How's It Going Vlad?

Well D'uh

This war thing isn't going as promised by Vladimir Putin. A friend of mine alerted to this bit floating around the internet:

Pulled this from Twitter - from a European parliamentarian named Riho Terras

Doesn't sounds promising for the Russians - in fact this could end in complete humiliation for them.

Intel from a Ukrainian officer about a meeting in Putin’s lair in Urals. Oligarchs convened there so no one would flee. Putin is furious, he thought that the whole war would be easy and everything would be done in 1-4 days.

Russians didn’t have a tactical plan. The war costs about $20 bln/day. There are rockets for 3-4 days at most, they use them sparingly. They lack weapons, the Tula and 2 Rotenberg plants can’t physically fulfil the orders for weapons. Rifles and ammo are the most they can do.

The next Russian weapons can be produced in 3-4 months – if even that. They have no raw materials. What was previously supplied mainly from Slovenia, Finland and Germany is now cut off.

If Ukraine manages to hold the Russians off for 10 days, then the Russians will have to enter negotiations. Because they have no money, weapons, or resources. Nevertheless, they are indifferent about the sanctions.

Alpha Spec Ops have been near Kyiv since the 18th February. The goal was to take Kyiv and instal a puppet regime. They are preparing provocations against innocent civilians – women and children – to sow panic. This is their trump card.

Russia’s whole plan relies on panic – that the civilians and armed forces surrender and Zelensky flees. They expect Kharkiv to surrender first so the other cities would follow suit to avoid bloodshed. The Russians are in shock of the fierce resistance they have encountered.

The Ukrainians must avoid panic! The missile strikes are for intimidation, the Russians fire them at random to “accidentally” hit residential buildings to make the attack look larger than it really is.

Googling the text got me this. Who is Riho Terras? Looking at the Wikipedia entry at least, he seems to be somebody who would know a thing or two about the Russian military machine. Last night the news was how Kyiv (got to get used to that spelling now LOLz) had not fallen, and a quick glance through the headlines shows it still hasn't fallen as I write this entry. 

What's amazing is that the Russians seem to have blundered into Ukraine thinking they might be welcomed by the panic-ed arms of its citizenry. Just the formulation of that idea seems incredibly stupid, but it seems that was what they were expecting. How wrong were they to be facing fierce resistance?

What is also astounding is that in this day and age they went marching in without a great deal of thought given to logistics. There are reports the tanks have run out of fuel. They had this issue in the Chechnya  war in the 90s. 20 years later under Putin, they haven't improved upon their weaknesses in the least bit. It is a complicated thing to run a modern war with all these components. Doing it without the requisite logistical support is impossible. What on earth were they thinking? 

We had the report the troops were selling off their small arms and ammo for vodka during the long encampment, and there are even reports in the NY Pot no less, that these low morale troops are also trying to hook up with Ukrainian women on Tinder. I mean, that, in isolation, is no big deal; however it seems to indicate the months of training at the border hasn't instilled a tremendous sense of mission in the invading troops. There going in with the mindset of The Abduction of the Sabine Women, rather than say, Ride of the Valkyries.   

So to Ukraine we say hold on, hang in there and fight for as long as you can. Putin can't keep this up. The world is with you. We just can't send troops in fear of outright nuclear war, but short of that, we're with you in spirit.   

And Now The War Is On

Vlad The Imperialist

In the end Vladimir Putin couldn't pull back from his own rhetoric. I don't think he's exactly drunk on his own words, but he's certainly dancing to his own misshapen tune as he sends in his forces over the borders into Ukraine. 

The global markets were a bit perturbed by all this. Why wouldn't they? Everybody thought a shred of sanity would prevail, but no. Vladimir Putin is doing the kind of thing we haven't witnessed since the middle of the last century - an ideologically framed war with zero regard to collateral damage. 

Because he denied his intent to invade Ukraine for so long as he amassed his troops along the borders, it is actually quite hard to figure out how he sees the endgame. If he wants Ukraine to come back to the fold as a nation that is part of a greater Russia, he's sure failing to win friends and influencing people in Ukraine. If he is hunting down his political enemies who would see Ukraine join Western Europe, then he might be in for a lot of resistance. For every historic reason Putin might cite as to why Ukraine belongs with Russia, the Soviet experience has been plenty for a lot Ukrainians. Can you really blame them? 

