Good discussion. I had not been aware of the oil tariff or of the Crimean/Black Sea energy deposits. I had heard that the Russians blew up the dam cutting off resrvoir water to Crimea, but had previously no idea of its significance.
Good news from Ukraine via Trent Telenko, a retired technical analyst at the U.S. Defense Contracts Management Agency, on the Chicagobozs blog:
I have posted on twitter about the Russian Army columns North of Kyiv decaying into immobile blobs due to the Rasputitsa, poorly maintained Chinese truck tires and shear “follow the plan” Russian incompetence.
The head and first dozen or so kilometers of the southernmost column north of Kiev have been stuck there for EIGHT DAYS. The Russians have since rammed more and more vehicles into this monster traffic jam (idiotically “following the plan” Soviet-style) so the whole thing is now 65-70 kilometers long (almost 40 miles).
And, because the trucks can’t go off-road due to the Rasputitsa mud and tire problems, they’re stuck on the roads and the roads’ shoulders three vehicles wide for the whole @40 miles. That means fuel and resupply trucks can’t move on or off road to deliver anything to anybody.
So all the columns’ heads are now out of fuel and battery power. They can’t move north, south or sideways, and everything behind them is stuck because of the mud, and rapidly running out of fuel and vehicle battery charge too (assuming they haven’t already). Nor can any of those columns defend themselves because they’re too densely packed. They’re just targets waiting for the Ukrainians to destroy them.
Only the Ukrainians had something better to do. They opened the floodgates of reservoirs around those columns to flood them and turn the surrounding areas into impassable quagmires for months – probably until July or August. (See photo below) Probably several thousand Russian vehicles in those columns will be irrecoverable losses. Hundreds of Russian soldiers might have drowned.
This was not just a debacle, but an EPIC one. About 1/5th of the Russian force in Ukraine is now flooded or trapped, and are definitely out of the war for good.
Russia is reportedly blocking Twitter, Facebook, various news sites, and major app stores, according to a German journalist.
The move comes after the Russian government announced last week that it was partially restricting access to Facebook in retaliation for the company applying fact-checking labels to posts from state-controlled media outlets.
Fëdor Dostoevsky has become the unlikely source of a controversy at a Milan university over its decision to drop a course on the 19th-century Russian novelist.
The University of Milano-Bicocca informed the Italian writer Paolo Nori on Tuesday night that his course on the author of Crime and Punishment had been cancelled “to avoid any controversy, in a moment of high tension.”
An incredulous, emotional Nori read the contents of the email during an Instagram live video in which he slammed the university’s decision as “ridiculous”, saying “even dead Russians” are now the target of censorship in Italy.
News of his cancelled course spread rapidly on social media, with criticism directed at the university which soon found itself embroiled in the very thing it had sought to avoid: controversy.
On Wednesday morning the university issued a statement underlining that it is “open to dialogue and listening even in this very difficult period that sees us dismayed by the escalation of the conflict.”
It confirmed that the course on Dostoevsky would in fact go ahead as originally planned and announced that the rector would be meeting Nori next week “for a moment of reflection.”
It is not the first time in recent days that the war in Ukraine has impacted the arts in Milan.
Earlier this week the city’s mayor Beppe Sala “ruled out” the return of Valery Gergiev to the podium at La Scala over the Russian conductor’s refusal to condemn the invasion of Ukraine by his friend Vladimir Putin.
Britain could have increased fracking for nat gas but didn't. Why? Because Russia pumped $95M into anti-fracking advocacy. Noted the head of NATO, Russia “engaged actively with environmental organisations… to maintain Europe’s dependence on Russian gas”https://t.co/4SfrNJcaJvpic.twitter.com/ciQFu2KV8R
Michael Schellenberger (both above & below) points out how eco-superstition (significantly funded by Russia as deliberate disinformatsia) persuaded both European countries and America to avoid energy production to save the earth!, thereby rendering both dependent on exported Russian energy. Vladimir Putin obviously believed that that dependency gave Russia a free hand to invade Ukraine.
How is it possible that European countries, Germany especially, allowed themselves to become so dependent on an authoritarian country over the 30 years since the end of the Cold War?
Here’s how: These countries are in the grips of a delusional ideology that makes them incapable of understanding the hard realities of energy production. Green ideology insists we don’t need nuclear and that we don’t need fracking. It insists that it’s just a matter of will and money to switch to all-renewables—and fast. It insists that we need “degrowth” of the economy, and that we face looming human “extinction.” (I would know. I myself was once a true believer.)
