* Posts by I ain't Spartacus

10123 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Jun 2009

Where are the (serious) Russian cyberattacks?

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Re: Maybe we've got it all wrong

Meanwhile, back in reality, the Russian economy is about to shrink by at least 25% in the first three months of this year. Russia has just committed three quarters of its deployable armed forces to a meat-grinder in Ukraine, with no obvious exit strategy. And is taking losses of close to 3% a week - meaning that in 6 weeks time the best units of the Russian army will be 20% dead and have had 20% of its equipment either blown up or stolen by Ukrainian farmers.

This doesn't strike me as genius level planning. Particularly since a divided and disinterested West is now a united, angry and motivated West. Picking up allies like Japan and South Korea who hope this new common purpose and strategic attitude can also be directed towards China - hopefully before China invades somewhere new.

You can call that a patient bit of strategic brilliance if you want. To me the word Clusterfuck appears more appropriate. Oh add hideous, evil, stupid and criminal.

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Re: Cyberattack = real attack

I think the Russians have a lot of capabilities. However, they're probably quite badly led - given that promotion is as much about political loyalty and patronage as it is about competence.

But as you say, NATO might respond. And there's a lot we could do at the moment to seriously destablise Russia. And they might nto want to tempt NATO into getting even more involved in Ukraine than we already are. Because NATO have the capability to seriously mess with Russia's command and control - adn they're having enough trouble with that as it is...

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Re: What about us?

Cyber attacks invite retaliation. Which could be cyber, or military - if they destroy/damage something vital.

For the West we don't want to escalate too much. Whenever you read the more excitable pundits about Putin you're always told that he has escalation dominace - due to being willing to go further than the pathetic namby-pamby Western leaders. But actually, in his career he's tended to threaten escalation - but in practise he's often been quite cautious. It's what makes this all-out attack on Ukraine so scary, because it's out of character and seems to have few upsides.

But even for him, escalation carries risks. He's fighting a massive war of aggression, but has just introduced comprehensive censorship within Russia to try and pretend that he's actually only embarked on a limited military campaign in defence of the poor downtrodden Russian-speakers of Eastern Ukraine. Being crushed under the jackboot of Nazis, NATO and the EU. If he launches cyber-attacks at us, we could do a lot of damage to that censorship. Plus he's also vulnerable in Ukraine. Say he launches a major cyber-attack on NATO and we respond by jamming all their military communications in Ukraine, and/or their radars? Even just their satnav? I think the Ukrainians have been removing road signs - I saw one motorway sign on the way to Odessa that had been changed to Ahead - Fuck off; Left - Fuck off into the sea - Right Fuck off back to Russia...

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Re: @Naselus - "Putin may not be insane"

Same for Romania. Not even the slightest strategic importance for NATO, even less than Ukraine. however, by selling them a couple of old F-16 and placing some outdated radar stations there the only plan is to piss off Russia.

This is where Putin's political analysis is at its most faulty. Him being an old KGB warhorse, still smarting at the loss of the Cold War - but too arrogant/stupid (or maybe just not posessing sufficient moral character) to analyse why his side lost.

To Putin the world is a zero-sum game. There's only so much cake to have - and damned if he's going to share. He's going to grab as much of the cake as possible - and failing that if he can't have cake - he'll destroy some of the cake so nobody gets it.

But neither economics or security are zero sum. That's why globalisation (despite having some economic losers amongst the lowest paid in the Western economies) has made the whole world richer. Including Russia, China, Africa, and the West too. Russia stopped getting richer after the sanctions imposed due to the annexation of Crimea - but up to then it's been doing quite well, even despite Putin's terrible mismanagement.

Meanwhile the West has been trying to extend peace and security (as well as economic growth) as far as it can. Imperfectly, and with many mistakes.

So European powers decided not to ignore Eastern Europe, but to share their largesse with them after the Cold War. And it can be seen how effective this was. The requirements to democratise the nastier areas of their governments and security services was part of the price of joining NATO - and democracy and liberal economics was the price of joining the EU. You can see how both of these in tandem made Europe more predictable, safer and richer. And therefore how extending this to Romania was in NATO's interests.

Plus you can compare the huge success of Poland, the Baltic States, Czechia and Slovakia to the terrible mess that is Belarus or Russia. Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria have also seen huge improvements, but not been quite so successful. In fact we might link closeness to Russia to failure in this context. Both physical and political. Bulgaria and Hungary have the closest links to Russia of the EU accession countries, and are doing the least well. Serbia suffers from having remained allied to Russia, rather than seeing where the success in Europe is and getting in with the Western powers. Belarus is now a basketcase. Ukraine, which was making large (if imperfect steps) in a more Westward looking direction was starting to do rather well, probably the reason Putin decided to destroy everything, in a fit of pique that they'd rejected his model.

But then of course, I'm talking as if Putin gave a fuck about the welfare of the Russian people. And as if economic growth and security for ordinary people were his objectives. But of course they aren't. Putin's objectives are the world being nice for Putin. Having a palace built at taxpayers expense with a lapdancing room in it. Keeping it classy Vlad! Having the fantasy of moving troops and spies round the map as if he was still in charge of a global superpower. Maintaining an insanely huge nuclear arsenal, rather than a sensible deterrent - as China do. And most important of all - staying in power forever, despite being shit at his job and having overseen an economy that hasn't grown in 15 years! And having fucked up even that lack of success by inviting on his country the largest package of coordinated sanctions ever seen in world history - by uniting most of the world in disgust at his vicious invasion of a neighbouring country for no fucking reason. Not to mention the war crimes of course.

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Re: "Putin may not be insane"

Putin has already indicated he wants a neutral Ukraine & has already occupied the bits he wants, he has no interest in the rest of Ukraine so long as its not in NATO & not in the EU.

Except for the fact he published that 5,000 essay at the beginning of the year about how Ukraine didn't really exist, and that Ukrainians were only Russians with funny accents, misled by evil Westerners and Nazis into believing otherwise. Before his videotaped screeds after recognising the Donbas republics and then on the day of invasion - where he said Ukraine didn't really exist and was a historical mistake of Lenin's - and should really be part of Russia.

From that point, a lot of people are going on the working assumption that these are the only statements that make his invasion look rational. He thinks he can conquer and annex all (or at least most of) Ukraine and will be welcomed by its "basically Russian" people - once he's hanged a few "Nazis", like Zelensky.

Which looks batshit insane to me. But is the only explanation that makes his war look sane that I can see. Particularly the early operations to capture Kyiv on day one. And also makes it fit in better with his normal MO, which is the quick thrust led by special forces - backed by the threat of overwhelming force - meant to create a more favourable situation on the ground that he can then spend the next few years defending, before launching the next clever "special operation". It's just this one was based on stupid assumptions and has been failing horribly ever since.

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Re: "Putin may not be insane"

Naselus,

Russia's demands weren't just that Ukraine guarantee it wouldn't join NATO. They also wanted all NATO troops out of all countries that joined NATO after 1990 (I'm not sure if that also meant Polish troops out of Poland - or just all foreign ones), plus Ukraine to give back all weapons that it has received from NATO countries in the last few years and lose all future NATO support in training and equipping its army. Oh and to agree to Russia's interpretation of the Minsk accords - and that means allowing an election in Luhansk and Donbas while there were under Russian political and military control (so a rigged one) and then those newly "elected" officials to be included into the Ukrainian government with some sort of powers of veto so that they could stop Ukraine ever improving as a country and showing up how pisspoorly Putin has been running Russia.

