That's pathetic even by your standards.Quote:
Originally Posted by sabang
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That's pathetic even by your standards.Quote:
Originally Posted by sabang
Russian economy in freefall as it officially enters recession in nightmare for Putin
Russia has entered a recession as its GDP fell by 4 percent in the third quarter of the year, according to a statistics agency. The Russian economy has suffered a massive drop in trade after pro-Ukraine powers enacted sweeping and devastating sanctions over the invasion of Ukraine.
It was also dealt a blow after hundreds of thousands of Russians - many believed to be high-skilled workers - fled the country after Putin announced a partial mobilisation in response to heavy losses in Ukraine.
According to figures published by Rossat, Russia's economy contracted by 4.1 percent in the second quarter of this year, before levelling off at a steady 4 percent compared with the previous year.
Two successive quarters of negative growth constitute a recession, as per the official definition.
Liam Perch, a senior markets analyst at Capital Economics, commented: "There’s little sign in the latest monthly data of a sustained recovery taking hold and we think the downturn may yet deepen in Q4 and Q1 as the recent mobilisation of reservists and the EU oil embargo take their toll."
There have been, however, some factors that have been able to "cushion" the impact of Western sanctions on the Russian economy.
Russia has been able to continue to export fossil fuels into Asia - however not at such high volumes and prices as it used to when trading with Europe.
Russia continued to export oil to the EU, despite cutting off natural gas supply to the bloc in September.
With several massive state-backed fossil fuel producers being central to the Russian economy, Putin has been widely seen as being able to fund his invasion of Ukraine through oil and gas revenues.
Economists said that imports into China, Belarus and Turkey rose sharply in the third quarter of the year, and Russia's banking sector has been able to stabilise.
However, Mr Perch said that the outlook still "remains bleak".
He added: "The latest data for September show that activity is levelling off rather than recovering. The mobilisation of reservists in September may cause a sharp fall in demand in Q4.
"And the EU embargo on Russian crude and petroleum product imports will hit industry and exports next year. We think it’s won’t be until at least mid-2023 before the economy embarks on a sustained recovery."
Before the full effects of sanctions had been felt, the Russian economy grew 3.5 percent year-on-year in the first quarter of 2022.
Russia's economy ministry predicts GDP will fall by 2.9 percent this year, while the central bank expects a 3-3.5 percent drop before a return to growth in the second half of 2023.
However, there is scepticism over the true state of Putin's economic woes, with the Kremlin prone to hiding potential missteps and weaknesses.
In August, a Yale School of Management study using "unconventional" data sources said Russia was publishing "increasingly cherry-picked" figures, "selectively tossing out unfavourable metrics while releasing only those that are more favourable".
The in-depth analysis of key figures suggested that around 40 percent of Russia’s GDP is under threat of being lost due to businesses withdrawing, putting more than five million jobs at risk.
It cited a further paper, published by Carnegie, which stated: "The Kremlin is afraid of publishing data that reveal the full scale of the economy’s collapse."
Russian economy in freefall as it officially enters recession in nightmare for Putin | World | News | Express.co.uk
I wonder if Cyril has asked Finland and Sweden if they consider themselves "provocatively expanding" towards Russia's border?Quote:
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa blamed Putin’s actions on the way NATO had, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, provocatively expanded toward Russia’s border.
:rolleyes:
I don't think Cyril ever promised Russia not to expand an inch eastward.
Bullshit. Stop spewing nonsensical propaganda you shill.Quote:
Originally Posted by sabang
Stop believing the bullshit you are being spoonfed, you numpty. Informed people are well aware there are deep divisions in the Ukraine. Or, what was Ukraine for a while.
Russian Colonel Who Helped Putin’s Mobilization Mysteriously Shot Dead
A colonel serving as the deputy head of one of the Russian navy’s top colleges has been found dead in mysterious circumstances, according to local reports.
