The Ukraine thing and impact on P4 P
Warning: I'm no historian or expert. But a few things stand out. The first is the idiocy of Germany shutting down nukes and being energy dependent. That can be reversed (except politics) and France seems to be doing the opposite of building more nukes, which is just as well for grid security. Yeah, Russia is a mess, it was a shithole in the 1990's and now has a government only on paper, essentially a bunch of rich guys sticking their stolen money in the UK etc via various shells the big banks and law firms help launder. Like South America, they don't trust keeping anything much there, as politics can change overnight. I'm not surprised that the Russian military is fucked up. It exists to wave around flags, jingoism and other bullshit to con the population about some common purpose rather than their real status as sheep to be shorn. Ukraine (not that long ago a puppet state of the USSR) is also a basket case or corruption and people not believing the future. So far the Russian army seems pretty feeble, but hey, Ukraine is even more feeble. As other have said here, Russia's bargaining chips are shutting off gas / oil pipeline and nukes. But that misses the elephant in the room.
My take is that Russian and China have seen the dollar weaponized and are scared shitless. But they have a huge cudgel if they cooperate. Simply create a new currency and price oil in that. They have the pipelines to Europe, Siberia, Iran and the warm water ports. And unlike Iraq pricing in Euros that got it invaded, they guys have nukes and cannot easily be fucked with by uncle sam. Make it digital would be even worse. It would be a true nuclear option and could collapse the dollar and many casinos. Western banks and their central banks. And I suspect this is going to happen sooner than many think. Russia and India just inked such a bilateral deal.
As for Ukraine, not sure what Putin had in mind other than as a buffer, still thinking like 1940. I've lived in eastern europe on and off since the 1980's. Here my very amateur impressions. The first is that the land mass labelled "Ukraine" on maps has changed hands every few decades, being variously part of Poland, Hungary, Russia and Czeque and various other fiefdoms. Secondly that that it's people were especially petty, cruel and thuggish to the jews in WWII, though the same can be said of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia and Hungary (LLEUH). The mass murder was motivated by theft: the racial thing was just a fig leaf to rationalize straight up stealing and looting and unearned wealth. Some interesting stuff has come out from decrypted enigma in recent years and serious historians like Martin Gilbert who linked it together. He also somehow got access to post 1990 soviet archives (that included captured German records) and translated and analyzed it. Bear with me on this! I was surprised to learn the German Einsatzgruppen (SS) found LLEUH methods too savage, brutal and crude, even by their deranged barbaric standards. Latvia and Ukraine kept getting special mention.
Official SS correspondence back to Berlin queried how they could behave like that. They came up with the answer that people in the east were human only in form. That neatly tied in with their racial ideas. The SS certainly knew it was thievery of their (soon to be dead) victims that truly motivated their newly discovered pro-nazi passions and made up nationalist myths. The joke was on them. They were used by the SS who never saw them as equals, but merely useful in the short term before being made into peasant serfs for the glorious third reich. Of course it is much more complex than that: various ethnic and / or religious / nationalist jingo mind con-games allowed manipulation of the population (per standard bag of tricks). By 1945 what was left of their territory was wrecked and depopulated and the usual rape and pillage. Soviet factories and farming methods and Stalin's terror wrecked it further and the dead hand of soviet style poverty and surveillance (that we label communism).
My own take it that it's like some sort of magic thinking culture and instant gratification in the "eastern" mindset (I know, a huge generalization, but hey, it fits the general pattern). Usually a led by a strong man, it allows a situation to con people to think prosperity can be achieved by a method other than by consistent hard work, education, rationality, stable property rights and predictability that lifts everybody's boats. Gaining wealth is more or less by theft (dressed up as something else). Instead it's like live for today only. It strikes me that the love of flashy consumer goods luxury glitter, leopard skin prints and etc symbolism is like a rip-off for the real thing. Putin may be as a simple as that, they old kleptocracy mindset and a bit of faded glory propaganda to toss to the population to keep them distracted. Even if Ukraine is swallowed, it is more degraded stuff grafted onto degraded Russia that let's not forget was a puppet state of the old USSR until 1991 ish. Not a lot changed except the local mob franchise owners. All the flag waving distracts from the real elites that control the purse. The west is the same. The entire neo-con thing is about loot and leave the population the crumbs, same as the old soviets, and indeed most of human history.
But do watch the (future) oil currency. That's the real game. Weaponizing SWIFT and the dollar is an inflection point that could easily derail the euro and dollar. We need to preserve real wealth so we can access beautiful young women.