Now given that Russia has invaded Ukraine 3 times since 2014 - disarming the Ukrainian army and giving up all hopes of re-arming it with modern weapons counts as a fucking stupid idea. As every time there was an internal disagreement in Ukriane's new devolved governing system, you can bet there'd have been Russian troops either on the border, or in the country.

That was not just normal great power muscle-flexing. It was Putin telling Ukraine that he wanted if not to run their government, to have an internal political veto and an external military one. For ever.

He never once deviated from those demands. There is now negotiation going on directly and via the Israeli government as mediators. I've seen a leak that the terms are in some ways worse, Ukriane would have to recognise Crimea and the independence of Luhansk and Donetsk (probably on the full province boundaries not what they'd been pushed back to before the war and cut it's army to 60,000 and promise not to join NATO. But in other ways they're actually better, because with the Donbas republics being recognised as independent - there's no political threat to Ukraine. And once Russian troops are out, they can break the terms of that deal any time and expand their army in 5 seconds flat, because they've got the trained personnel. So you do what Weimar Germany did after Versailles and you lose a bunch of privates, but keep the number of staff officers and NCOs to allow you to expand extremely quickly back up to full strength.

Given Putin also ought to be able to work that out, I'm sure there's some catch or misreporting from journalists being too optimistic - or he'll wait for them to surrender and then say, "Surprise! My army aren't pulling out after all!"

But anyway Putin's invasion of Ukraine was not "rational" in the sense that it's broken a bunch of his existing policies that were rational. For example, the way the French and Germans allowed him to negotiate and manipluate the Minsk accords gave him a crippling and permanent hold over Ukraine. France and Germany wouldn't support them, because they had political capital invested in their great diplomatic triumph, yet no Ukrainian government could implement Minsk, because Russia never honestly did the bits it was supposed to (like remove its troops) and no government could survive the disaster of allowing the Russian agents at the top of those governments into authority over Ukraine.

But as soon as Putin recognised the Republics as independent states, he voluntarily fucked up his own quite successful (if immoral, short-termist and dangerous) policy of the last ten years. Launching a full-scale invasion is even madder. He's buggered up his own economy, is taking massive military losses he wouldn't even have been able to afford to replace with the Russian economy at pre-sanctions-collapse levels. And what for? If he conquers Ukraine he's going to need hundreds of thousands of troops to hold it (the place is huge), and if he doesn't he's now lost his political leverage and fucked both his economy and his army.

US estimates are that Russia has lost about 5% of their initial equipment that they invaded with - something like 1,000 vehicles. Plus 4,000 killed (so you'd expect at least double that wounded enough to be out of action for a bit) Which is about 8% of the invasion force (150k-200k). That's in 2 weeks. And they haven't even launched a major assault into a big city yet. Even if they can unfuck their supply lines this is more than two thirds of the Russian army (and many of its best units) getting heavily damaged. They can replace the manpower, but the equipment is going to be expensive. Another two weeks of this and even if they win the war the Russian army will take a decade to recover. I doubt they can build new, but they can get some old Soviet kit out of mothballs and remanufacture it to more modern standards.

If it's rational, it's the fucking stupid end of the rationality scale.

Internet backbone provider Lumen quits Russia

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Re: Hire a few hundred thousand biplanes.

And the poor troops suffered from propaganda in another way. They became a bit of a forgotten army. Progress was slow because Italy has so much good defensive terrain, and the Germans were well led (by Kesselring). Plus allies had to get their own shit sorted out, blood fresh troops (and commanders) and then move some of those experienced units back to England to be used in D Day. So there were a lot of periods of basically WWI style trench fighting - meaning casualties were high and progress was limited. But it was necessary, because we didn't have the landing craft in 1943 to put enough troops into France to guarantee success (or enough blooded troops and officers) - I think the 1943 D-Day plan could only do 3 invasion beaches, not 5. Meanwhile the Italian front tied down another 20-30 good quality German divisions that would have made D-Day a much closer-run thing, and attrited the German forces to help both the Russians and make D-Day less of a hideous gamble.

Allied news was much more accurate than the Germans, but still didn't dwell on all the downsides above. And so not only did the guys who fought in Italy not get the glory, but some imbeciles even came up with the phrase "D-Day Dodgers" - despite the fact that fighting conditions in Italy were generally worse than in North Western Europe. Except for in the bocages, in the first 6 weeks after D-Day - which was bloody awful terrain to have to attack into.

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Re: Missile vs hot air

The air inside probably isn't, but the burners should be.

You could of course solve this problem by filling them with hydrogen. Then you only need to worry about the cannon shells - but who knows, they may pass straight through without exploding? Or if you prefer the boring life, there's helium.

UN mulls Russia's pitch for cybercrime treaty

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Acronym Issues at the UN

The UN's Ad Hoc Committee to Elaborate a Comprehensive International Convention on Countering the Use of Information and Communications Technologies for Criminal Purposes

So that gives us: UNAHCECICCUICTCP

Hmmm. Needs more work methinks. As it's Putin's idea, could we call it the Cybercrime United Nations Treaty?

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Re: If Russia is for it

The oligarchs aren't all that important. For very rich people, they have pretty minimial involment in Russian politics. All they're allowed to do is become regional governors and spend their cash on smartening up the regional towns and cities.

The real power in Putin's regime is with the security services. Rosvgardia (internal security), FSB and SVR (the domestic and foreign successors to the KGB), GRU (military intelligence plus special ops), the armed forces and the State Security Council and Putin himself of course.

Being an ex KGB colleague is the big way to get ahead. One of Putin's problems is that lots of his people aren't much younger than he is - and because he doesn't get out much he's not meeting new people to refresh his regime with.

Russia mulls making software piracy legal and patent licensing compulsory

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But Putin likes wars during Olympics. It's his thing. Summer 2008 invasion of Georgia, and Winter 2014 and 2022 for Ukraine. To be fair he also invaded Ukraine in 2015 - but sometimes it's just too long to wait for the next Olympics...

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Re: "arbitration, often in Stockholm or London"

London is the global capital of business arbitration. It's not universal, New York, Stockholm, Switzerland, (Hong Kong at least used to be), all get heavily used - but where two businesses from different countries have to sign a contract they'll quite frequently agree to do it under English (and Welsh) contract law because it's well understood, more predictable than the way European* contract law tends to be interpreted and takes place in a well-run jurisdiction where it's pretty much unheard of to bribe a judge.

It's a growing area of UK exports. As well as the huge amount of legal work that gets done in London as part of doing business there.

If a government wants to issue debt, but is worried that it might not be trusted (say due to past defaults) it will usually issue that debt in London, under English law or New York under US law. This allows governments to borrow at lower rates, because they can't just default without legal consequences, as they could under their own law. The good point being governments can borrow if they need to, the bad side being there's no easy way to fix it when they screw up and borrow too much, like Greece or Argentina.

* This isn't a criticism of European judiciaries by the way. But the jurisprudence on contracts is a bit different in Western Europe, and judges are more likely to heavily interpret the contract and try and correct it after the fact. To try and come to some kind of fair arrangement. Whereas traditionally English contract law is more minimalist - and where both parties are professionally advised and considered to have the ability to understand what they signed, judges will do the minimum to fix the dispute using the written terms of the contract (or ending it) unless there is serious reason to do otherwise. Hence the outcome of a legal case is much more predictable for both sides.

PayPal, Visa, Mastercard suspend Russian services

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Re: Your average person in the Russian street

Saw it on the BBC last night. There's a little old lady in her mid-90s in St Petersburg. One of the survivors of the Leningrad siege (she's well known and basically local royalty). She came out with her two anti war banners, that were literally bigger than she is. And the whole crowd were applauding her - you could see they were too scared to protest themselves, but they were there to watch and they applauded her until she was politely (and rather gently) arrested. Then all went silent - and I rather suspect went home ashamed of themselves for not doing more.