Vadim Boyko is said to have been responsible for working with troops recently called up under Vladimir Putin’s “partial mobilization order” for the war against Ukraine.
He reportedly showed up to work early Wednesday at the Makarov Pacific Higher Naval School in Vladivostok—and then was found with at least one gunshot wound.
Several local media reports were quick to deem his death a suicide, with the Far Eastern Gazette reporting that he “fired a bullet in his temple.” The news outlet said Boyko’s suicide had been confirmed with sources within the Pacific Fleet via a local TV station.
“Yes, Colonel Boyko committed suicide within the walls of the [naval college],” the unnamed sources were quoted saying.
Reporting by the Russian Telegram channel Baza described a very different series of events, however.
The channel, citing unspecified sources, said multiple gunshots were heard outside Boyko’s office just before the desk sergeant went in and found his body with five gunshot wounds to the chest.
No suicide note was found at the scene, according to Baza, and investigators found five shell casings and four Makarov pistols.
His death comes just one month after a military commissar for the Primorysky region was found dead, with local authorities claiming only that his “heart stopped.”
https://www.thedailybeast.com/deputy...ances?ref=home
If "informed" by the Russian state you mean.Quote:
Originally Posted by sabang
Ukraine had no political problems before Putin started warmongering.
How much have you had to drink today?Quote:
Originally Posted by sabang
:rofl:
:rofl: Ignorance advertised. :rofl:Quote:
Ukraine had no political problems before Putin started warmongering.
Putin’s Top TV Puppet Threatens 7 Countries With Air Strikes After Poland Blast
The deadly blast that killed two people in Poland sent shockwaves across the globe this week, fueling fear that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine might escalate into a world war with the direct participation of NATO. While many are relieved that the incident was likely an attempt by Ukraine to intercept a Russian missile—on a day when Moscow launched about 100 strikes on Ukraine—Russian propagandists were seething with anger and irritation.
After all, that reaction undermined Russian state media’s notion that NATO is already fighting against Moscow, itching to get directly involved in the bloody conflict. State TV host Vladimir Solovyov took that opportunity to spew more threats against the West, while describing Ukrainian territories recently taken back from Russia’s invading troops as Russian territory occupied by Ukraine.
During his radio show Full Contact on Vesti FM, Solovyov exclaimed: “This is war... you thought you could fight against us and the war wouldn’t come to you? You want to wage war against Russia! But you want to do it on the territory of Ukraine or on the Russian lands Ukraine just occupied.”
Solovyov baselessly alleged: “The language being heard on the frontline is mainly Polish and English. Are you bastards thinking that sooner or later this war won’t come to you?” He threatened: “If we dealt with you bastards, you would feel differently... I have a question: where is the Polish air defense?”
The host slid right into his go-to tactics, asserting that anyone who believes Russia might be running low on conventional missiles should remember the “6,000 nuclear warheads” it also possesses. He asked: “Do you have air defense systems? Europeans, are you certain that all is well with you? You’ve been delivering everything to Ukraine... Germans, you are naked right now! N-a-k-e-d! You’ve given up your IRIS-T [high-tech air-defense missile systems].”
One by one, Solovyov threatened Poland, Germany, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and the Baltic nations, saying that “Yesterday it finally became clear what and how we should do.” He opined that NATO’s measured response gave away its hesitation to escalate, claiming that the alliance lives in fear of the great and mighty Russia. He called upon NATO to carefully weigh every word in its final resolution, so that it does not become a damning “verdict.”
The rest of Solovyov’s rant revealed the fear that lies beneath the surface of Vladimir Putin’s bravado and bluster: growing domestic discontent within Russia. Solovyov yelled about how Russia needs to promptly produce everything that is needed by faltering troops in Ukraine. “If anybody didn’t understand it, this is war. War! This is a war against NATO,” he raged.
Pundits and experts on other state media shows expressed similar frustration. During Monday’s broadcast of The Meeting Place on NTV, an expert at the Strategic Development Council, Igor Shatrov, complained that “We weren’t ready for the war that we started!”