As the history of capitalism amply demonstrates, if you start a war against the capitalist hegemony, your reputation suffers greatly and maybe even get whacked. No matter which way you dice it, invading Ukraine was the worst option for Putin, no matter how much he might try to spin it otherwise. And let's not forget he lied about his intention for months so what credibility does he have left anyway?

The Spy Who Can't Come In From The Cold

Having watched Russia turn into this rather silly caricature strongman state over the last 25 years has been a bit of a drag. It's not like it's the fault of the Russian people. They're as much a hostage to history as anybody living under a tin pot tyrant. It's just that it's kind of weird to see what once was the high-minded Soviet Union reduce itself to the kind of state Saddam Hussein was running in 1991 when he invaded Kuwait. 

Now, we're not putting together a big coalition to push Russian forces out of Ukraine like we did with Kuwait, but we likely will send weapons and supplies to the Ukrainians and we have no idea how this all plays out. In light of that, one has to wonder ho all this came to pass, and essentially, it comes down to the inability of the US led hegemony to talk Russia off the cliff edge when the Soviet Union collapsed. Somehow we didn't manage to shepherd Russia back in to the fold of a capitalist Europe. We didn't woo Russia back to civilisation - we let it wander off like an orphan, still equipped with nukes. Essentially, the West let Russia meander into this dictatorship and let the paranoia fester. That very paranoia has now manifested itself as this political will to take Ukraine like some re-run of World War II. 

So there's Vlad Putin, the ex-KGB guy who just can't get rid of his ideological framework and mindset. He climbs to the top of Russian politics and he's still largely informedly his experience as a spy. For years and years he was presented as this weird Russian guy who may or may not be a psychopath. it turns out, he was exactly the kind of bad guy you would expect from an ex-KGB spy allowed to run a country. Wo's fault is it exactly that Russia ended up with him as their de facto dictator? I sure don't want to pin that on the Russian people. Some of that responsibility lies with the west.

And so here we are today. 

When A War Is Not A War

Putin's Shuffle Step

As soon as I put up the last post, Vladimir Putin went and delivered a speech decrying Ukraine's role in its own self defence. He then declared Donetsk and Lugansk as independent People's Republics, which is a bit like declaring the Eastern Suburbs and North Shore of Sydney as 'independent people's republics'. With that he proceeded to move troops into the Eastern parts of Ukraine which have been in dispute since 2014. 

Ukraine decried - because decrying is the verb of the day - that Russia's declaration was verbatim the one they used when Russia invaded Georgia. 

Mr Kyslytsya says the Russian statements of independence for Donetsk and Luhansk are word-for-word copy and pasted from Russia's statement preceding it occupation of Georgia in 2008.

"The United Nations is sick. It has been hit by the virus spread by the Kremlin. Will it succumb to this virus? It is in the hands of the membership.

"Who is next among the members of the United Nations?"

Pretty funny if you have a dark sense of humour. I can hear Vladimir's evil laugh all the way from the Kremlin. 

By Mid-morning over here, Russian troops were finally on the move and arrived in the freely declared peoples' republics of Donetsk and Lugansk. Surely that's war, now that Russian troops were officially inside Ukraine. Even the secretary of Health in the UK thought it was an invasion:

The UK Health Secretary Sajid Javid says "the invasion of Ukraine has begun".

Speaking with Sky News UK, Mr Javid said people were "waking up to a very dark day in Europe".

"President Putin has decided to attack the sovereignty of Ukraine," he said.

But no. Joe Biden demurred and said the Russians were merely in territories they had taken by subterfuge already. He's ready for his summit. t's enough to make one wonder how many more hairs he intends to split with Putin. The script is supposed to show this is the bit where Biden and Boris impose heavy sanctions on Russia. The fact that hasn't seems to indicate that Biden wants to have the threat of sanctions as a bargaining chip that is still alive. One tends to think that perhaps Putin does not care about the sanctions. Putin has had to hold still while the Olympics rolled on in Beijing. now that they're over, he has a free hand. 

Does Biden really think the threat of sanctions is still a viable negotiation card?

Maybe This Is Just A Dance?

