Thread: How dangerous is Vladimir Putin?

Originally Posted by OhOh

NYSE Composite

Market index

Down nearly 7% since opening, first 5 minutes.

https://www.google.com/search?client...B8%B7%E0%B8%AD

Recovery or death?

Never happened



−366.20 (2.29%) today

a review...........

Originally Posted by S Landreth

Wonder what its friends think of him.



Russian stocks crash and ruble plunges to record low

Russian stocks crashed by as much as 45% and the ruble hit a record low against the dollar on Thursday.

The Moscow market rout was triggered by news that Russian troops had launched an attack on Ukraine, a move that is likely to trigger a new wave of "full scale" sanctions aimed at President Vladimir Putin's inner circle and Russia's oil-dependent economy.

A broad offensive by Russian forces targeted military infrastructure across Ukraine as well as several airports. The assault began hours before dawn and quickly spread across central and eastern Ukraine as Russian forces attacked from three sides. Putin warned of bloodshed unless Ukrainian forces lay down their arms.

The Moscow stock exchange had suspended trading earlier on Thursday but when dealing resumed, stocks went into free-fall.

The MOEX index plunged as much as 45% before rebounding to trade down 33%, while the RTS index — which is denominated in dollars — was down 38% at 8:25 a.m. ET. The crash wiped about $70 billion off the value of Russia's biggest companies.

Russian banks and oil companies were among the hardest hit in volatile trading, with shares in Sberbank (SBRCY) — Russia's largest lender — at one stage losing 57% of their value. Rosneft, in which BP (BP) owns a 19.75% stake, plunged as much as 58%, before steadying a little. BP shares dropped 3% in London. Gazprom (GZPFY), the giant gas company behind the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, was down 40%.

Edit

Biden announces sanctions to "maximize a long-term impact on Russia"

President Biden on Thursday announced that G7 leaders have agreed to impose new sanctions against Russia, including further measures on four financial institutions and sanctioning "Russian elites and their family members."

The big picture: The sanctions "are going to impose severe costs on the Russian economy both immediately and over time," Biden said. "We have purposely designed these sanctions to maximize a long-term impact on Russia and to minimize the impact on the United States and our allies."

Biden said the purpose of the sanctions is to "limit Russia's ability to do business in dollars, euros, pounds and yen to be part of the global economy."

The president added that the U.S. has now sanctioned "Russian banks that together hold around $1 trillion in assets."

What he's saying: "The Russian military has begun a brutal assault on the people of Ukraine without provocation, without justification, without necessity. This is a pre-meditated attack. Vladimir Putin has been planning this for months, as we've been saying all along," Biden said.

"Putin is the aggressor. Putin chose this war. And now he and his country will bear the consequences."

Biden emphasized that U.S. forces "are not and will not be engaged in a conflict with Russia in Ukraine, and our forces are not going to Europe to fight in Ukraine but to reassure those allies in the east."

"This aggression cannot go unanswered and if it did the consequences for America would be much worse. America stands up to bullies. We stand up to freedom."

Driving the news: Russia began attacking Ukraine early Thursday, with large explosions being reported shortly after Putin announced a "special military operation" in Ukraine.

As of earlier this morning, 40 Ukrainian servicemen and dozens of civilians have been killed in the attacks.

Ukraine crisis: A list of sanctions Western countries imposed on Russia

Originally Posted by Hugh Cow

While talking about the U.S. inflaming the situation by sugesting an invasion, the U.S. has now been fully vindicated in their assessment of Putins intentions, while the anti western russian apologists have been proved wrong. Now there can be no doubt about this ruthless Russian dictator. What a bunch of russian shills.
I do think discounting any NATO action was a big mistake. They should have at the very least left the option open and kept Putin guessing.

Spot on and fully agree.

Originally Posted by sabang

Another assessment is that the US has lead the Ukrainians like lambs to the slaughter.

Still doubling down on stupid, I see.

Originally Posted by Switch

Your ‘opinion’ has been found wanting in the past. Even more so now Putin has kicked off the totally unjustified and illegal invasion of its sovereign neghbour.

I think a solid consensus is clearly formed to support that fact. He has no credibility left, none of the Three Stooges do.

Originally Posted by S Landreth

Never happened

You posted a graph indicating an open at 16000 and a fall to 15600. Thereafter, a meander to, 15647 at 1:30 pm. Is the graph not evidence of a small decline?