I remember she was out protesting straight after the invasion. Back when it was single protesters only, and quite a lot of violence used to arrest them. No organisation and almost everyone else too scared. Again she went out alone with her banners and again she was quietly and politely arrested - with a large crowd looking on. Applauding here and then dispersing.

I guess she knows all about Nazis, and recognises them when she sees them. I wonder how long she gets arrested for, and how many times she's been out demonstrating, in Winter in Russia.

I bet the guys arresting her were nervous though. I can imagine that crowd going from too scared to show too much support to angry mob in no seconds flat.

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Re: Your average person in the Russian street

I've seen reports of that, but it doesn't mean all Russians believe it. And it was Russian babushkas that did a lot to put a stop to the Soviet war in Afghanistan. And that "only" killed 15,000 Soviet troops in 10 years. If the Russians keep losing people at the rate they did in the first week of the war - they're going to hit that milestone in the first month. And that's assuming the Ukrainians are over-stating things, and they don't hit it this week.

From videos online it's also clear that many Russian troops are pretty reluctant to kill babushkas in Ukraine. At least face-to-face - it's different when it comes to firing rocket artillery into cities.

You wonder how long Russia's security forces can go on arresting anti-war demonstrators. It's one thing beating the crap out of some students (with their long hair and horrible music, we had proper respect for dictators in my day...) - it's a whole other ballgame when you have to start arresting granny.

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Re: Who is the target?

Because of the new laws on what you can say, somebody in Russia had fired up Photoshop and knocked up a nice book jacket: Tolstoy's 'Special Military Operation and Peace'.

I worry about us making the sanctions go too far, and having such a catastrophic effect on the Russian ecomony that Putin sees it as war. But equally his government made the choice to suddenly ratchet up the repression to Soviet levels again - and so it's pretty hard to justify a foreign company sending in staff at the moment. And that's ignoring the effect of sanctions, meaning that it's going to be incredibly hard to get paid.

It's now effectively a criminal offence to be a foreign journalist operating in Russia - which wasn't the case in Soviet days. The effect of Russia's economy having been relatively linked to the rest of the world, and then suddenly shutting it off, means that we're likely to end up with even less interaction than during the Cold War. Aeroflot used to be able to fly, now with most/all their planes being leased, they're going to struggle to leave the country without having them siezed. And being foreign models, spares are going to become a huge problem even to fly internally.

It's going to take some careful thought and language by Western political leaders to try and keep this from escalating constantly. I was pleased to see both Biden and Boris Johnson in interviews say this isn't about regime change, just about imposing costs on the Russian government for the invasion.

At the moment Putin doesn't want to climb down, but as it becomes increasingly obvious that winning militarily is near impossible, I hope that we can find clever ways of giving him a way out of Ukraine. If that's possible.

Russia scrambles to bootstrap HPC clusters with native tech

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How many vacuum tubes does it take to build a supercomputer? And just how warm would the room/building get if you tried?

I remember a story from Bletchley Park. It was all woman teams that operated the Bombes. Young officer is sent into the room with a message on a rainy day. To find all the women stripped to their underwear using the nice warm machine to dry their outer clothes.

And a very happy young junior officer he was! There being much fewer opportunities for a young man in the 1940s to see so much of the female form. Sadly, somebody talked. And a system of female messengers was instituted to spoil his fun...

Russia acknowledges sanctions could hurt its tech companies

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Overall, I don't think it's been a full blown policy disaster for China, but I do suspect that they're quietly shifting from tacit approval of Russia's actions to a more neutral stance.

I'm not sure President Xi's inner circle are capable of honest self-analysis. Rather like Putin's regime, its becoming much more of a personal dictatorship than an autocracy.

The Russians and the Chinese have spent the last decade poking at a divided West. Apparently seeing those divisions as encouragment to keep poking. Until eventually what's happening is that the West are realising that they're going to have to act collectively.

What was it Napoleon said? Never interrupt your enemy when he's making a mistake.

But they just don't seem to be able to help themselves. Take China EU relations. China got this nice win, when the EU signed that trade and investment deal between the Trump and Biden presidencies. Biden's team asked the Europeans to hold off until he was in power and could talk about it. But they pushed ahead. Merkel even came out and said that Europe should be equidistant between the US and China. Ignoring the fact that one of those two is a vicious dictatorship running a cultural (if not actual) genocide in Xianjiang and Tibet and the other is an ally who actually pays to have troops stationed in Germany to defend it against an increasing Russian threat. Ah I still remeber the days of being ridiculed for saying Merkel's foreign policies were awful, and being told she was the best politician since sliced bread...

But having achieved this great division between the US and in particular France and Germany (but also the rest of the EU - even though France and Germany pushed that trade agreement), China had to fuck it up. The EU put in some sanctions against minor Communist Party officials over Xinjiang, so China responded by sanctioning a bunch of MEPs. Well how were they to get that deal through the European Parliament now? All those years of effort to split the EU and US buggered up in one fit of pique!

And now we have China's unofficial trade embargo on Lithuania, because they accepted a trade mission from Taiwan to be set up in Vinius. Well of course if you're going to embargo goods from one member of the EU, what about the others? Well for a few months the EU tried to ignore it. Germany tried to pressure Lithuania to back down. But now the EU have taken China to the WTO over it? And Australia, the US, UK and others have joined the action.

So I'm not sure if China or Russia's governments are currently capable of seeing how badly they're screwing up. Meanwhile the big democratic economies are being forced to realise that they need to cooperate diplomatically, militarily and economically. Plus the supply chain mess caused by the pandemic is simultaneously making people look at their economic dependence on China. This is the exact time for China to be meek and cooperative, to let sleeping dogs lie and hope we decide that would be too much effort. But instead they team up with Russia to show us that if we do nothing, the world is going to get even scarier.

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bombastic bob,

Otherwise why ELSE would he target civilians like this?

He's targetting civillians like this because he's fucked up. Make no mistake, the Russians are already burning through plan B and are on to plan C - and that's after only a week.

Plan A was a quick, glorious victory. Using a surprise attack and special forces to decapitate the Ukrainian government. Loudly claim victory, hang a few "Nazis" and all back in time for tea and medals. I'm still not clear whether Putin's plan was to fully annex Ukraine or just to install a puppet government and bugger off - that's a question of whether he truly believes his own bullshit about how Ukraine isn't really a country, Ukrainians are just Russians with a bit of a funny accent and that it's an evil CIA imposed government that Ukrainians are desperately waiting for Russia to liberate them from.

If he does genuinely believe all that shit, then he's stupider than we thought - and we can dismiss all idea that he's even capable of coming up with clever plans. Let alone implementing them.

If he doesn't believe all that bullshit, then why the fuck did he launch such a stupid invasion plan, that was guaranteed to fail?

But then his current plan B makes no sense either. If his objective is a friendly Ukraine - or at least one that accepts Russian hegemony, then bombing its cities to rubble means permanent burning hatred. Which means there can be no peace deal. But if he's not aiming for a peace deal, then how the fuck to he expect to annex and control 44 million Ukrainians in a truly massive country with fewer than 200,000 troops!

If they lost a conservative 3,000 killed last week - then we'd expect about 4-5 times that number in injuries. How long does he expect this war to carry on, when he's taking 10% casualties a week?

So I'm presuming the plan is to use rocket artillery to destroy a couple of cities, to force Ukraine to surrender. But on what terms?