Going back about 10 days, it appeared that Putin was readying his army to march into Ukraine en masse on the 16th February. When the news broke from America that their intelligence apparatus had identified that date, it quickly became a joke that Putin would do exactly as predicted. For whatever reason - probably many - the Russian army did not invade that day. In the six days since, Vladimir Putin has essentially had two endure the speculation of when exactly he would order his army into Ukraine. If he started out trying to bluff Zelensky, he might have over-reached already. Instead he found himself being goaded by the world's press into invading Ukraine. 

Consider for a moment the troops Putin has amassed is about 190,000. The Ukrainians have 200,000. It's not like they have a significant advantage over the Ukrainians. While they are spread right across the north and eastern border, they don't have the best lay of the land to take on 200,000. If I were running this on a computer game, I don't think I would want to be sending in my 190,000 against 200,000 who know I'm coming. 

I also covered the general low discipline and low morale of the Russians army in Belarus in the previous post. They're not exactly the best, even on their best days. If you add in the general lack of desire to engage in a fratricidal war amongst the Russian officer corps, maybe invading Ukraine is not an action they want to take. While Putin might rant on about how Ukraine belongs to a Greater Russia because they share slavic roots in ancient Rus, it sort of rings hollow when you have your troops on the border trying to put together a Russian Anschluss. 

It's all enough to make you wonder if Putin in fact wants to follow this trajectory. Maybe, just maybe this has become all too much. So yesterday I had this thought that what Putin might go for was a quick PR victory for his own people, declare a 'Mission Accomplished' moment for himself and just send his troops home after all. How could he do that? Well he might just send his army into Donetsk and Lugansk, declare the crisis over and make himself appear victorious. So far, he seems to have gone in that direction. 

Shadow Boxing History

I've also been thinking there's something of a re-run of the Cuban Missile Crisis in all of this. It essentially starts because Russian generals get this idea that maybe JFK is a very weak President because he's so young, and America could be pushed around with the threat of an all out nuclear war. So they send missiles to Cuba and of course the CIA spots the missiles and this precipitates a blockade of Cuba by the Americans. 

This time Vladimir Putin has got it into his head that maybe Joe Biden is a weak President because he is so old, and so perhaps he could be pushed around. Putin could try throwing his weight around and re-annex Ukraine with the threat of World War III on the European continent. So he amasses his troops on the border with Ukraine and of course the CIA spotted it and told the world. 

During the Cuban Missile Crisis, it turned out Khrushchev himself did not want to go to a Mutually Assured Destruction scenario, and so back-channeled his desire to defuse the crisis to the White House. This is not to say somebody in the Kremlin today is definitely back-channelling to the White House, but it seems likely that somebody on the Russian side with some influence might want to de-escalate this mess. 

Here's something for Vladimir Putin to think about. He's already one of the richest men on the planet. He's been running Russia across 3 decades. For better or worse, he's even had an Olympics in Sochi, he's run a few wars, and he's still standing. He might be looking for a big win that would put him in the history books as some kind of national hero, but he's already in the history books as another strong man leader of Russia to rival Stalin. Does he really want to risk going down like Hitler, fighting the Americans and the British and the assorted countries of Europe? Or worse still, lose access to his bloated Swiss bank accounts over all this Ukraine business? Is Ukraine really worth risking all of it? 

I'd be a bit leery of losing all of it over Ukraine. I'd also be leery of a coup. 

View From The Couch 22/Feb/2022

Happy Palindrome Day

That is, if you're into this thing and you go by DD/MM/YYYY format. If you don't, it is not. 

The next palindrome day would be 23/02/2032 and we'll have one every decade up to 29/02/2092. That last one is kind of amazing because we get a leap year exactly where we need it to get that palindrome day. One hopes civilisation does not wipe itself out in the 2040s so that we can get there. Heck, I'm hoping they cure death and ageing so that I myself can see that day. 

You certainly hope Putin doesn't start World War III and wipe us all out. Speaking of which...

Putin In The Boot?

It's been a few weeks now of this will-he-won't-he business of Ukraine. It's hard to miss, but Vladimir Putin has been running training camps for his troops all along the North and East borders of Ukraine, perhaps to send the not-so subtle message that he still considers Ukraine to be Russia's bitch. 