John Kerry, the United States’ climate envoy, perfectly captured the myopia of this view when he said, in the days before the war, that the Russian invasion of Ukraine “could have a profound negative impact on the climate, obviously. You have a war, and obviously you’re going to have massive emissions consequences to the war. But equally importantly, you’re going to lose people’s focus.”
But it was the West’s focus on healing the planet with “soft energy” renewables, and moving away from natural gas and nuclear, that allowed Putin to gain a stranglehold over Europe’s energy supply.
As the West fell into a hypnotic trance about healing its relationship with nature, averting climate apocalypse and worshiping a teenager named Greta, Vladimir Putin made his moves.
While he expanded nuclear energy at home so Russia could export its precious oil and gas to Europe, Western governments spent their time and energy obsessing over “carbon footprints,” a term created by an advertising firm working for British Petroleum. They banned plastic straws because of a 9-year-old Canadian child’s science homework. They paid for hours of “climate anxiety” therapy.
While Putin expanded Russia’s oil production, expanded natural gas production, and then doubled nuclear energy production to allow more exports of its precious gas, Europe, led by Germany, shut down its nuclear power plants, closed gas fields, and refused to develop more through advanced methods like fracking.
The numbers tell the story best. In 2016, 30 percent of the natural gas consumed by the European Union came from Russia. In 2018, that figure jumped to 40 percent. By 2020, it was nearly 44 percent, and by early 2021, it was nearly 47 percent.
For all his fawning over Putin, Donald Trump, back in 2018, defied diplomatic protocol to call out Germany publicly for its dependence on Moscow. “Germany, as far as I’m concerned, is captive to Russia because it’s getting so much of its energy from Russia,” Trump said. This prompted Germany’s then-chancellor, Angela Merkel, who had been widely praised in polite circles for being the last serious leader in the West, to say that her country “can make our own policies and make our own decisions.”
The result has been the worst global energy crisis since 1973, driving prices for electricity and gasoline higher around the world. It is a crisis, fundamentally, of inadequate supply. But the scarcity is entirely manufactured.
Europeans—led by figures like Greta Thunberg and European Green Party leaders, and supported by Americans like John Kerry—believed that a healthy relationship with the Earth requires making energy scarce. By turning to renewables, they would show the world how to live without harming the planet. But this was a pipe dream. You can’t power a whole grid with solar and wind, because the sun and the wind are inconstant, and currently existing batteries aren’t even cheap enough to store large quantities of electricity overnight, much less across whole seasons.
In service to green ideology, they made the perfect the enemy of the good—and of Ukraine.
Message from the Ukrainian tax office: “Have you captured a Russian tank or armored personnel carrier and are worried about how to declare it? Keep calm and continue to defend the Motherland! There is no need to declare [them as income].” https://t.co/xduC7YlXa9
Red State found an article that appeared in three different Russian regime outlets on February 27th (since withdrawn, probably because the Invasion of Ukraine, contrary to Kremlin expectation, did not quickly topple the pro-Western Government and lead to a quick surrender and occupation).
Choice excerpts:
A new world is being born before our eyes. Russia’s military operation in Ukraine has ushered in a new era – and in three dimensions at once. And of course, in the fourth, internal Russian. Here begins a new period both in ideology and in the very model of our socio-economic system – but this is worth talking about separately a little later.
Russia is restoring its unity – the tragedy of 1991, this terrible catastrophe in our history, its unnatural dislocation, has been overcome. Yes, at a great cost, yes, through the tragic events of a virtual civil war, because now brothers, separated by belonging to the Russian and Ukrainian armies, are still shooting at each other, but there will be no more Ukraine as anti-Russia. Russia is restoring its historical fullness, gathering the Russian world, the Russian people together – in its entirety of Great Russians, Belarusians and Little Russians. If we had abandoned this, if we had allowed the temporary division to take hold for centuries, then we would not only betray the memory of our ancestors, but would also be cursed by our descendants for allowing the disintegration of the Russian land.
…
Now this problem is gone – Ukraine has returned to Russia. This does not mean that its statehood will be liquidated, but it will be reorganized, re-established and returned to its natural state of part of the Russian world. In what borders, in what form will the alliance with Russia be fixed (through the CSTO and the Eurasian Union or the Union State of Russia and Belarus )? This will be decided after the end is put in the history of Ukraine as anti-Russia. In any case, the period of the split of the Russian people is coming to an end.
And here begins the second dimension of the coming new era – it concerns Russia’s relations with the West. Not even Russia, but the Russian world, that is, three states, Russia, Belarus and Ukraine, acting in geopolitical terms as a single whole. These relations have entered a new stage – the West sees the return of Russia to its historical borders in Europe . And he is loudly indignant at this, although in the depths of his soul he must admit to himself that it could not be otherwise.