Originally Posted by bsnub

Still doubling down on stupid, I see

Allegedly the Ukraine leader's words:

"Speaking in the early hours of the morning from Kiev, Zelensky said he had reached out to “partners” in the West to tell them Ukraine’s fate was at stake.“I asked them – are you with us?” Zelensky said. “They answered that they are with us, but they don’t want to take us into the alliance. I’ve asked 27 leaders of Europe, if Ukraine will be in NATO, I’ve asked them directly — all are afraid and did not respond”

“We were left by ourselves. Who is ready to go to war for us? Honestly, I don’t see anybody. Who is ready to give Ukraine guarantees of NATO membership? Honestly, everybody is afraid,” the Ukrainian president added."

Ukraine ready to discuss neutrality, Zelensky says — RT Russia & Former Soviet Union

NaGastan/NATO fails to deliver "promises" again, evacuating all out the country, sounds familiar? They would have taken any gold and foreign currency if they hadn't stolen it years ago.

Which country will NaGastan/NATO destroy next by walking the walk to their own isolation.

Originally Posted by pickel

You are as deluded

I await boots on the ground, they are now being admitted, Russian troops have invaded Ukraine.

The question is will they stay or withdraw once their objectives have been met, a la Georgia 2008:

5th August 2008 to 12 August 2008 - one week?

Russo-Georgian War

"The Russo-Georgian War^{[note 3]} was a war between Georgia, Russia and the Russian-backed self-proclaimed republics of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. The war took place in August 2008 following a period of worsening relations between Russia and Georgia, both formerly constituent republics of the Soviet Union.

On 5 August, South Ossetian presidential envoy to Moscow, Dmitry Medoyev, declared that South Ossetia would start a "rail war" against Georgia.^[145] The razing of the village of Nuli was ordered by South Ossetian interior minister Mindzaev.^[146] Georgian authorities organised a tour for diplomats and journalists to demonstrate the damage supposedly caused by separatists. That day, Russian Ambassador-at-Large Yuri Popov declared that his country would be involved in the conflict on the side of South Ossetia.

On 12 August, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev announced the cessation of the "peace enforcement" operation in Georgia. "The operation has achieved its goal, security for peacekeepers and civilians has been restored."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russo-...r#Early_August

or will they go the whole:

8-year-long splatter, splatter, .... of civilians, men, woman and children, a la the Nagastan/NATO v Afghanistan disaster slinking off in the night.

A fairy tale to enjoy or scare the children ....

From the Black Sea to the East Med, don't poke The Russian Bear


The US shouldn't have poked the Russian Bear. Now it is fully awake: after Ukraine, the Russians are likely to do a clean sweep of foreign belligerents poking around the East Med and the Black Sea.

By Pepe Escobar

February 24 2022

"This is what happens when a bunch of ragged hyenas, jackals and tiny rodents poke The Bear: a new geopolitical order is born at breathtaking speed.

From a dramatic meeting of the Russian Security Council to a UN history lesson delivered by Russian President Vladimir Putin and the subsequent birth of the Baby Twins – the People’s Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk – all the way to the breakaway republics’ appeal to Putin to intervene militarily to expel the NATO-backed Ukrainian bombing-and-shelling forces from Donbass, it was a seamless process, executed at warp speed.

The (nuclear) straw that (nearly) broke the Bear’s back – and forced it to pounce – was Comedian/Ukrainian President Volodymy Zelensky, back from the Russophobia-drenched Munich Security Conference where he was hailed like a Messiah, saying that the 1994 Budapest memorandum should be revised and Ukraine should be nuclear-rearmed.

That would be the equivalent of a nuclear Mexico south of the Hegemon.

Putin immediately turned Responsibility to Protect (R2P) upside down: an American construct invented to launch wars was retrofitted to stop a slow-motion genocide in Donbass.
First came the recognition of the Baby Twins – Putin’s most important foreign policy decision since inserting Russian jets into Syria’s airspace in 2015. That was the preamble for the next game-changer: a “special military operation…aimed at demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine,” as Putin defined it.

Up to the last minute, the Kremlin was trying to rely on diplomacy, explaining to Kiev the necessary imperatives to prevent heavy metal thunder: recognition of Crimea as Russian; abandoning any plans to join NATO; negotiating directly with the Baby Twins – an anathema for the Americans since 2015; finally, demilitarizing and declaring Ukraine as neutral.

Kiev’s handlers, predictably, would never accept the package – as they didn’t accept the Master Package that really matters, which is the Russian demand for “indivisible security.”
The sequence, then, became inevitable. In a flash, all Ukrainian military forces between the so-called line of contact and the original borders of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts were re-framed as an occupying army in Russian-allied territories that Moscow had just sworn to protect.

Get Out – Or Else

The Kremlin and the Russian Ministry of Defense were not bluffing. Timed to the end of Putin’s speech announcing the operation, the Russians decapitated with precision missiles everything that mattered in terms of the Ukrainian military in just one hour: Air force, navy, airfields, bridges, command and control centers, the whole Turkish Bayraktar drone fleet.
And it was not only Russian raw power. It was the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) artillery that hit the Armed Forces of Ukraine headquarters in Donbass, which actually housed the entire Ukrainian military command. This means that the Ukrainian General Staff instantly lost control of all its troops.

