DawgTalkers.net Forums DawgTalk Palus Politicus War in Ukraine...continued

But what's the impact of that debt default? They're already sanctioned anyhow. I suppose creditors could go after or foreclose on their foreign assets to recover, but what do they really have that's recoverable. Would they still be shut off from financing elsewhere, like China?

Keep in mind that my understanding of this is not at a very high level, admittedly.

Well, stupid me. I should have read your article before posting. It appears to have answered a lot of my questions.

at this point your understanding is as good as anyone else's. Russia has exposed so much about them, good and bad. i think an immediate benefit would be to take over their oil industry as a restitution/reparation for invading ukraine, which then drives down energy cost in Europe, which *should* have a trickle down effect on the rest of the global economy. we could do that without taking over Russia, because puppet governments don't work, and definitely won't work in a country like Russia. so maybe we lift sanctions after imposing heavy austerity measures and policy requirements the Russian government must put in place? just speaking out loud here.

Yet not trying to take anyone's guns away. Like you know, everyone against being a responsible gun owner keeps screaming about.

2 dead and 20 wounded after mall with more than 1,000 people inside hit by airstrike, Ukrainian officials say

https://www.cnn.com/europe/live-new...27-22/h_f3b4185573c5baa5f285a5e2f11bb0b9

so we hitting malls now, Russia?

My recollection is it's due to a "hold on to your butts" massive interest rate hike. I also don't know how that works, but that doesn't sound too good for your average everyday Russian. He's sacrificing "main street" in order to prop up his currency.

They're not really broke though, they can send the money due to Western lenders not being able to accept payments under sanctions. But we can see their military is broken.

My understanding (which is probably at least somehwat wrong, TBH) is that the default is much more tied to the avenues that they (don't) have to pay out what they owe to bondholders. Those avenues are cut due to sanctions, and also to step(s) the US govt has taken to isolate Russia financially (I thought there was a move, additional to the official sanctions) that an office of the US govt has taken to further impede Russia paying its debts. It wasn't called out in the articles I read, but it actually kinda sounds shady as hell if I understand things correctly. Nobody cares because it's Putin and Russia and it furthers the goal of the sanctions that everyone agreed to... but it's just kinda weird when some Russian clown says something entirely to do with Russia is actually the fault of the West, and he's right.

I read one of those articles right after another that said Russia has more oil money than they know what to do with right now due to high prices and India and China filling the demand vacated by the US and others.

j/c...

Don't think I've seen this posted. Looks to be legit.

What's happening there?

I'm the furthest thing from an expert, but that doesn't look legit at all. The buggy shoots something up in the air and then each individual vehicle in the convoy explodes.

I don't think that video is real, or it's heavily manipulated. Otherwise, that buggy is badass as hell.

It's CGI.

Some people tend to think that propaganda is only used by those they consider to be the enemy. I realized that wasn't true by taking American History in high school.

Apologies!! Not real then... But fun.

Well, at least they are really using buggies. And it was kind of awesome even for CGI.

Yea…Rambo is jealous of that clip and he’s been firing his 50 Cal nonstop for the past 40 years without reloading.

quote further down in tweets

Dear English-speaking friends, this is a high-quality CGI work by an author unfamiliar to me. But the war in Ukraine is real. And right now you can help a small public initiative to rebuild Ukrainians' housing, destroyed by the army of Russian invaders.

First I've heard of this. Vlad's days are numbered.

Wanted to make sure we keep this thread going, as we really shouldn't lose sight of everything going on there.

Russia is receiving RPAs from Iran. It's not a good thing for Ukraine, for sure, but goodness, it also reeks of desperation. Can you imagine if we were 5 months into a war with an inferior opponent (on paper) and we asked some place like Italy for help with obtaining adequate weapon systems?

https://www.yahoo.com/news/putin-deadly-gift-iran-084859415.html

It's certainly not a good look for Russia. But at the same time I think Russia will receive enough support from their friends who are our enemies that there's really no chance Ukraine can win in a war of attrition. I certainly hope I'm wrong there but there is no logistics issue with Russia bordering Ukraine and the size of their military alone far outweighs Ukraine's.