There is no plan. Putin is a gambler, who's mostly taken low-risk chances and got away with it. And people (I guess including him) have taken some of his losses as wins - like breaking off the Donbas from Ukraine. All that did was guarantee further conflict, and after 8 years the Russian economy never recovered from the sanctions. Now he's gone for a massive gamble in Ukraine and there are no upsides - the economic damage is massive, but the Russian army is also now fucked. It's lost massive amounts of equipment it can't afford to replace, and destroyed its reputation and morale.

China (those other "genuis" long-term strategists) have encouraged Russian adventurism in order to distract and weaken the West. Only to see the Europeans and Americans unite in a massive blast of sanctions and new military spending, plus link up with Australia, Japan, Taiwan and South Korea. We're all now rebuilding our Cold War state institutions (having had this shock) and I bet they'll be turned on China next. For Russia and China, this has been a policy disaster.

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Re: Voodoo economics

They should be able to print Roubles for quite a bit. The collapse in the economy is going to be deflationary - so printing in order to keep people in work is actually quite a sensible move - as it was with Covid support. But that only works in the short to medium term.

The question is how much they can use the economy to substite for the imports they can no longer get. I suspect the answer is not much. Apparently the small artisanal food economy is now pretty robust in Russia, after the Russian response to Western sanctions after the Crimea annexation was a ban on imports of European luxury foods. But I suspect that's a tiny island around Moscow and St Petersburg - and not something they can do to get chips for their car plants or spares for their oil and gas drilling equipment.

Russia's economy is a lot more globalised than it was in the Soviet era - so the pain is going to hit most sectors of it. I guess they're going to be able to ship some stuff in from China, but you can imagine the prices might be a bit high (what with their being no alternative) and sanctions from Japan and South Korea are pretty heavy as well, so they're going to struggle to get things like chips, decent computers and machine tools. Which is terrible for the long term.

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Ukraine isn't a new Afghanistan for Russia, it's something far worse. The Soviets lost a total of about 15,000 dead in that war - which lasted nearly 10 years.

Obviously we don't know casualty figures from this war, but I'm beginning to suspect that the Ukrainian claims aren't that far over the top - and it could be more than 5,000 dead in a week. We're missing huge amounts of the battle - which aren't making it to Twitter or journalists' cameras - because most of that stuff is coming from journos or people with smartphones in cities. But even there we've seen whole Russian light infantry formations attacking into cities without heavy support and getting slaughtered.

One suggestion being that Russia's military comms have broken down, and so lightly armed Airborne and Rosvgardia (internal security troops) attacked into cities solo in the early days following the plan - and their support didn't materialise.

But even though the Ukrainians are losing ground, they're holding firm outside Kiev and not even retreating much around Kharkiv and the North East. Which suggests that there's some fierce fighting going on there, which our intelligence agencies will know about because all our spy planes are up feeding intel to Ukraine (and analysing Russian tactics for us for later). The more cautious US/UK sources were estimating Russia had suffered a couple of thousand dead at the end of last week. So more dead in a week than in an average year of the Afghan war.

The Russians can't sustain this tempo for long. They don't have many fresh units to commit and their logistics system isn't up to the job. Though I doubt the Ukranians are in much of a condition to counter-attack on any scale. But I think the equipment losses are also pretty fearsome. Something's going to have to give soon - even if it's just the war settling down into a grim stalemate for a few weeks.

Internet backbone Cogent cuts Russia connectivity

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Re: unwarranted and unprovoked invasion of Ukraine,

teknopaul,

We don't even know if NATO is the real reason. Ukraine weren't going to be joining NATO anytime soon - and that was blindingly obvious to anyone with half a brain. Because most of the major European members were against it.

But as it happens, it's not obvious that the real threat Putin was upset about wasn't the EU anyway? It wasn't NATO membership that the Ukrainian people wanted when they chucked out their government in 2014. It wasn't NATO flags they were holding in the Maidan protests, there were EU ones. The Ukrainian public didn't show a great interest in joining NATO until after Russia had invaded, annexed Crimea, set-up the 2 breakaway Donbas republics and then invaded again in 2015 to stop them collapsing. It was links with the rest of Europe, and the prospect of not being lumbered with Russian backed governments they were after.

So it's just as likely that what Putin fears is an independent and democratic country on his borders, that might manage to have a reasonably well-functioning democracy. Particularly given that lots of its population speak Russian and have Russian relatives. And so complaining about NATO or EU "interference" in Ukraine is just a way of trying to claim that it's all nasty outsiders suggesting that you don't need dictators like Putin around to keep you safe.

Also there's a good argument to say that the only reason the EU has survived to have wealth and peace is the existence of NATO to protect it.

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Re: Conspiracies not all wrong?

I agree that banning RT was a mistake. I don't know what happened in the UK, as I didn't think we had. From what I read it's because the EU had banned them, and so they lost satellite access. That explains why Sky and Freesat lost them, but I'm not quite sure why they also disappeared from Freeview.

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Re: Difficult choice to make

If the sanctions keep turning former billionaire oligarchs into millionaires, or hopefully, but unlikely thousandaires, then one of them will find the easiest solution is to be rid of Putin for good.

The oligarchs don't run the place. And never did. They just got very rich. But other than people like Berezovsky, they mostly stayed out of politics. And what was done to Berezovsky was done as a warning ot the rest of them.

The government is mostly run by ex-KGB types - the so called siloviki. Now a bunch of them have become oligarchs. But not the same type. They don't own the companies they run, they're running the big state companies like Gazprom and the like. So they've also got loadsa money and the yachts, but Putin can take most of that away simply by replacing them.

Then you've got the inner circle, running the government. Who are also mostly ex KGB. But they're the ones with real power, and access to Putin. It's presumably going to be one of them that replaces him, if anyone does. In the same way the Politburo replaced Kruschev for taking too many risks with the Cuban missile crisis.

But I'm not sure that's possible any more. In the old days, Putin had a group around him, helping him to run things, and advising him. He's moved from an authoritarian "managed democracy", through an autocracy into what looks increasingly like a personal dictatorship. There is no Politburo equivalent to tap him on the shoulder and suggest a quiet retirement. And probably nobody he'd trust to protect him, if he did retire. Which suggests he's now in office for life. Which could be a very long time.

Europe's largest nuclear plant on fire after Russian attack

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Re: Like primitive man putting his hand in fire

Israel didn't bomb Iran's nuclear reactor. As far as I know that is still being built by the Russians. However, Israel did bomb both Iraq and Syria's. But they were both under construction at the time, and not fuelled, so there was no radiation risk.

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Happy

Re: I know it can't be done

Being A10 pilots, their weapon of choice isn't a bomb.

But, as the saying goes, when all you've got is a massive 30mm cannon with armour piercing shells, everything looks like a tank.

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Re: I know it can't be done

I suspect that is because those analysts see things from a western point of view. Everything is sanitized from the air, or in a desert!!!!!

No. It was misplaced faith in the Russian army. Which has been on a major modernisation binge for the last fifteen years.

Anyone who looks at a potential invasion of Ukraine was going to instantly compare to WWII. Which is obviously where a lot of the fighting was. And one of the big things you learn, when you study that history is the mud. For example, it wasn't the snow that stopped the Germans from capturing Moscow in 1941. It was the mud. They had to halt the attack in October until the snow really kicked in, the ground froze and they were able to move again. Although by that point they were at the end of their logistical tether and the Soviets had brought in yet more reserves. Otherwise you were just limited to road and rail transport. And in the case of the Germans their rail logistics didn't get them much past Smolensk.