This was Shock and Awe against Iraq, 19 years ago, in reverse: not for conquest, not as a prelude for an invasion and occupation. The political-military leadership in Kiev did not even have time to declare war. They froze. Demoralized troops started deserting. Total defeat – in one hour.

The water supply to Crimea was instantly re-established. Humanitarian corridors were set up for the deserters. Ukrainian forces remnants now include mostly surviving Azov batallion Nazis, mercenaries trained by the usual Blackwater/Academi suspects, and a bunch of Salafi-jihadis.

Predictably, western corporate media has already gone totally berserk, branding it as the much-awaited Russian ‘invasion.’ A reminder: when Israel routinely bombs Syria and when the House of One Saudi routinely bombs Yemeni civilians, there is never any peep in NATO’s media.

As it stands, realpolitik spells out a possible endgame, as voiced by Donetsk’s head, Denis Pushilin: “The special operation in Donbass will soon be over and all the cities will be liberated.”

We could soon witness the birth of an independent Novorossiya – east of the Dnieper, south along Sea of Azov/Black Sea, the way it was when attached to Ukraine by Lenin in 1922. But now it would be totally aligned with Russia, and providing a land bridge to Transnistria.
Ukraine, of course, would lose any access to the Black Sea. History loves playing tricks: what was a ‘gift’ to Ukraine in 1922 may become a parting gift a hundred years later.

It’s creative destruction time

It will be fascinating to watch what Prof. Sergey Karaganov masterfully described, in detail, as the new Putin doctrine of constructive destruction, and how it will interconnect with West Asia, the Eastern Mediterranean and further on down the Global South road.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the ceremonial NATO Sultan, denounced the recognition of the Baby Twins as “unacceptable.” No wonder: that shift smashed all his elaborate plans to pose as privileged mediator between Moscow and Kiev during Putin’s upcoming visit to Ankara. The Kremlin – as well as the Foreign Ministry – don’t waste time talking to NATO minions.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, for his part, had a recent, very entente with Syrian Foreign Minister Faisal Mekdad. Russia, this past weekend, has staged a spectacular hypersonic and otherwise, featuring Khinzal, Zircon, Kalibr, Yars ICBMs, Iskander and Sineva – irony of ironies, in synch with the Russophobia-fest in Munich. In parallel, Russian Navy ships of the Pacific, Northern and Black Sea fleets performed a series of submarine search drills in the Mediterranean.

The Putin doctrine privileges the asymmetrical – and that applies to the near abroad and beyond. Putin’s body language, in his last two crucial interventions, spell out nearly maximum exasperation. As in realizing, not auspiciously, but rather in resignation, that the only language Beltway Neo-conservatives and ‘humanitarian imperialists’ understand is heavy metal thunder. They are definitely deaf, dumb and blind to history, geography and diplomacy.

So, one can always game the Russian military – for instance, imposing a no-fly zone in Syria to conduct a series of visits by Mr. Khinzal not only to the Turk-protected shady jihadist umbrella in Idlib but also the jihadists protected by the Americans in Al-Tanf base, near the Syria-Jordan border. After all, these specimens are all NATO proxies.
The US government barks non-stop about “territorial sovereignty.” So let’s game the Kremlin asking the White House for a road map on getting out of Syria: after all the Americans are illegally occupying a section of Syrian territory and adding extra disaster to the Syrian economy by stealing their oil.

NATO’s stultifying leader, Jens Stoltenberg, has announced the alliance is dusting off its “defense plans.” That may include little more than hiding behind their expensive Brussels desks. They are as inconsequential in the Black Sea as in the East Med – as the US remains quite vulnerable in Syria.

There are now four Russian TU-22M3 strategic bombers in Russia’s Hmeimim base in Syria, each capable of carrying three S-32 anti-ship missiles that fly at supersonic Mach 4.3 with a range of 1,000 km. No Aegis system is able to handle them.

Russia also has stationed a few Mig-31Ks in Syria’s coastal region in Latakia equipped with hypersonic Khinzals – more than enough to sink any kind of US surface group, including aircraft carriers, in the East Med. The US has no air defense mechanism whatsoever with even a minimal chance of intercepting them.

So the rules have changed. Drastically. The Hegemon is naked. The new deal starts with turning the post-Cold War set-up in Eastern Europe completely upside down. The East Med will be next.

The Bear is back, hear him roar."


From the Black Sea to the East Med, don'''t poke The Russian Bear