During last Thursday’s broadcast of The Evening With Vladimir Solovyov, the head of the State Duma Defense Committee, Andrey Kartapolov, delivered a pompous speech, urging citizens not to panic and claiming that Russia finally has a historic chance to do away with the West. He boasted that Russia is far ahead of the West, having already conducted a mobilization, while NATO countries “haven’t even started.”
Other participants promptly rained upon Kartapolov’s parade, worrying out loud that unless things improve, Russia might be headed for a revolution. Tigran Keosayan, husband of RT boss Margarita Simonyan, complained that Russia’s defeats in Ukraine were caused by a series of internal problems, such as corruption, intentionally false reporting and the withholding of information from people who are expected to fight and potentially perish in this war.
Keosayan opined that the average Russian might be more inclined to accept defeats in Ukraine, including the recent retreat from Kherson, if the government comes clean and admits its mistakes. Responding to Kartapolov, he sniped: “Comrade Colonel-General said that he fears panic. What are you talking about? There is no panic. There is something much worse: irritation.”
https://www.thedailybeast.com/vladim...blast?ref=home
You are a full stop idiot pushing propaganda lies. Do you even know anyone in Ukraine? Because I do, and the first thing they would tell you is that you are full of shit.Quote:
Originally Posted by sabang
Your comments echo a propaganda narrative supplied by the Kremlin. You are a useful idiot and nothing more.
The same could be said by our federal Liberal regime back in Ottawa. No big deal. All smoke no fire.Too many chiefs, not enough injins.Quote:
Originally Posted by misskit
Nope, too many open source avenues to get government information.Quote:
Originally Posted by russellsimpson
Just why you would think there is any similarity between a fascist dictatorship and a country like Canada is baffling.
What is it with you apologist morons and your obsession with basements? Do you nitwits have pleasant memories of being rogered in your cellars? What a couple of sad clowns.Quote:
Originally Posted by sabang
:rofl:
General of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation S. V. Surovikin
@S_V_Surovikin
"Ukrainian S-300s have already shot down a Romanian fighter jet and a Polish tractor, killing three in the process on NATO territory.
This is three more people than the Russian Federation has killed since 1991 on NATO territory."
:kma:
Yes, because Russia are scared little pussies.Quote:
Originally Posted by OhOh
This is why they don't want Ukraine in NATO.
Everyone but the thickshits already knows, yawn-
https://eurasiangeopolitics.files.wo...0-election.jpg
Oh! Maps with colors. Where have I seen that before?Quote:
Originally Posted by sabang
Attachment 95048
It does not mean a fucking thing.
Maybe you can explain to me why the streets of Kherson looked like the liberation of Paris this last week. You are nothing more than an apologist shill pushing debunked propaganda narratives.
Nice to see you had to look for the most obnoxious oversized image you could find. Kind of like your childish use of large text fonts. Is that what they teach you in useful idiot school?
Of course Mr Trump, elections don't mean a thing. If people vote the wrong way, lets have another Maidan.
https://external-content.duckduckgo....30a&ipo=images
You idiot, that ship sailed long ago. You are as usual pushing worthless blather in an attempt to divert attention from what is happening on the battlefield.Quote:
Originally Posted by sabang
Your highness Putin is getting his ass handed to him on a plate.
Keep your eye on Svatove. You have more humiliation coming.
Actually, right now I am keeping my eye on the grown ups. Hoping for some sense and sensibility. :chitown:
You are one of the TD Three Stooges. You post Russian propaganda, fake news and conspiratorial bullshit. You use big pictures and text fonts which in and of itself is childish behavior.Quote:
Originally Posted by sabang
You are nothing more than a petulant child and far from an adult.
Yep, with crushing arguments like that you must be correct. Btw did you beat your Ukranian friend in the video game?Quote:
Originally Posted by bsnub
Ask him if he has a passport and you can show him around your war bunker/basement.