That's why one of the Russian words that anyone who's read about WWII on the Eastern Front knows is Rasputitsa. Which is the two "mud seasons" they get due to Autumn rains, and then in Spring when all the snow melts (plus rain). Which is probably why the advances from Crimea are going very well, but the advances in the North are so slow and their logistics so screwed up. There's only so many trucks you can get down the roads - and that's without the enemy shooting at you. Or what looks like large numbers of mechanical breakdowns caused by bad maintenance practises from the Russian army over the last few years.

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Re: Not fake news but…….

Also the caption says that's a slowed down video, not in real time. Which might explain why you see it fall so slowly.

It's risky to try and interpret all this stuff that ends up online, unless you've the experience and expertise to do so.

Find one of the open source intelligence types online to follow, if you want to see this type of stuff interpreted properly. Like Rob Lee on Twitter or Bellingcat.

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Re: "illegal, illogical, and inexplicable"

Firstly we have the problem that Germany and France weren't going to let Ukraine into NATO. They didn't have the appetite for the risk of annoying Russia. That may have changed now. Putin has just told Macron that he plans to conquer Ukraine - but if that fails and he's forced to make peace - I don't think it's now guaranteed that it won't be offered NATO membership immediately.

Also Russia used to have a tiny border with NATO. But now, it's moved a bunch of troops into Belarus and invaded Ukraine. If it can conquer Ukraine it's now going to have an absolutely massive border with NATO. They used to just border the Baltic States - that were barely armed and had small NATO battalions to defend them. Now they're going to have troops directly bordering Poland. Poland are rapidly modernising their forces, and are (shall we say) highly motivated.

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Re: Like primitive man putting his hand in fire

Surely their artillery commanders have maps? Can't they read them? When the order comes in for fire support on this grid square - surely you'd notice the symbol on your map and at least pause to think?

Although I've since seen a report on the BBC that what they hit was a training building. So it could be a decent distance from the reactors - and the Russians were totally confident in their accuracy? But I suspect they were just feeling lucky.

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Devil

Re: I know it can't be done

Using an aircraft to bomb? How quaint.

I dare you to say that in a bar full of A10 pilots.

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Re: I know it can't be done

Russia's anti-aircraft defences haven't even successfully managed to neutralise Ukraine's airforce. Which is a tenth the size of the Russian one, and a lot less modern. And their handful of Turkish drones have also been doing pretty well.

Admittedly this is partly because the Russian army has seemingly been ignoring its own doctrine and not fighting a combined arms operation using its battalion tactical groups, which integrate air defence with front line troops.

But I'd say that some F35s or B2s could make that a very sad convoy indeed. And given that the Russians chose to invade in the mud season - and so are basically stuck with road travel only in the North of Ukraine - they can't even disperse the forces - as anybody who goes offroad, soon ends up stopping. So they make fat, juicy targets. If only we could lend Ukraine a couple of squadrons of A10s - as this is literally what they were built for.

I remember reading from some military anaylsts before the war about how this wasn't a problem any more, because modern armies are different and better and can magically ignore the mud.

Deutsche Bank seeks options as sanctions threaten Russian dev unit

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Paris Hilton

You take that back! That's all his own hair. And it's lovely! It's the greatest hair!

Details of '120,000 Russian soldiers' leaked by Ukrainian media

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Happy

Re: In other news

Anybody got a tank I can borrow and which way is Belgium ?

John Finnemore's take on the issue

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Re: The best way to eliminate an enemy is to make them a friend.

<blockquote.The Russians look to be enacting their version of the Monroe doctrine.</blockquote>

The Monroe doctrine was wishful thinking, not policy. The only way to enforce it was the British Royal Navy - the 19th Century US Navy was tiny. Which as happens, suited Britain - because having got almost exclusive control of North and South American markets during the Napoleonic War - Britain didn't need an empire there to be making a lovely profit. So keeping the rest of Europe out suited both the USA and Britain.

NATO didn't fight for Ukraine, because Ukraine's not in NATO. NATO will defend countries in NATO - that's the whole point of it. Strangely enough Russia has spent the last ten years busily persuading all its neighbours that the only way to be safe from Russia, is to be in NATO. It's a bit fucking stupid of Putin to complain about this, when it's the inevitable outcome of his own policies.

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Re: I can imagine the PsyOps...

With ~200k Russian troops in Ukraine, troops families likely know they are in the Ukraine.

Lots of them don't. Obviously it's currently hard to get facts, because Ukraine have a good reason to exaggerate and/or make Russia look bad. As do Western intelligence services, when they talk to journalists off the record. But there have been multiple claims of the Ukrainians contacting relatives of dead or captured soldiers to tell them what's happened - and those people haven't been informed by trhe Russian government - and didn't even know their relative was in combat.

As it happens probably 75% of Russia's front line combat troops are involved in the invasion. But seeing as Russian media isn't allowed to even call it a war, and the propoganda story is it's a limited special operation to stop Ukraine from slaughtering the population of Luhansk and Donetsk - so Russian TV doesn't even mention the attack from Belarus or Western Russia heading for Kyiv and Kharkiv.

But it's starting to look pretty clear that when Russia sent those troops to Belarus "on excercises" - they'd really told them they were excercises. Even many of the less senior officers. Some were even issued with return travel warrants. But had their mobiles taken, as gets done as standard with serious excercises now. So they could't tell their relatives. Many troops have claimed that they didn't even know they were invading until they realised they were inside Ukraine. There are loads of videos online of locals chatting to soldiers to corroborate that.

Ukraine's government have been very savvy about this. They're putting resources online so relatives can find out about who's been killed and capture. The Russian ministry of defence hadn't even admitted to taking a single casualty until yesterday. Now they've admitted to 500 Which suggests the US/UK estimates of about 2,000 are on the low side.

This is an army which has deployed mobile crematoria to the front! So heaven knows if that's to cover up their own casualties, or to cover up murdering any of Ukraine's government that they can capture? Seeing those can't have filled their soldiers with confidence...

Russia is the advanced persistent threat that just triggered. Ready?

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Re: "Where does Putin nuke that wouldn't actually hasten his own end?"

bombastic bob,

Hitler was always planning a genocide from the start. It's in Mein Kampf - if you can make yourself read it (don't it's a terrible book - in both senses of the word). That puts him into a special, very small league table of evil. Several genocides really - as he wanted to kill all the Jews but also kill large numbers of the Slavic peoples, just keeping enough of them around to be slave labour for the Germans that he'd install in their former territories.

Putin is vicious and callous - and doesn't give a fuck about human life. See what he did to Grozny in order to recaputure it in 1999/2000 - which was basically to destroy it with artillery. That's what they're doing to Kharkiv and Mariupol now - using multiple launch rocket systems with explosive warheads and cluster bombs. On civilian targets. That and heavy artillery. The death toll will be horrifying.

But he did try to do it without the massive butchers bill first. And killed a lot of his paratroopers and Spetznaz units in incredibly stupidly planned operations in the process. So I think he's got that Soviet disregard for human life, but I don't think he's actively out to kill people unless its useful to him.

In one other way he's not like Hitler. His army is crap. I've been reading some debate amongst military anaylsts. Pretty much everyone agrees the invasion plan was shit. But the implementation has been a complete clusterfuck. And they've had to have operational pauses to let the logistics catch up after only 2 or 3 days! But they're only 50km from the border. General Paulus' pause, in his original plan for Operation Barbarossa, was at Smolensk (which was about halfway to Moscow). And his supply lines were by rail and horse and cart. Their logistics plan seems to be, "Fuck it! I'm sure it'll be fine." If they try that while invading Poland, then the Poles will take great delight in taking them apart. And heaven knows what the US A10s will do to them, lined up on the roads like that.