The reports seem to swell the numbers of the Russian troops each day and by now there are between 140,000 and 190,000 depending on whom you count amongst the military, all amassed along the border. Joe Biden even announced last week that 16 February was the most likely date of invasion, but obviously, announcing it took out the sting from that plan. 

His troops according to the Belarus press does not appear to be in good nick:

"The first thing that catches your eye is the situation with COVID-19, which, according to official statistics, is breaking all sad records, and Omicron has begun its “victory march” around the country, everyone has already begun to infect each other.

Russian and Belarusian officers and soldiers are getting sick, followed by local residents; and so on in a circle. But a particularly alarming situation is observed in the Gomel region, and not all military men end up in hospitals, some of them are treated in field camps, especially if the case is mild.

In addition to the possibility of getting sick, there is fear among local residents, and not even war, but firstly, occupation, because no matter how much they say that the Russian military will leave the country at the end of the exercises, doubts about this still remain."

Right. So Covid-19 seems to be subtracting form the sum total of that mighty force. The article goes on to deride the Russian troops as being mostly horny drunks from who one must keep one's daughters and pets safe - even if they are ostensibly on their side. Worse still, the demographic of the Russian troops is described as resembling the Mongol and Tartar horde of old which indicates the units were pulled out from the Far East. The article goes on to conclude:

"Against this background, you believe more reports that you don’t want to believe at all, that “under the guise” of exercises, now you can get hold of weapons, allegedly even a Kalashnikov assault rifle can really be bought, you just need to know how and to whom to approach. And the fact that they sell rations, diesel fuel, uniforms is no longer news, it is already a business, including barter for alcohol and cigarettes.

And - it's true, with such a number of troops, equipment, equipment that is now in Belarus, no one will notice the loss of any pistol or machine gun, hundreds of boxes of rations and several tons of solarium, how can this be written off as expenses during the exercises? The “rear front” knows perfectly well, there is definitely no doubt about this.

In general, the mood in Belarus now is approximately the same: everyone is waiting for the end of these exercises, which look more like a Mongol-Tatar invasion. And in any case, one thing can be said: this has definitely not happened in our country yet, and it would be better if it did not happen."

It doesn't sound like the Belarus are terribly excited about the prospect of the Russian army staying or for them to wade across the border into Ukraine. It just doesn't sound like General Norman Schwarzkopf assembling a force of 400,000 in Desert Storm - the picture of a modern, integrated, technological military might - if they're getting compared to the Mongol horde of yore. And that leads one to suspect that maybe the invasion will be beset by the same kind of bungling friendly-fire-filled nightmare that was the Georgian excursion back in the 1990s. 

Of course, one thing that can be said about Vladimir Putin is just how stupid he looks if he lets this circus continue. You either do this with the full knowledge your moves have been telegraphed, or you cut your losses before you lose even more in the debacle that is about to break loose. By now the Ukrainians are ready for the Russian drive towards Kiev. If that drive gets bogged down, the Russians are really going to be like that monkey with its fist in the jar holding a cookie, but unable to pull out. When that happens, there would be no sugar-coating the mounting death toll.

As Dirty Harry says, a man's gotta know his limitations. At this point, it's more like "make my day."

That Weird Interest Rates Discourse

The markets this year have been a bit of a bumpy ride, thanks to the above Ukraine business, but also the looming interest rises that are expected to be made by the US Fed. I've explained before how it is unlikely in the context of global supply chain issues that raising interest rates will be taming the price spikes. A lot of them are because oil has shot through prices unseen in a very long time. Of course, in normal times, when oil gets closer to $100 a barrel, the US shale oil business starts looking viable again, so the OPEC price manipulation tends to head that off. Now with the pandemic, perhaps it has become a bit harder to keep oil prices low for Russia and Saudi Arabia, the two biggest fish in OPEC.

Even so there are other people who are not fans of the US Fed raising interest rates - like Xi Jinping. Having started his own property market debt bubble pop in China, the markets are in a precarious state in China. Considering the towering debt that is out there in property and elsewhere, just trying to deleverage has been a nightmare of defaults from major firms in the property development sector. As such Xi issued a warning that the US Fed raising the interest rates would be a terrible thing for the world market. Of course he woulds ay that because China would have to service its debt in US Dollars and they would become more expensive. In the olden days it used to be, America sneezes and the world catches a cold. Xi is saying if China sneezes we'll all catch COVID. Which, essentially, we have.  