I think it all depends (which I know is a non-answer). I figured that Russia would do much better in the current iteration than they had done initially, and they have. However, they're still not doing nearly as well as they should. They can still encounter logistics issues, even though the materiel doesn't have as far to go and it should relatively be in a straight line. For them, it's about getting the items off of the assembly line, or out of storage, and then allocating it precisely where it needs to go, when it needs to go there. That all has to be coordinated with an advancing front, as well, even despite the fact that front isn't really advancing that quickly. On top of that, it looks like their depots have been hit and currently still exist in the range of the HIMARS, and we're sending more of those to Ukraine. Logistics are also further complicated the more they get into urban settings. It's hard to effectively maintain a depot within city limits when you have a population that is hostile to you, but you also can't keep stuff too far away in case ish gets real.

Another logistical problem they have is actually maneuvering the terrain of Ukraine. From what I’ve read recently, Ukraine is blowing up bridges and whatnot to help stall the Russian advance, and it seems to be having somewhat positive results.

The other problem is that they could run out of steam really quick. That goes beyond materiel and straight to the boots on the ground. They've been on an offensive - albeit slow - for quite some time now. From everything I've read, they have manpower issues and it's never a good thing if you leave the same people on the front for way too long, especially when they're away from home, not exactly fighting for a life-saving cause, against an enemy who is protecting its homeland and way of life. They seem to try and combat that asymmetry by going after the Ukrainian morale by bombing hospitals and schools and whatnot, but that could also backfire as well.

That all being said, I agree with you for the most part. Russia tried to be cutting edge with its approach initially and failed miserably. They showed that they are not a modern superior military. The "Big 3" turned into the "Big 2.5." That being said, they are still far more capable than Ukraine and have pretty much just assumed the role of trying to be the elephant who sits on a lion. They're going to take their claw marks against a fierce opponent, without much strategy other than just using their sheer weight to try and crush it.

I think for Ukraine to succeed, they need to hold out long enough to exhaust the over-taxed Russian front and receive enough weaponry to start a counter-offensive, especially when the weather gets cold (ironic to do that against Russia). One advantage of the HIMARS is that you can launch a massive barrage and be gone seconds later. They need to keep doing that to keep the Russians guessing. That’s a big morale factor. My guess, though, is that the Russians are purchasing the Iranian UAVs to try and find the HIMARS vehicles to take them out. There needs to be some type of counter put in place to combat the UAVs, especially the kind that the Iranians have. It doesn’t take a whole lot to shoot them down, since they’re by-and-large prop planes without pilots, and they’re not stealth. Hopefully they still have enough stingers to get the job done.

I certainly can't and won't attempt to dismiss the points you made. All are very real possibilities. I do however feel if we're looking at it from a logistics standpoint it's far less complicated to get weapons from right next door than from across the Atlantic Ocean.

Or even through Belarus, which they had done before, and did poorly. I'm guessing they're applying lessons learned now as well.

The funny thing is when I started in my first office on base, I saw a whole bunch of logisticians and logistic specialists. I always wondered why we had so many people doing that stuff. Now I know without a doubt.

Moreso, I think the change in pace favors the Russians as well. The news snippets I've been seeing lately has the Russians doing a lot more shelling vs taking ground. I would think logistics issues won't be as big when movement slows way down.

As for morale, I doubt it's gotten any better for the Russians, but the Ukrainians have to be feeling it by now.

One thing we haven't heard about in a while is economic sanctions. Did we empty our gun? Are we just waiting for the full effect? That probably has stalled with oil prices being what they are, but Russia is still pumping oil to Germany. How do we reconcile the different time scales (turning off Russian oil was never going to be an overnight thing, but the idea was to do something that would have a positive effect for Ukraine in a timely manner)?

That's a really good question. I'm guessing most of the remaining economic cards to play are with Europe now. They - Germany especially - wanted to dance with the proverbial devil, and now they're paying for it. It would be great if we had the silver bullet to drop oil prices too.