Washington’s vaunted “rules-based international order” has undergone a stress test following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and here’s the news so far: it hasn’t held up well. In fact, the disparate reactions to Vladimir Putin’s war have only highlighted stark global divisions, which reflect the unequal distribution of wealth and power. Such divisions have made it even harder for a multitude of sovereign states to find the minimal common ground needed to tackle the biggest global problems, especially climate change.
In fact, it’s now reasonable to ask whether an international community connected by a consensus of norms and rules, and capable of acting in concert against the direst threats to humankind, exists. Sadly, if the responses to the war in Ukraine are the standard by which we’re judging, things don’t look good.
The Myth of Universality
After Russia invaded, the United States and its allies rushed to punish it with a barrage of economic sanctions. They also sought to mobilize a global outcry by charging Putin with trashing what President Biden’s top foreign policy officials like to call the rules-based international order. Their effort has, at best, had minimal success.
BECOME A SCHEERPOST PATRON
Yes, there was that lopsided vote against Russia in the United Nations General Assembly, the March 2nd resolution on the invasion sponsored by 90 countries. One hundred and forty-one nations voted for it and only five against, while 35 abstained. Beyond that, in the “global south” at least, the response to Moscow’s assault has been tepid at best. None of the key countries there — Brazil, India, Indonesia, and South Africa, to mention four — even issued official statements castigating Russia. Some, including India and South Africa, along with 16 other African countries (and don’t forget China though it may not count as part of the global south), simply abstained from that U.N. resolution. And while Brazil, like Indonesia, voted yes, it also condemned “indiscriminate sanctions” against Russia.
None of those countries joined the United States and most of the rest of NATO in imposing sanctions on Russia, not even Turkey, a member of that alliance. In fact, Turkey, which last year imported 60 billion cubic meters of natural gas from Russia, has only further increased energy cooperation with Moscow, including raising its purchases of Russian oil to 200,000 barrels per day — more than twice what it bought in 2021. India, too, ramped up oil purchases from Russia, taking advantage of discounted prices from a Moscow squeezed by U.S. and NATO sanctions. Keep in mind that, before the war, Russia had accounted for just 1% of Indian oil imports. By early October, that number had reached 21%. Worse yet, India’s purchases of Russian coal — which emits far more carbon dioxide into the air than oil and natural gas — may increase to 40 million tons by 2035, five times the current amount.
Despite the risk of facing potential U.S. sanctions thanks to the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA), India also stuck by its earlier decision to buy Russia’s most advanced air-defense system, the S-400. The Biden administration eventually threaded that needle by arranging a waiver for India, in part because it’s seen as a major future partner against China with which Washington has become increasingly preoccupied (as witnessed by the new National Security Strategy). The prime concern of the Indian leadership, however, has been to preserve its close ties with Russia, war or no war, given its fear of a growing alignment between that country and China, which India sees as its main adversary.
What’s more, since the invasion, China’s average monthly trade with Russia has surged by nearly two-thirds, Turkey’s has nearly doubled, and India’s has risen more than threefold, while Russian exports to Brazil have nearly doubled as well. This failure of much of the world to heed Washington’s clarion call to stand up for universal norms stems partly from pique at what’s seen as the West’s presumptuousness. On March 1st, when 20 countries, a number from the European Union, wrote Pakistan’s then-prime minister Imran Khan (who visited Putin soon after the war began), imploring him to support an upcoming General Assembly resolution censuring Russia, he all too typically replied: “What do you think of us? Are we your slaves… [Do you take for granted] that whatever you say we will do?” Had such a letter, he asked, been sent to India?
Similarly, Celso Amorim, who served as Brazil’s foreign minister for seven years during the presidency of Luis Inacio “Lula” de Silva (who will soon reclaim his former job), declared that condemning Russia would amount to obeying Washington’s diktat. For his part, Lula claimed Joe Biden and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky were partly to blame for the war. They hadn’t worked hard enough to avert it, he opined, by negotiating with Putin. South African President Cyril Ramaphosa blamed Putin’s actions on the way NATO had, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, provocatively expanded toward Russia’s border.
