despot

Saturday February 26, 2022

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Saturday February 26, 2022

Western powers have realised Russia is largely immune to sanctions

The war against Russia is one western countries want to fight with only economic sanctions, not guns.

February 20, 2014

Russia’s conflict with Ukraine, despite its long gestation and planning by Vladimir Putin and his supporters in the Kremlin, was supposed to end quickly once financial retaliation began. Yes, there would be military skirmishes on the ground, but little more than a few casualties were expected once a range of penalties began to bite.

The western powers have quickly realised that unless they are willing to fire the financial equivalent of a nuclear arsenal, Putin has made sure Russia is largely immune, at least in the short term.

Over a decade, Kremlin policy has carefully reduced domestic public and private sector debt and allowed the central bank time to build a war chest of foreign assets large enough to shore up the country’s finances for months, if not years.

This means that the sanctions put in place over the past couple of days by the EU, US, UK, Japan and Canada are unlikely to have any significant effect on the Russian economy or its financial stability.

Only the full package of measures used against Iran – shutting Russia out of the international payments system, Swift, while also banning purchases of Russian oil and gas – will do the trick.

July 18, 2018

As Hosuk Lee-Makiyama, the head of the European Centre for International Political Economy, said, Europe has allowed itself to become more integrated with Russia, while Russia has separated itself from Europe.

He said EU countries owned a combined €300bn of Russian assets that would be vulnerable to confiscation if a full-blooded financial war broke out. The UK owns billions more via firms such as BP, which has a near-20% stake in the Russian oil company Rosneft.

“Sanctions are one of the few options that European countries have in a conflict situation like this. If you disconnect North Korea or Iran from the international financial system, you do not expose yourself to that much damage.”

Speaking on BBC News, he added: “But while I don’t say it is impossible to envisage Russia being barred from the Swift system, it is a nuclear option that means you exterminate yourself along with your enemy.”

Swift (the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) is the main secure messaging system that banks use to make rapid and secure cross-border payments, allowing international trade to flow smoothly.

It transmits trillions of dollars’ worth of deals every day, but is coming under pressure from a Chinese government-backed rival, Cips, which Russia could use to conduct its financial business deals supplemented by direct transactions with counterparties.

It is also possible for the G7 countries and EU to ban the purchase of Russian gas and oil, but commodities analysts agree that while there is spare capacity in oil markets to make up for the loss of Russian supplies with a price rise limited to $140 a barrel, there is no hope of boosting gas output to fill a gap created by a Russia ban.

Shortages would quickly force countries in Europe to ration gas and the price would be likely to rocket back to nine times normal levels, as seen before Christmas, stirring memories of the 1974 oil price shock. (The Guardian) 

 

Friday February 25, 2022

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Friday February 25, 2022

Decision to invade Ukraine raises questions over Putin’s ‘sense of reality’

March 4, 2014

Vladimir Putin’s decision to launch a catastrophic new European war, combined with the sheer weirdness of his recent public appearances, has raised questions in western capitals about the mental stability of the leader of a country with 6,000 nuclear warheads.

They worry about a 69-year-old man whose tendency towards insularity has been amplified by his precautions against Covid, leaving him surrounded by an ever-shrinking coterie of fearful obedient courtiers. He appears increasingly uncoupled from the contemporary world, preferring to burrow deep into history and a personal quest for greatness.

The French president, Emmanuel Macron, is well-placed to analyse changes to Putin’s demeanour. Macron once drove a cooperative, if self-conscious, Putin round the gardens of the palace of Versailles in a tiny electric golf cart in the summer of 2017 and welcomed him to his holiday residence at a fortress on the Mediterranean coast the following summer, where Putin descended from a helicopter carrying a bunch of flowers and complemented the Macrons on their tans.

February 17, 2022

After Macron held five hours of talks with the Russian leader in Moscow at opposite ends of a 15-metre table, he told reporters on the return flight that “the tension was palpable”. This was not the same Putin he had last met at the Elysée palace in December 2019, Macron said. He was “more rigid, more isolated” and was off on an “ideological and security drift”.

Following Putin’s speech on Monday, an Elysée official made an unusually bold assessment that the speech was “paranoid”. Bernard Guetta, a member of the European parliament for Macron’s grouping, told France Inter radio on Thursday morning, after military invasion began: “I think this man is losing his sense of reality, to say it politely.” Asked by the interviewer if that meant he thought Putin had gone mad, he said “yes”.

Guetta is not alone. Milos Zeman, the Czech president and long one of Vlaldimir Putin’s staunchest supporters, denounced Putin a “madman” after the invasion.

July 22, 2014

“All our Russia-watchers, watching his press conferences, think that he’s descending even more into a despotic mindset,” another European diplomat said.

Vladimir Ashurkov, a close aide of Alexei Navalny, Putin’s most prominent opponent who is now in a penal colony, described Monday’s rambling speech by the Russian president about Ukraine as “really bizarre”.

“It’s unprecedented in the rhetoric of world leaders, but also for Russia. It’s quite strange,” said Ashurkov, who is executive director of Navalny Anti-Corruption Foundation, and lives in exile.

August 10, 2007

“Why would you spend so much time, you know, looking back into the past, when we now live in the 21st century? We should be looking into the future. It puzzles me as to what audience is intended for such a speech, because it’s not going to resonate with Russians and it’s rubbish for an international audience.”

“I think he’s in some sort of self-induced concept of reality that is very revanchist, based in the past, and in the trauma of the dissolution of Soviet Union,” he said. “Frankly speaking, we are in a situation where the leader of a major nuclear country is living in his own world.”

In a crisis, it would be very much up to Putin how to react and whether to escalate. Like a US president, he has access to a nuclear briefcase, the Chegets, with nuclear launch code. According to an analysis by the Middlebury Institute for International Studies at Monterey, the defence minister and chief of staff of the armed forces are also supposed to be involved, but in Putin’s Kremlin it is unclear whether they would act as any kind of brake on his actions.

“Nuclear weapons are an interesting exception to the general rule that the psychology of world leaders is less important than the systems they work in,” Foley said. “Don’t assume that this could proceed in an orderly fashion. It could spin out of control very easily.” (The Guardian)