While Russia obviously thought things through and prepared for the conflict well, I think most of the credit for the geopolitical disaster goes to the west. If western powers simply ran a proxy war without starting a global economic war, then Russia wouldn’t have gained nearly as much from it.
Cutting themselves off from Russian commodities and energy triggered a massive economic crisis in the west. Meanwhile, seizing Russian foreign assets caused financial exchange to start moving outside of SWIFT and western economic system.
What we’re seeing unfold globally is beyond the wildest dreams of any Russian planners.
It’s a great analysis of what’s involved in large scale warfare, and shows how deindustrialization has not completely screwed the west in terms of military preparedness.
While they’re focusing on Ukraine there, the real context here is if there was a conflict with China. If the west can’t keep up with Russia industrially, they have no chance with China given that it absolutely dwarfs Russian industrial base.
That’s pretty much the only angle they have, but once the hot war is over then all the focus will be on the economic war and things are looking increasingly desperate for the west there. What basically happened is that Russia taught the west an object lesson regarding the balance of power. There is no longer any doubt regarding who has the stronger army or a stronger economy. Russia will be dictating how things are going to be developing in Europe going forward.
That would go completely counter to the narrative they’ve been building for the past few months, so that’s highly unlikely. Thing is that they really don’t have a good off ramp now. It’s going to be very hard to paint it as anything other than total victory by Russia, and on top of that Russia is also winning the economic war. It’s pretty hard to turn this into any sort of win for NATO.
Similar to this
We still assess Russian ground force in the Donbas to be slow and uneven.
Like ok, so it’s slow… progress and if Russia is gaining ground then what’s Ukraine doing?
this is a pretty good overview of what likely happened
I wonder how long NATO is going to last now that the blowback from the economic war is starting to affect western standard of living. My prediction is that people associated with the current policy will become politically toxic, and we’ll see countries starting to break ranks and doing business with Russia. Unfortunately, we’re likely to see a shift to the right as we’re seeing in France and Hungary at least in the near term. However, I really doubt that either NATO or EU will be around for much longer.
Yeah, I think we’re headed towards the irreversible collapse of the global capitalist system at this point. The pandemic has shaken its foundations to the core, and now climate change is unfolding at a faster rate than anyone expected. I don’t see how capitalism can survive a disaster on such a scale.
There is an indication that omicron is less deadly, but it’s still a dangerous virus that’s much worse than regular flu. The idea that viruses get more mild over time is based on the fact that milder versions have a better chance to spread thus outcompeting more serious ones. However, this is more of a rule of thumb than anything. Lots of viruses are very infectious and deadly.
It’s also worth noting that death rate isn’t the only relevant metric. Numbers of hospitalizations and long term disabilities are just as important. Omicron is currently overwhelming healthcare systems in US and Canada because a lot more people end up in the hospital due to how many overall infections are happening. I’m in Ontario, and we just announced a slew of restrictions because our healthcare system can’t keep up.
Once the initial pandemic is over, then the question is going to be how many people developed long term problems. This will again put more stress on healthcare and social services, as well as impact people’s ability to work.
Right, 20% of all US currency was printed during past couple of years and now inflation is close to 7%. Meanwhile, wages are remaining flat and minimal wage pays nowhere close to the cost of living. I expect the fallout from the omicron wave is going to be more severe than any of the past waves.
At the start of the pandemic there were at least some attempts at containment. As ham-fisted as they may have been, it was better than doing nothing. Now, there’s no will from the government or the public to take any action. However, case counts are already making other waves look flat, and Delaware was just forced to issue state of emergency because hospitals are getting overrun.
The real surge is likely to hit after a week or two since everybody just went to visit friends and family for the holidays. These people will come back and infect their communities, and it takes around a week or two before symptoms get bad enough to require hospitalization. This means we can expect a huge wave towards the end of January.
At that point there’s likely going to be need for mass shutdowns and that will lead to market panic. This is likely to be the start of the deferred financial crisis. It’s not really clear what the strategy is going to be at that point. Printing even more money will obviously make inflation even worse, but there aren’t any other readily available solutions either.
The fact that at least 14 million people die as a result of capitalist policies each and every year completely blows away any argument regarding death tolls of communism. Even if we took the absurd 100 million number from VoC that includes dead nazis from WW2, capitalism matches that every seven years. Meanwhile, the numbers in the article don’t even bother including all the death and suffering caused by imperialist wars. Conservatives estimates for the death toll from the war on terror alone is around 6 million.
LMAO truth, motherfucker has one of the dumbest mugs around