…
Because the construction of a new world order – and this is the third dimension of current events – is accelerating, and its contours are more and more clearly visible through the spreading cover of Anglo-Saxon globalization. A multipolar world has finally become a reality – the operation in Ukraine is not capable of rallying anyone but the West against Russia. Because the rest of the world sees and understands perfectly well – this is a conflict between Russia and the West, this is a response to the geopolitical expansion of the Atlanticists, this is Russia’s return of its historical space and its place in the world.
This makes perfect sense. Vladimir Putin subscribes to the traditional claim of the despotic ruler of the duchy of Moscow to be the inheritor of Kievian Rus and the new Caesar presiding over the Third Rome.
Invading, subjugating, and occupying neighboring states is just the perfectly legitimate and obligatory task of “gathering the Russian lands,” i.e. gaining control over White, Black, and Little Russia and ruling all Eastern Slavic language speakers. Norman Davies, in God’s Playground, a History of Poland, compares this insolent pretention to some minor duke in Brittany asserting a claimed right to gather and rule all the Celtic lands.
Of course, the duke of Moscow traditionally not only claimed a right to possession of “all the Russian lands.” He additionally claimed a vital state interest in possessing an additional cordon sanitaire of puppet states surrounding Russia’s Western borders, purely to protect the Motherland from the constant, frightful threat of attack from Western Europe!
The Eastern Slavic state started with Kiev, and the Eastern Slavs became part of Western Civilization when Saint Vladimir the ruler of Kievian Rus’ converted to Christianity.
Moscow was founded as just another city/state of Kievian Rus’.
The city-states of White and Black Russia were referred to as Rus’ [Roosh]. Moscow was called Rossiya.
The history of the Eastern Slavs diverged in the 1240s as the result of the Great Mongol Invasion. Kievian Rus’ was swept away. Kiev resisted and was destroyed. Moscow surrendered to the Horde, and the dukes of Moscow (the ancestors of later self-styled “Caesars,” the first of whom bestowed that title on himself following his marriage in 1472 to a princess of defunct Byzantium, fallen to the Turks in 1453) served as tax collectors to the Horde and knocked their foreheads on the ground in submission to the Khan at Sarai.
White and Black Russia (today’s Belarus) sought the protection of the mLithuanian princes and joined Lithuania and consequently were never taken by the Mongols. Ukraine was liberated via a Reconquista by the Lithuanians piece by piece with Grand Duke Vytautas finishing standing by the Black Sea in 1399.
The Cossacks, referred to in Ace’s history, began as escaped Lithuanian serfs who fled to the uninhabited steppe borderlands, intermarried with the Tartars, and lived as outlaw brigands, preying on the Turks.
Ilya Repin, Запорожцы пишут письмо турецкому султану, [Cossacks write a letter to the Turkish sultan], 1880-1891, State Russian Museum, Saint Petersburg.
In 1569, the Lithuanian dynasty ruling the combined state of Poland-Lithuania (formed in 1386, when the Lithuanian Grand Duke married the Polish Queen, converted to Christianity from Paganism, and became King of Poland, was doomed to expire because Sigismund Augustus refused to remarry when Barbara Radziwill, the love of his life died suddenly. “He left no heir but Liberty,” was the saying.
Jósef Simmler, Śmierć Barbary Radziwiłłówny [Death of Barbara Radziwill].
1860. National Musem, Warsaw.
Via the Union of Lublin, ties between Poland-Lithuania were strengthened, two parliaments were merged into one, and “The Union of Both Nations” became a Republic with an elective monarchy. In the course of the manueverings toward Union, Sigismund Augustus twisted the arms of reluctant Lithuanian magnates by transferring Ukraine from Lithuanian Administration to Poland.
Jan Matejko, Unia Lubelska [The Union of Lublin]. 1869. Muzeum Narodowe w Warszawie. Depozyt w Muzeum Okregowym w Lublinie.
This transfer of authority was not terribly successful. A great Cossack Rebellion, 1648-1657, was a bloodbath which led to the acquisition of Eastern Ukraine by Muscovy in 1654, and which marked the beginning of “the gathering of the Russian lands” by the despots of Moscow.
The rest of Ukraine was acquired by Moscow via the three Partitions of Poland in 1772, 1793, and 1795. The Russian Occupation of Poland, Lithuania, and Ukraine was resisted 1793-1795 under Kosciuszko, 1795-1815 in the Napoleonic Wars, 1831-1832 in the November Insurrection, 1863-1864 in the January Insurrection, and so on.