I'm sure the Ukrainians are feeling it morale-wise, especially after the early on success. Russia now seems content to proverbially sit behind its walled fort and shoot off cannons against Ukraine's melee forces. Hopefully we can keep the influx of long range weaponry flowing into Ukraine so they can not only keep targeting the "fort" but also what's behind it.

I think I saw whispers of A-10's on Yahoo as well. I don't know how much truth there would be to something like that, but those could have a pretty devastating effect on an entrenched position.

In regards to sanctions I think they have very limited abilities. You have places like India that are desperate for resources and make up a huge population. They are still doing a hardy business with Russia. Then you have a great economic powerhouse like China with their huge population that will never go along with many of the sanctions if any. China actually lifted Russian import restrictions on wheat after the war in Ukraine stated. I'm not saying restricting trade with the west doesn't have an impact. Surely it does. But I don't see it as the crippling impact the western world made it out to be.

J/C

This is a pretty good article:

Russia using 85% of fighting force in Ukraine: senior US defense official
Liz Friden, Caitlin McFall
Fri, July 22, 2022, 9:05 AM·2 min read
A senior U.S. defense official told Fox News Friday that Russia is using 85% of its fighting force in Ukraine as the war continues for a fifth month.

"They can’t keep it up forever," the official said. "They have expended a lot of smarter munitions. Their capabilities are getting dumber."

The U.S. defense official assessed that Russia has not only deployed its missile forces, Air Force and its special operation forces known as "Spetsnaz," but it has removed troops from other areas near its borders and stationed across the globe.

The official added the Pentagon has assessed that Ukraine has taken out more than a hundred "high-value" targets in attacking Russian command posts, ammunition depots, air-defense sites, radar and communications nodes, and long-range artillery positions.

Additionally, more than just military targets, Moscow is grappling with a substantial number of causalities daily.

The senior defense official said that "thousands" of lieutenants and captains, "hundreds" of colonels, and "many" generals have been killed in the fighting since the war began.

"The chain of command is still struggling," the officials added. "They are still not effective at combined arms."

CIA Director William Burns estimated this week that some 15,000 Russian soldiers have been killed in the last five months and that as many as 45,000 have been wounded.

"Quite significant set of losses," Burns said during the Aspen Security Forum. "The Ukrainians have suffered as well, probably a little less than that. But, you know, significant casualties."

Russian forces are reportedly relying on "rolling barrages" – which is an artillery-based strategy that bombards large swaths of area – but a method that has not proven particularly effective, the senior defense official told Fox News Friday.

Russia, which has heavily relied on missile strikes is believed to be launching tens of thousands artillery rounds per day; however, Russian forces have yet to be able to take out single High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) – which allows Ukraine to deploy multiple rocket launches effectively.

The official said that at some point they will "get lucky" and hit at least one U.S.-supplied system.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced this week news plans to send four more HIMARS to aid Ukrainian forces.

Russian troops have largely occupied the eastern regions of Ukraine, but the fight for Donetsk is expected to "last through the summer" with Russia achieving slow gains at high costs.


https://www.yahoo.com/news/russia-using-85-fighting-force-130526000.html

This could also make things interesting. I'm not sure what the likelihood of something happening is, but if Chechnya wants to go for another shot at breaking away, now might be the time:

https://www.foxnews.com/world/putin-faces-second-war-front-chechens-threaten-new-offensive-russia

Hopefully, Biden will ask the world to hit Iran with the same level of sanctions Russia has gotten. Aiding a war criminal in the committing of further war crimes should be punished on the same level as the original bad actor, IMHO.

Estonia's prime minister has a message for the West: 'Don't worry about Putin's feelings'
Michael Weiss
Mon, July 25, 2022, 6:36 PM·10 min read

TALLINN, Estonia — Sitting in her office in Stenbock House, a well-appointed neoclassical building in the heart of Tallinn's medieval Old Town, Prime Minister Kaja Kallas wanted to discuss the last 80 years of European history. But she had only 20 minutes.

An attorney by training and a former member of the European Parliament, Kallas's position was tenuous when she met with Yahoo News on July 8, so much so that she nearly had to cancel her interview. "There’s a chance I won't be here tomorrow," she said, referring to the collapse of her coalition government days earlier and her round-the-clock negotiations to cobble together a new one, something she managed to do on July 18 after briefly resigning.