Jokes aside if the US Fed wants to make it their thing to target inflation once more, then 7% inflation probably needs rates to go as high as 14%. That's kind of what Paul Volcker did as Chairman of the US Fed in the early 80s in order to tame inflation. Let's say Jerome Powell is not as hawkish and lifts interest rates to only 5%, that would still be a right punch in the face of the debtors out there in the emerging economies. I'd love to see him do it, but I don't think the global economy can take it. There's a reason why interest rates got so low even before the pandemic and thanks to the 'Taper Tantrum' of 2013, came back down again. 

All of this is to say, if Jerome Powell raises rates and China's economy goes into reverse, the world will suffer and the world economy outside of the US is now big enough that America would suffer from that event and so Jerome Powell will be back to lowering interest rates just to protect the US economy. It's almost not worth going through the dance of raising rates, only to lower them within 3 months. Perhaps it's this kind of damned-if-you-do- damned-if-you-don't nature of things is contributing to the market volatility.  

 

   

Quick Shots - 07/Feb/2022

Opening Borders Soon

After 2 years of shutting itself off from much of the world, Australia is allegedly going to open its borders to vaccinated international travellers. The feeling we have been getting from both Federal and State levels of governments over here is that they've just about had enough of dealing with the pandemic so they would like to fast forward to the end. I'm a bit sceptical of pundits who are saying omicron is a sign that the Corona Virus is getting less pathogenic and more endemic and this is a good thing. The numbers seem to indicate it can still kill its fair share of people, and let's not kid ourselves there's still the Delta variant out there, even if it is getting squeezed out by Omicron. Sure. Tell the dead that it's just going to be endemic now like the 'flu.

Indeed, that's been one of the comparisons that politicians have trotted out at various points of this pandemic - whether it is more contagious than or less contagious than the 'flu; or whether it is more or less pathogenic. It's hard for most people to contemplate the Spanish 'Flu from 100 years ago but that pandemic lasted 4 years, killed more people than World War I and a century later, can still kill its fair share in any given winer outbreak. We just don't make a fuss over it because the number of people killed by influenza is below a threshold for political action. A pandemic by its very nature places itself well and truly above that threshold. Therefore it seems foolish for politicians to be talking about it as though it should be below the threshold while the disease is out in the community killing its fair share. The numbers are such that if it were an axe murderer on the loose, we'd be sending out a tax force to stop them. 

I'm not against opening the borders but it seems like the politicians are doing it because they've just run out of patience. And that doesn't seem to be a good ingredient in decision making during a pandemic that hasn't quite died out. There might be a reason for that ...

Omicron Is Everywhere (But Then Again So Is AIDS)

Up until 26th November 2021, I had managed to avoid the virus entirely. After that date I seemed to get an alert for every location I visited. I talked to a friend up the North Coast in early December who reported that nobody had met anybody with Covid-19 until November 2021, and all of a sudden his neighbourhood was full of people who tested positive to Omicron. People close to me have treated positive to Omicron all of a sudden, and as this burst rolled into January members of my family got it as well. I'm still a Covid cherry for better or worse.

What's weird is that this fucker spread so fast, it has broken through containment lines that used to be solid. It has flooded into Queensland and South Australia, and has even made a beachhead in Western Australia. You can just see the politicians raising their hands in the air, surrendering to this threat because basically they can't stop it spreading. In that sense it is game over for all attempts at physical containment. from here on in, it is up to the citizens to be vaccinated as much as possible and hopefully their immunity pushes the virus out of circulation. 

It's hard to figure out how civilisation is going to cope with this ongoing endemic virus. If we reflect back to the other pandemic in our lifetime in AIDS/HIV, it seems like parts of the economy were hit harder than with what AIDS/HIV did. Maybe the mainstream world didn't get to see just how hard the gay community were hit by AIDS/HIV. If it is a once in a generation thing to go through a pandemic, then maybe we can expect another organism in the next 30 years. Of course, there are forecasts that say civilisation will crumble because of global warming by then. It may well do - in which case humanity would be toast because the only way we got through this pandemic was through science and technology, where it be the quick development of the mRNA vaccines, or the expansion of IT that happened just in time for all the white collar jobs to be worked from home.