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There are fundamental issues at hand. At what point can a group of people secede?

Why was it okay for Taiwan to secede from China?

They didn't. China seceded from them. The Kuomintang lost the Chinese civil war to the Communists and so retreated to Taiwan. They even kept the UN Security Council seat and mostly the interantional recognition that they were still "the real China". Until Nixon went to China, and started a process where most countries recognised the People's Republic of China, and they got the UN Security Council seat, and in fact the whole thing - as the Republic of China got kicked out of the UN entirely. Hence the name Taiwan or even in some sports "Chinese Taipei" - when the country is still the Republic of China. Everybody pretends they're still a province of China that just happnens to be a bit awkward about it. And hopes the rest of China will eventually recognise reality, rather than try what Putin's just done in Ukraine to force the point.

Why was it okay for Kosovo to secede?

Because the Serbs were on their third genocidal war in 10 years (Croatia and then Bosnia), and so NATO governments decided they'd had enough and did something, rather than wait for the corpses to pile up like the last two times. It's still diplomatically awkward. Spain for example doesn't recognise Kosovo as an independent state because they also don't want to tempt the Catalans or the Basques to get ideas.

It seems NATO and Russia both answer these question depending on what gives them a chance to expand their territories.

The difference is here that Kosovo isn't NATO territory. Whereas Crimea has been annexed, and is part of Russia - and most of the populations of Transnistria, Donetsk, Luhansk, South Ossetia and Abkhazia have been given Russian passports, to go with the Russian "peacekeeping" troops stationed there. And their leaders who often answer to Moscow, whereas NATO has attempted to set up genuinely representative governments.

NATO got involved in Bosnia and then Kosovo because our governments were shamed into it by the people, who'd had enough of seeing the slaughter and expected our governments to do something about it. They weren't government policy taken with the expectation of national gain - they were actually drains on our resources.

Russia got into Crimea out of greed for territory. South Ossetia & Abkhazia, Luhansk and Donetsk were about destablising Georgia and Ukraine - they were leverage. Conflicts that Putin could turn on and off in order to screw with their politics and diplomacy.

Catalonia, like Scotland and Quebec, should have been granted an independence referendum - given how consistent the support is for separatist parties in Catalonia. But sadly the rest of Spain does not agree.

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Re: "Where does Putin nuke that wouldn't actually hasten his own end?"

The nuclear option is a worry. By the middle of the war, Hitler had (at least partially) stopped believing in the wonder weapons or military victory. But as he said, if the Germans were unable to sieze glory when he gave them the chance, then they deserved to go down in flames.

So a lot of the rest of the Nazi leadership were busily working on their own mad delusions of course. Tehey all knew they'd lost the war by 1943 - but they kept on fighting, hoping for something to come up. And lots of them were expecting to ally with the UK and US to finish off the Soviet Union.

Himmler was planning to "save some jews" as bargaining chips, so that he could make an anti-Soviet alliance in exchange for not killing them.

Goering wanted to be in charge, though God knows why. Perhaps he was too high on morphine at this point to care? But what shocked them all at the end was the realisation that Hitler no longer gave a fuck about Germany. He wanted to burn everything he could reach, and ordered the destruction of the little infrastructure and industry that Germany had left. What did he care about whatever population survived the war, since he wasn't planning to?

So we're now basically hoping that Putin's not so irrational and such an egotist, that he'd rather let the world burn than go quietly. Like Hitler, he's just spent 2 years in a bunker, almost never leaving. Just in this case its been Covid self-isolation. What effect has that had on his mental state? While I'd imagine a few of his allies are now starting to look at their options, and realise their boss maybe no longer shares the same objectives as them.

His reaction to these sanctions should be telling. If we tank the Russian economy, and he doesn't care, then clearly he is no longer planning for the long term. Even if, like the senior Nazis, nobody seems to have quite been able to admit it to themselves.

Not that Putin is Hitler of course. It's just the historical parallels fit so well in some ways. Particularly for those around him, who might want to have some stake in the future of Russia after Putin's fall/death.

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But people's lives may depend on it. If you're in Ukraine and running a hospital for example. But also having a database of information that might be useful to the Russian government is now a major risk, if Russian troops turn up at your datacentre and ask for everything. Not a problem if it's just a list of electricity subscribers, but a mobile phone company holds records of people's text messages, a bookseller knows which of its customers have bought material not appproved by the Russian government. All this sort of information could be useful to a dictatorship with a sudden internal security problem - i.e. that it's just conquered a hostile population, and wants to govern them.

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If Russia attacks a EU country, then there would probably be a EU response, which probably would trigger a much broader conflict. NATO will most likely respond once that happens.

The EU is not a military alliance. There would certainly be an EU economic response, but most of the good economic sanctions are being used over Ukraine. So there's not much more to do there.

NATO, Finland and Sweden all inter-operate and train together. They've got the readiness and the skills.

But we're not fighting to defend Ukraine because we don't want to start WWIII. Nuclear uncertainty is uncertain. Far better to deter an invasion by using the implied nuclear threat of NATO self-defence - than to make the implied threat of intervening in a war if Russia has already started it - which might lead to Russian nuclear "self-defence".

Also of course, Putin can't now invade Finland, because he's just bogged most of his army down in Ukraine. And they're going to be busy for a bit. And after that, they're clearly going to need some retraining. Fuck knows what their excuse for a war plan is, but they need to thinnk about sacking shooting some generals and get in some better ones. They've done a pointless parachute drop, a couple of pointless helibourne assaults and an even more pointless amphibious invasion. It's like a bad jazz band, where even the drummer has to be allowed a couple of solos...

To be fair, the helicopter assault could have worked. If they could capture an airfield and fly in heavy weapons, to get round behind the main formations of Ukraine's army and attack Kyiv. Particularly if they had air superiority so could stop the Ukrainians moving their forces easily. You also need air supreriority to be flying tranpsort planes around, and to control sufficient perimiter round the airfield to stop them being shot down with shoulder-fired SAMs. But they don't have air superiority because they did the ground assault on day one, with only a small number of air and missile attacks, and so haven't managed to take down Ukraine's air defences. I'm guessing they don't have enough cruise missile stocks to have destroyed all the air bases (airbases are big it takes many more than just one hit) and their airforce doesn't seem to be up to the job of continuous, sustained attacks.

What we don't know is how badly chewed up the Ukrainian army are getting in the mobile battles outside the cities. Are they just slowing the Russian advance down at heavy cost - or is it a genuine contest? But the Russian units getting into the cities so far are more lightly armed and being beaten back. There's some paratroopers (but not elite ones - I guess its uncool to have light infantry in the Russian army, so they all have to be called paras) and Rosvgardia and OMON units - who are paramilitaries more used to guarding borders and buildings or beating up protestors than actual fighting. Those poor buggers should never have been put into the front line

I guess the Russians are short of manpower for city fighting, while the mechanised infantry are tied up fighting the war of manoeuvre to surround the cities. And because they've assumed Ukraine would be a walk-over they've been sending small columns into the cities to see what happens.

The problem is that in the "good old days" a Red Army general could affort to be a callous bastard and reckless of human life (even his own sides'). Because the Red Army was huge, and there were loads of your own soldiers to use as cannon-fodder. That's not true in the modern Russian army. It's big, but not that big. Perhaps their generals have forgotten?

EU cuts off key Russian banks from SWIFT system

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Re: "heavy sanctions against Russia's [..] corrupt elite"

Pascal Monett,

As you say, it's pretty clear that Putin has planned this long in advance.