Despite the turmoil in her own government, Kallas was intent on sending a message to the rest of the world about yielding to Russian demands on Ukraine.

"I think a fundamental mistake was made after the Second World War," Kallas said, sitting beneath a painting of Moses receiving the Ten Commandments. "While the Nazi crimes were widely condemned, the communists’' crimes never were. So we see a strong revival of Stalinism right now in Russia. Seventy percent of Russians support Stalin, despite his having murdered 20 million people, despite the deportations, the prisons camps, war, everything. History books in Estonia were rewritten after communism, whereas Russians are still being taught the same history that we had to read during the Soviet period, which was total crap."

Kallas is Estonia’s 13th prime minister since the Baltic country declared its independence in 1991, although arguably the 45-year-old, who was 12 when the Berlin Wall came down, has already proved among the most troublesome for Moscow.

Her government has been staunchly supportive of Ukraine since Russia launched its invasion on Feb. 24. In fact, the smallest of the three Baltic states, with a population of just 1.3 million, Estonia has so far sent more than $270 million worth of military assistance to Ukraine, the equivalent of more than 30 percent of its annual defense budget.

In addition to armored personnel carriers, antitank mines and a wide variety of small arms, Estonia has been an eager supplier of the U.S.-made Javelin antitank missile system, one of a slew of extremely effective shoulder-launched weapons that have helped Ukraine withstand the initial thrust of the Russian invasion.

Now that Ukraine has moved from a strategy of mobile defense into a grinding artillery war against the Russians, Estonia, a NATO member-state since 2004, has helped modernize Kyiv's arsenal with a number of FH70 155-millimeter towed howitzers, plus the MAN Kat 6x6 heavy trucks to tow them. When considered alongside their humanitarian and financial assistance, the Estonians donated the equivalent of 0.81% of their gross domestic product to another nation at war, a staggering metric.

Kallas is keen to emphasize that security assistance is not charity. "I was asked in Parliament by our far-right party why we’re doing this," she told Yahoo News. "And I answered that Ukraine is literally fighting for us. When Russia is at war with them, they're not at war with us. And we have peace here."

Maintaining that peace is of existential necessity for Estonians, who share an uneasy 182-mile border with a revanchist power currently occupying 20% of Ukraine and threatening to permanently gobble up much, if not all, of that territory. Estonia itself was annexed by the Soviet Union in 1940 when Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler agreed to the mutual carve up of Eastern Europe under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Then it was invaded and occupied by the Nazis when Hitler double-crossed Stalin and launched Operation Barbarossa in 1941, his doomed World War II attack on the Soviet Union that included modern Ukraine.

Until 1991, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania remained under Soviet rule. Tens of thousands were killed, imprisoned or deported to Siberia. Among the deportees in 1949 was Kallas’s mother, just 6 months old at the time, who was dispatched in a cattle car along with Kallas’s grandmother to the Russian tundra and raised in exile until she was 10.

Kallas’s great-grandfather, Eduard Alver, was a commander of the Estonian Defense League during the 1918-1920 Estonian War of Independence, which resulted in the country’s first emancipation from Russia. Her father, Siim Kallas, served as both foreign minister and prime minister of Estonia in the 1990s, after the country gained its independence a second time.

Since then, Estonia has often found itself struggling against geographical fatalism. One can drive the length of the country in just over two hours and it could quickly be overrun again by its much-larger next-door Russian neighbor. In 2004, Estonia joined the European Union and NATO to be firmly in the Western camp and insusceptible to a recurrence of past victimhood —the very ambition Ukrainians are dying on native soil to achieve.

Kallas’s sense of history is inextricably wedded to her own genealogy; her family’s suffering can be read in every bullet and flak jacket her government has shipped to Ukraine.

