctions. The Poles almost immediately responded with double barrel birds, stating that they had sufficient alternative natural gas sources to get them through to the fall, when they will be free of Russian natural gas. Bulgaria screamed that the move was retaliation for their NATO membership, and I find it highly likely that Bulgaria will find friends in high places.
Putin’s rage is slicing off his own nose to spite his face. Putin went into this with a healthy war chest parked offshore, but that disappeared when historically neutral Switzerland joined the NATO ranks, and froze all Russian funds in their banks. He has almost no financial resources to draw on to conduct his war.
Current estimates are that Putin makes $1-2 billion a day on natural gas and oil exports to Europe. At this point, that is the only thing that is supporting his war in Ukraine. And now he’s turning off the spigot to countries for being members of NATO. Poland, Bulgaria, and other members will find help to make up the shortfall, but Putin has nowhere to go to make up for the shortfall his treasury is about to find from the loss of revenue. What a fucking moron.
I think he’s pissed and probably desperate. He’s been lashing out verbally, too. Things in Ukraine aren’t going well and it seems to be sinking in to him.
There’s always China as a market for their oil and gas but I don’t know the infrastructure exists to ramp up to the levels Russia has exported to Europe. Then there’s the issue with China’s monetary policy as they have been reluctant to fully engage in world markets. They have had a small exchange with a limited number of countries that include Russia but while this type of economics is way out of my league it’s my understanding that upwards of half trillion per year is way the fuck more than the financial deal between China and Russia can handle. And THAT assumes China would want to entwine themselves that much with Russia to begin with.
As a counterbalance to NATO and the U.S. China offered qualified support of Russia’s war in Ukraine but I for one haven’t heard much from them for weeks now. Russia is being exposed, and more importantly weakened more with each passing day. That is actually something China is surely studying with great interest. All those natural resources, and close to China. China is far more powerful economically (even before the war) and now obviously militarily too than Russia. Putin and Russia would have to agree to humiliating terms to get China to bail them out of the mess they’ve created, and China knows it. As in Russia would break any deal as soon as it could. That creates its own set of complications, so the best thing China can do is offer some (very) mild supportive platitudes to Russia but as Rachel Maddow says don’t watch what they say, rather watch what they do. And the smart thing for China to DO is stand on the sidelines. There will be plenty of goodies for them to gather when the time comes to pick over the carcass of what Russia will wind up becoming. The tricky part will be something I already mentioned – trying to keep Russia from feeling so humiliated that they will plot for a time they can lash out.
Yeah, about China…what people forget or don’t know is that they pay for Russian oil well below market price. As such, it is not nor could ever be a substitute for the self-inflicted losses he just handed out vis-a-vis Poland and Bulgaria.
Putin knows he’s f**ked, both militarily and economically. He really only has two choices left, capitulate or escalate to nuclear/chemical/biological weapons. Obviously, he has chosen the latter and is knowingly putting Russia in a worse position specifically so that he has a reason for escalating that he can sell to his own people.
Don ‘t call Putin the Imp. That is unfair to Tyrion Lan mister who was a genuinely good man.
Putin is more if a Lucida Malfoy, arrogantly sure of himself but nowhere near as smart or powerful as he believes. Problem is, he thinks he is Voldemort.