However, there's been a lot of discussion about this because it's pretty clear that not even all of the army command were in on the plan - hence the poor performance particularly of the troops attacking from the North and North East. Neither were a lot of the government. Which could be why US and UK intelligence were sure there'd be an invasion (they predicted it in early December), but most other European intelligence agencies were much more doubtful, as were lots of think tank types and security journalists. Because their Russian sources were certain there wouldn't be a war.

So it could well be that Putin dumped the oligarchs in the shit. Because the invasion looks so irrational, and so unlikely to achieve any of the objectives that anyone thought Putin might be trying to achieve - that htis was the reason so many people thought US and UK intelligence were talking bollocks.

Also, when Putin prepared for this, he seems to have prepared by talking to his intelligence agencies. And they appear to know fuck-all about either economics or military matters. Either that or he doesn't take no for an answer anymore, so only gets told what he wants to hear. But it's clear they're not prepared for the level of sanctions that are hitting them And neither was their military plan up to standard - they seem to have ignored their own military doctrines and just gone for a lighting series of surprise attacks to sieze Ukrainian cities and decapitate the government nearly bloodlessly in order to have the operation mostly done within a couple of days. Why else would they launch troops across the border without even pausing to disable Ukraine's air defences - or try to send lightly armed paratroopers into cities in tiny numbers - with no heavy weapons, artillery or air backup.

Sanctions are now so severe, that no oligarch with assets abroad is going to find it easy to access them. Unless they're in China, or maybe India and Brasil.

They'll get easier to circumvent, as time goes on and vigilance drops. At the moment everyone is panicking about breaking them, and worried that a new sanction will come along tomorrow - so it's easier to just do nothing for a bit and wait and see.

A lot of these sanctions are still new. So the big question is how tough will enforcement be. In general the US have been better at this than either the EU or the UK in the past. But that may change. There's been a major shift in sentiment. The UK for example has slowly been building the legislative tools to do this much more effectively, with things like Unexplained Wealth Orders and the like - and I think this invasion is just the shock to the system that's going to add the political will to the already existing momentum from think tanks, Parliamentary committees and the intelligence services who have wanted this to happen for years, and have been slowly building the tools.

The oligarchs are probably going to suffer. The problem is, Putin doesn't care about them. He just uses them when he needs cash. But the second tier oligarchs, who are mostly his mates from his KGB days who run the state owned companies are also suffering. They're not really oligarchs, the Russian joke is that being an oligarch is actually their job. People like Sechin at Gazprom. Because Putin might actually listen to them, if they all tell him the sanctions are a disaster for the economy. But they're not really his peers, they're the help. It's the people running the security organs that he talks to every day. I guess this is the downside of him having been self-isolating for 2 years, to avoid getting Covid.

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Is it possible the Russian army has outsourced its supply chain to Capita? That would certainly explain the fact they've had to have two operational pauses to sort their fucked up logistics out in a war that's only been going for a week.

BitConnect boss accused of $2.4bn crypto-Ponzi fraud has disappeared

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Re: Is the SEC really his biggest problem?

"Mister Chrysoprase is VERY upset"

No, no. You've got that wrong. He's not upset. He's very disappointed. And Mr Crysoprase doesn't like to be disappointed...

BOFH: All hail the job cuts consultant

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Devil

Them's fightin' words!

Gerard's a fairly dull person to speak to – and I've talked to OS2 fans.

Cyberwarfare looms as Russia shells, invades Ukraine

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Re: I disagree with the rationale here

MarineTech,

I can't see NATO making any military response in defence of Ukraine. Had we allowed them to join, things would have been different. And Russia would have known upfront that they were attacking a country covered by a nuclear umbrella. But we didn't, so they aren't.

Since Russia has invaded Ukraine, and is seemingly bent on capturing large parts (maybe all) of the country - if we get involved at this stage we're risking war which could go horribly wrong and/or horribly nuclear.

Also Russia has been mobilising for 4 months for this. More if you count the mini-surge of forces to Ukraine's borders in April last year. So we couldn't put serious boots on the ground in a timely manner - we deliberately haven't forward based major NATO facilites in Eastern Europe, as part of the NATO Russia founding act from the 90s. Something I hope we'll now scrap, telling the Russians that if they want to be a threat, we'll defend. Obviously we could do some serious damage to the Russians with air support, but I doubt we could get the numbers of aircraft deployed in time to overwhelm the Russians, so we'd have to take large risks and accept losses. Plus how would Russia react to our aircraft from bases in the UK, Romania, Poland, Germany etc destroying their tank columns? At the least there'd be missile (and maybe special forces) attacks on some of our air bases. Maybe lobbing a few tactical nukes around, given they've only limited numbers of cruise missiles, and you need a lot of cruise missiles to take out a large airbase. Especially if they're not that accurate. The risks are too high.

What makes the nuclear threat work is not just us promising to protect the Baltic States. But us having troops there. So for the Russians to conquer the place, they've got to kill lots of our troops. That means NATO has skin in the game, a reason to reinforce or counter-attack - and maybe a reason for defensive tactical nukes. And then the full horrors of MAD. Of course modern NATO doctrine doesn't really involve massive nuclear strikes on Soviet tank formations in the Fulda Gap, so I don't quite know how we expect the nuclear dimension to work. Presumably the strategic nuclear shield is there to defend NATO from Russian tactical nuclear strikes, and superior airpower is there to break up the tank formations for the outnumbered ground troops. Given how little space there is to trade for time in the Baltic States, and how small our garrisons are, I think we're going to have to do some serious thinking about this in the next few months. I'm not sure small tripwire forces is enough anymore.

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Re: Russia may not win this cyber war

The problem with waging a cyber war against Russia is that Putin doesn't care. If he cared about his own people's prosperity, he wouldn't have annexed Crimea on a whim (the Russian economy hasn't really grown since), he would have reduced the theft of the oligarchs so there was more money going round the Russian economy, he certainly wouldn't have invaded Ukraine just now.

But Putin's attitude is that our heroic Russian people can take more pain than you weak Western democracies. And of course that's fine, because he personally won't be joining them in suffering that pain, nor will the people around him. And as the Soviets found, even when you've got demonstrably less, you can still bribe enough people to support the regime by giving them a bit more than everybody else gets. After all, why else did Putin join the KGB in the 1970s, when nobody could have had any illusions how evil an organisation it was. If you'd willingly join the KGB in the 70s, you'd have joined the SS in 1940.

Putin is also right of course, becuase he doesn't have to worry about elections.

So the question is, what does Putin want? And how can we threaten or take that away from him, or at least use it as bargaining chips? I doubt he cares about money. So long as he rules Russia, he'll have enough money. As soon as he stops ruling Russia, he risks being poor, dead or put on trial. He also seems to genuinely care about Russia being militarily powerful. And possibly more importantly NATO not being. So I'd say that we need to reinforce NATO's Russian border anyway, due to the increased security threat now he's got troops in Belarus and Ukraine. So we should do so, noisily and expensively.

So the goal of sanctions should be to damage the Russian economy sufficiently that it can't support a threatening military. While building up our own capabilities. And see if we can also tempt him into spending lots of cash to counter our military tech, in hopes of damaging the economy further. All while offering de-escalation and disarmament in return for Russia doing similar and being less of a military threat - such that hopefully they can have an economy to support a large military at such time as they don't want to threaten us with one. I guess this is going to be a long and painful process with hopefully lots of diplomacy, but with resolution behind it. And the credible ablity to use force if there's no other option. So sadly another Cold War. But this time Russia has a vastly smaller economy and no fig leaf of ideology on its side.