Kallas caused a moderate stir in late June, just before the NATO summit in Madrid, when she told reporters that the alliance had to revamp its plans for fortifying its eastern flank. Under the current strategy, NATO views Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania as trip wire states that could be occupied for up to 180 days before the alliance moved in to defend them. As Kallas pointed out, Ukraine at that time was only 100 days into its defensive campaign against Russia and thousands of civilians had died, millions had been displaced (including as many as 1.6 million Ukrainians who had been deported to Russia) and cities such as Mariupol had been reduced to rubble. Kallas’s point was obvious: Given that Estonia is one-thirteenth the size of Ukraine, Kallas might not have a country to lead after 180 days of occupation. Wasn't that the contingency NATO membership was meant to forestall?


"When I was in Paris, driving around, I saw all those monuments to Napoleon and it made me think: for a small country, war always means destruction, pain," she told Yahoo News. "But for a bigger country, it's not always so. War also means glory, new riches."

Her allusion to France hardly seems accidental. Kallas has been an explicit critic of French President Emmanuel Macron's insistence that the West not "humiliate" Vladimir Putin, something she sees as a dangerous non sequitur. In a March 24 op-ed in the New York Times, she wrote, "Putin cannot win this war. He cannot even think he has won, or his appetite will grow."

"I keep reminding my colleagues who want to pick up the phone and talk to Putin," she said, in another unmistakable reference to Macron. "OK, fine — talk to him. But don't forget he is a war criminal. Right now he's stealing Ukraine's grain and threatening famine to get sanctions lifted. His state propagandists talk openly about hunger as Russia’s last hope. This is who you’re dealing with."

The prime minister wholeheartedly agrees with historian Timothy Snyder’s argument that Putin doesn't require any face-saving concessions to withdraw from Ukraine. He rules in "virtual reality," she said, and because Russia’s information ecosystem is his plaything, he can pack up his army and go home whenever he chooses and dress up military defeat as a popular victory. "His people will believe him," Kallas said. "Don’t worry about Putin's feelings."

The flip side of Putin's capricious fail-safe is that he can also drag out the war as long as he wants and suffer little to no domestic blowback, Kallas added.

"In the Western world, we'd want to recover every one of our soldiers on a foreign battlefield; our instinct is not to leave anyone behind," Kallas said. "In autocracies, they don't care because soldiers' mothers aren't going to protest as they would in democracies."

To drive those points home, at a recent meeting with a top foreign diplomat, Kallas offered as a gift a copy of "The Dictator’s Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics," by political scientists Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith. The book’s underlying message is crystal clear: You can’t deter or outplay the tsar by assuming he will act as you would under similar circumstances.

While debate has erupted in Estonia about how much money and weaponry the government should be sending to Ukraine, Kallas still enjoys overwhelming domestic support on her handling of the situation. "We were thinking eventually that people would get tired and start asking, 'Why do you do all this for Ukraine when we need help over here?'" she said. "But if you look at the surveys we've done, it's something like 91% of Estonians say we have to support Ukraine, we have to help refugees. This is so very clear."

She is markedly less confident that the rest of Europe agrees. For the past five months, the European Union has managed something approaching unity about sanctions against Russia and aid for Ukraine, even as it stares down a particularly cold forthcoming winter owing to Russia’s energy blackmail. Putin may be fighting one war of attrition on the battlefield, but he’s fighting another against the longevity of European resolve.

"I won’t mention any names, but the leader of one big country who is very supportive of Ukraine told me, 'My political situation back home is that the overall view is that the war is NATO’s fault.'" Kallas said. "It’s hard for him to keep the support going because the public pressure is 'give in, stop this.'"

Kallas is particularly sensitive to the moral ambiguities and geopolitical contradictions the West has trafficked in since the war started. "It’s very interesting. We went from saying, 'Ukraine must not lose' to saying, 'Ukraine must win and Russia must lose,'" she said. "But let's be clear about something: if we stop helping Ukrainians militarily, then they won't be able to defend themselves. So on the one hand, we say it's up to them to decide their fate, but on the other, we are making that decision for them with our own policies."

Another concern for Kallas is what will happen politically in the United States — both at the congressional and presidential levels. Could Estonia, along with Lithuania, Poland and the United Kingdom — other stalwart defenders of Ukraine with large degrees of domestic consensus on the issue — supply Kyiv with sufficient weapons and ammunition on their own, should Washington's patronage dry up?