Many other countries simply preferred not to get sucked into a confrontation between Russia and the West. As they saw it, their chances of changing Putin’s mind were nil, given their lack of leverage, so why incur his displeasure? (After all, what was the West offering that might make choosing sides more palatable?) Besides, given their immediate daily struggles with energy prices, debt, food security, poverty, and climate change, a war in Europe seemed a distant affair, a distinctly secondary concern. Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro typically suggested that he wasn’t about to join the sanctions regime because his country’s agriculture depended on imported Russian fertilizer.
Leaders in the global south were also struck by the contrast between the West’s urgency over Ukraine and its lack of similar fervor when it came to problems in their part of the world. There was, for instance, much commentary about the generosity and speed with which countries like Poland and Hungary (as well as the United States) embraced Ukrainian refugees, having largely shut the door on refugees from Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. In June, while not mentioning that particular example, India’s foreign minister, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, highlighted such sentiments when, in response to a question about the European Union’s efforts to push his country to get tougher on Russia, he remarked that Europe “has to grow out of the mindset that [its] problems are the world’s problem, but the world’s problems are not Europe’s problem.” Given how “singularly silent” European countries had been “on many things which were happening, for example in Asia,” he added, “you could ask why anybody in Asia would trust Europe on anything at all?”
The West’s less-than-urgent response to two other problems aggravated by the Ukraine crisis that hit the world’s poor countries especially hard bore out Jaishankar’s point of view. The first was soaring food prices sure to worsen malnutrition, if not famine, in the global south. Already in May, the World Food Program warned that 47 million additional people (more than Ukraine’s total population) were going to face “acute food insecurity” thanks to a potential reduction in food exports from both Russia and Ukraine — and that was on top of the 193 million people in 53 countries who had already been in that predicament (or worse) in 2021.
A July deal brokered between Ukraine and Russia by the U.N. and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan did, in fact, ensure the resumption of food exports from both countries (though Russia briefly withdrew from it as October ended). Still, only a fifth of the added supply went to low-income and poor countries. While global food prices have fallen for six months straight now, another crisis cannot be ruled out as long as the war in Ukraine drags on.
The second problem was an increase in the cost of both borrowing money and of debt repayments following interest rate hikes by Western central banks seeking to tamp down inflation stoked by a war-induced spike in fuel prices. On average, interest rates in the poorest countries jumped by 5.7% — about twice as much as in the U.S. — increasing the cost of their further borrowing by 10% to 46%.
A more fundamental reason much of the global south wasn’t in a hurry to pillory Russia is that the West has repeatedly defenestrated the very values it declares to be universal. In 1999, for instance, NATO intervened in Kosovo, following Serbia’s repression of the Kosovars, even though it was not authorized to do so, as required, by a U.N. Security Council resolution (which China and Russia would have vetoed). The Security Council did approve the U.S. and European intervention in Libya in 2011 to protect civilians from the security forces of that country’s autocrat, Muammar Gadhafi. That campaign, however, quickly turned into one aimed at toppling his government by assisting the armed opposition and so would be widely criticized in the global south for creating ongoing chaos in that country. After 9/11, the United States offered classically contorted legal explanations for the way the Central Intelligence Agency violated the Convention Against Torture and the four 1949 Geneva Conventions in the name of wiping out terrorism.
Universal human rights, of course, occupy a prominent place in Washington’s narratives about that rules-based world order it so regularly promotes but in practice frequently ignores, notably in this century in the Middle East. Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was aimed at regime change against a country that posed no direct threat to Russia and therefore was indeed a violation of the U.N. Charter; but so, too, was the 2003 American invasion of Iraq, something few in the global south have forgotten.
FULL- https://scheerpost.com/2022/11/14/wh...ct-of-madness/