All very depressing. But I think it's pretty clear that the current leadership of Russia and China have both decided that accomodation of their reasonable desires by the West is weakness, leading to them making more-and-more unreasonable demands. And if we don't want to live in that world, we're going to have to do something about it.

US imposes sanctions as Russia invades Ukraine

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Funfact3: All those being nice talking points that have suddenly surfaced on Russian media. After Putin made his historically ignorant speech about how Ukraine doesn't really exist and never really has.

Clearly borders have moved a hell of a lot over the years and so Ukraine hasn't always been a state. But Kievan Rus was older than Novgorod - and in fact was Novgorod's overlord at first. I admit it's 25 years since I studied Russian history, plus Ukraine's history is insanely complex. But large chunks of modern Ukraine were part of Kievan Rus for hundreds of years, until the Mongols turned up. After that there was no united state and bits were owned by everybody in the area, and some from quite far away (like Genoa). It wasn't until the 19th Century that most of modern Ukraine was part of the Russian empire. So even with all that complex history I think Ukraine has been an independent state (for a rather loose value of the word state) than it's been part of Russia or the Soviet Union. It also owned some bits of Russia during some of that time - which certainly links the cultures more than if not. But surely if we're going for full on revision of borders, why can't Lithuania own Ukraine again? Or perhaps a Polish Lithuanian commonwealth?

The point about Ukrainian statehood is that Ukrainians chose it to be so. They had a referendum on independence in 1991. Which won with a massive overall majority. Crimeans also voted in that referendum, and though they only just voted for leaving the Soviet Union as part of Ukraine, they did so.

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Re: re. more blankets

Russia has sold a lot of gas to China. But there are two problems. Firstly, as you say, the Chinese know when they're holding the aces, and have not paid top dollar. So they've done a couple of big deals, but when you factor in building the pipelines, it's not a huge amount of cash - and nowhere near replaces the money from selling to Europe.

The second problem is worse. Most of the gas fields they're selling to China, are different to the ones they're shipping to Europe. So they're actually having to invest in two almost completely separate bits of infrastructure. Short of blowing even more money on building interconnectors across Russia between their gas fields, at yet more vast expense, gas they don't sell to Europe just sits in the ground with all the drilling gear doing bugger all. It would be a much longer process to switch that kit to the fields supplying China, or to build pipes to do the same. And if they did, that leaves them dependent on China, rather than Europe. I reckon that they'll get a lot less change out of trying to negotiate with the Chinese government.

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Re: re. more blankets

uncle sjohie,

Just to be a pedant...

Nordstream 1 and 2 are both gas pipelines across the Baltic from Russia to Germany. The point about NS 2 was that NS 1 doesn't have the capacity for all the gas Russia supplies to Western Europe. Most of it, but not all. The rest is shipped through the old pipelines that go through Ukraine and Poland and supply lots of Eastern Europe.

So the reason that this was a strategic betrayal of its allies by the German government is that once built this meant that Germany could still get all the gas it needed from Russia, even if Russia stopped shipping to Ukraine and Eastern Europe.

The second reason is that it was a betrayal of a supposedly joint foreign policy objective to support Ukraine. Ukraine's government makes a nice chunk of its tax revenues from transit fees for all the gas going through its pipelines, and we've been loaning and giving Ukraine cash to support them for the last few years, and so what the rest of Europe didn't want is to have Russia be able to cut off that supply of income at will - by just diverting supplies to NS2.

It's actually a bit more complex, because the old Yamal pipeline takes its gas from some different fields to Nordstream 2 - so there might even be some truth in Russia's claims earlier this year that it was struggling to keep supplies up from the older fields and needed to shift demand to the other pipelines. That will I believe be true in future, but is probably a lie this year.

But Europe had already been hostage to Russian gas diplomacy for over a decade now. When Ukraine wouldn't grant Russia a new lease on the Sevastapol naval bases 15 years ago, Russia cut off gas supplies in the middle of winter. Because that pipelines also supplies Eastern Europe, they were also hit, and so the EU started building gas interconnectors, so supply could be moved from Germany to Poland. At that point Russia were charging Poland 40% more than they were charging Germany for gas, and Ukraine over 100% more. That should have been the wake up call everyone needed to realise that Russian gas supplies can't be trusted, but although the EU did make considerable strides to build a more robust internal transfer network, and investigated Gazprom for abuse of monopoly (they were found guilty but not punished about 5 years ago) - it wasn't enough. And Germany still chose to build Nordstream 2 and also close those nuclear power stations.

In terms of doing a good job, the EU and the rest of the members probably gets a 6.5/10 for making the best of a bad job, despite German betrayal, by building a bunch of interconnectors. Losing points for not being tough enough on either Germany or Gazprom. And Germany gets a 1/10 for being totally selfish, but also at the same time totally short-sightedly stupid.

Apologies for the anti-German rant. It should really be Merkel (and mostly that fucking toady Schröder) that get the blame. And to be fair to the current German government they've been given the hospital pass and I think taken the right decision - despite a lot of predictions that they wouldn't.

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Re: Parting Shot?

bombastic bob,

Thanks for your reply. I totally agree that diplomacy is the best solution. Which means us giving up things we can live without in exchange for things we want more. And so we should definitely be talking to Russia and engaging with them. In fact a bit of diplomatic give-and-take might be very good. If we can do some hard negotiating and actually have deals fulfilled, then we can actually start to build trust. I don't think Putin is Hitler - with an irrational aim to take over the world.

But there's a big problem. I'm not sure we can give him what he wants. He can't be stupid enough to really think that NATO are a serious military threat to Russia. We could be, in a few years, if the US completely changed their force posture and flooded Europe with reinforcements. And if the European armies invested more, so they could deploy more than just small battle groups. But that's what nukes are for. The problem is our threat to him is by existing. Working, stable, successful democracy is a threat to him. There's a brain-drain of Russian talent regularly heading West - and if Ukraine were to become a successful democracy - what would that say to Russians about how shit their system is.

So OK. We allow him his buffer-zone of misery. Let him keep Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia as varying degrees of failed states - so Russians don't have nice places right on their borders. But the problem with that is Ukraine and Belarus can see Poland - doing rather nicely out of being in NATO and the EU thankyouverymuch. And so they want a bit of that, and so do we then allow him to move and try to make Poland, the Baltic States into failed states too to keep him happy?

Also Putin keeps on pushing. I think we need to push back. We need stuff to give him, so he'll not do stuff we won't like. But as here, he's created this crisis by mobilising. Why should we reward him for it? So if we give something, we should take more. OK, you can have an unwritten guarantee that we won't let Ukraine in. But in return, we're putting 2 divisions in Poland, setting new rules on gas supply to Europe and fining Gazprom say $5billion for supply manipulation, which they promised not to do as part of the settlement of an EU regulatory complaint in about 2015. They should have been fined then, but "promised not to do it again, honest." Plus we're increasing our missile defences in Eastern Europe - basing offensive missiles there too, to mirror what Russia has already done in Kaliningrad, and some more economic sanctions. Then we can offer to stop doing some of this in exchange for deescalation in Ukraine. It imposes real costs on both sides, but we're way richer than Russia. Basically it's Cold War containment. Proper deterrence at all levels, forcing Russia to ruin their economy if they want to be a big military player, but offereing reasonable diplomacy and de-escalation at all times.

Just giving him what he wants when he threatens us, means he'll threaten us again. Nukes in Kalinigrad, more aggressive naval and air operations in our backyard, more cyber attacks and attempts to damage elections. He's fighting the Cold War, and has been for at least a decade, so we need to return the favour, and perhaps privately remind him who won the last time, and offer alternatives.