"Probably not," she said.



https://www.yahoo.com/news/estonias...rry-about-putins-feelings-223606146.html

Putin’s new gas squeeze condemns Europe to recession and a hard winter of rationing

-Germany, the region’s largest economy and traditional growth driver, has a particular reason to worry.

-It’s largely reliant on Russian gas and is sliding toward a recession.

-The possibility of a recession in Europe now seems “clear-cut,” Citi economists and strategists said in a note Tuesday.

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/27/put...o-recession-and-winter-of-rationing.html

the EU has for more ability to withstand a recession than Russia does. Russia is also losing money AND manpower, as well as military equipment. the EU isn't bowing down to Putin because of gas prices lol. neither is Biden, and thank god for that. so many "patriots" in this country feel a tight squeeze and start panicking and taking putin's side.

beta males.

It seems like the sanctions are going to have less of a short-term impact, but do more long-term damage to Russia's economy. I wonder if that was the original intention.

I think it was. Perhaps they wanted it to have more of a short-term deterrence, but that obviously didn't happen. Putin is very patient, though, and I'm pretty sure he's confident in his ability to maintain a long-term iron grip vs the whims of the Western countries.

I suppose one thing he overlooked is - if there is one country that seems to know how to bounce back from adverse circumstances - it's Germany.

Crazy to think they were an economic powerhouse, then destroyed, then they became an economic powerhouse again, and were destroyed even worse. Then they were divided into 2. Now...they're the economic powerhouse of Europe again.

I have my doubts because those sanctions all happened when it was a foregone conclusion that Russia was going to steamroll Ukraine. I highly doubt they rolled out those sanctions with the intention of the true pay-off not happening until months/years down the road. I REALLY REALLY HOPE they didn't roll out sanctions knowing what it would end up doing to gas prices so that Russia could briefly line its pockets.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/no-matter-kremlin-says-sanctions-103053407.html

Russia's economy is crumbling under sweeping sanctions and a corporate exodus, a Yale study found.

The study stands in contrast to economic releases from the Kremlin.

"The Kremlin has a long history of fudging official economic statistics," the Yale authors wrote.

Five months into the invasion of Ukraine, Russia's economy is imploding from sweeping international sanctions and a corporate exodus, a Yale University analysis has found. The analysis, released July 20, was led by Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a professor at the Yale School of Management.

The study's findings stand in contrast to studies of Russia's economy that show it's holding up better than expected. Many of those analyses, forecasts, and projections draw from Russian government economic releases, which are becoming "increasingly cherry-picked; partial, and incomplete, selectively tossing out unfavorable statistics while keeping favorable statistics," the Yale team wrote. "Indeed, the Kremlin has a long history of fudging official economic statistics, even prior to the invasion."

Russia's economy has not rebounded and is in fact "reeling," the Yale authors found. They used private Russian-language data sources and sources like high-frequency consumer data for their analysis.

"From our analysis, it becomes clear: business retreats and sanctions are catastrophically crippling the Russian economy," the authors wrote.

One reason Russia appears so resilient is because the Kremlin has been flooding the economy with "artificial liquidity" and propping up the ruble with "draconian capital controls," wrote the Yale team.

In reality, the corporate exodus out of Russia has reversed nearly 30 years worth of foreign investment, as those foreign companies accounted for 40% of the country's GDP, the Yale authors added.

"Putin is resorting to patently unsustainable, dramatic fiscal and monetary intervention to smooth over these structural economic weaknesses, which has already sent his government budget into deficit for the first time in years and drained his foreign reserves even with high energy prices," they wrote.

In April, Russian Finance Minister Anthon Siluanov said the country will draw from its rainy-day fund to cover the deficit. The move, the Yale team wrote, points to a Kremlin that is "fast running out of money, despite intentional obfuscation."

The report's authors call on the international community to keep pressure on Russia over the Ukraine war: "Defeatist headlines arguing that Russia's economy has bounced back are simply not factual — the facts are that, by any metric and on any level, the Russian economy is reeling, and now is not the time to step on the brakes."