The US has advertised shipment of the anti-tank weapons, but I have not heard of any anti-aircraft weapons. Can you provide a reference for the anti-aircraft weapons?
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Russia/Ukraine conflict
- Thread starter amolina
- Start date
This is super funny.
www.newyorker.com
Putin Says He Deserves Ukraine as Consolation for Losing White House
“Losing control of the most powerful nation on earth was a bitter pill for me to swallow,” the Russian President said.
TheTalkingMule
Distributed Energy Enthusiast
I've been advocating in the oil thread for an aggressive release from the strategic petroleum reserve to crash oil futures in response to this aggression. No one's listening.
You could not release enough oil fast enough. And then where are you at, buying back on the open market. The market will crash its own futures.
That would be a very bad idea…
Jeff Kilburg: "electronic vehicles". I.e.: I don't know anything about that sector
These days all vehicles are electronic.
February 22, 2022 Ukraine-Russia crisis news
Tensions between Moscow and Kyiv are at their highest in years, with Russian President Vladimir Putin signing decrees recognizing two separatist pro-Moscow regions in Ukraine as independent, a provocative move as fears of an invasion mount. Follow here for the latest news updates.www.cnn.com
Here are the sanctions as detailed by Biden:
Biden also noted that if Russia "continues its aggression," additional sanctions could follow.
- "We're implementing full blocking sanctions on two large Russian financial institutions: VEB and their military bank."
- "We're implementing comprehensive sanctions on Russia's sovereign debt. That means we've cut off Russia's government from Western financing. It can no longer raise money from the West and can not trade in its new debt on our markets or European markets either."
- "We'll also impose sanctions on Russia's elites and their family members. They share in the corrupt gains of the Kremlin policies and should share in the pain as well."
- "We've worked with Germany to ensure that Nord Stream 2 will not ... move forward."
Biden has been criticized for not going all in on sanctions, but the plan is to crank them up incrementally. The plan is also to hit those with the most power to stop Putin internally. If the oligarchs are hurting, they will deal with Vlad.
Canceling the permit to Nord Stream is part of this. If a friendlier, less aggressive regime was in place, then the gas will flow.
Russia has a staggering array of equipment left over from the fall of the USSR. Like the US, most of their aircraft are cold war aircraft. Same with their tanks. They have almost certainly upgraded electronics, but the same equipment is in use.
East Asia is in their own regional cold war right now. China wants to own the South China Sea and their neighbors are countering them. Many of those countries are ramping up spending as a result.
My partner has been reading quite a bit from the Russia experts lately. Putin's position has gotten shaky. In the recent elections, Putin's party cooked the books as they always do, but Putin knows what the real vote was, and he probably didn't do that well. The younger Russians are ready for somebody less Soviet-like.
His evaluation when he was recruited by the KGB in the 80s was that he had an unusual tolerance for risk and stayed calm when taking big risks. A sign of psychopathy. He's doing a "wag the dog" to try to re-cement his power.
The experts are also saying that he is acting far less rationally than he used to. Throughout his career he has been calculating and made chess moves. Now he's behaving more erratically than anyone has seen before.
I have read that the Russian plan was to go in, decapitate the Ukrainian leadership, install a puppet like the guy in Belarus, then get out. But they need to stay until the new guy's power is stabilized. That's likely not going to happen very easily. the Ukrainian people are now dead set to reject anything like that.
They will have to keep troops in Ukraine until they think the new regime is stable, or leave the guy to be overthrown in a week. That's when things will get messy for the Russians.
Ukraine will receive Stinger anti-aircraft missiles within days, Lithuania PM says
I heard Stingers were coming from other places too. Russia relies heavily on helicopters for ground support and those are very vulnerable to Stingers.
What will work quicker and is more stealthy is to have the US's Middle Eastern allies like Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Kuwait to turn on the spigot and flood the market with oil. They've done that before.
The US is also going after Russia's ability to sell oil by denying them access to US dollars.
JRP3
Hyperactive Member
Spot on.
The strategic petroleum reserve has a specific purpose and lots of planning built around its purpose.
When a recent past president ordered large purchases to fill the petroleum reserve because the oil price dropped, the engineers were not happy. Even the ones who supported this past president.
The logistics and engineering around the supply and release are no joke. Also, that reserve is not there just because you want oil futures to crash, or even your enemies to suffer because of their crash…
Cosmically bad idea to release them to try to crash the price of oil.
There's only enough oil in that reserve for like a week's worth of American daily usage anyways. Replacing our entire usage is not the point of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.
JRP3
Hyperactive Member
Doing some research from various sources it looks like the reserve is over 30 days worth but can only be accessed at a rate of 4.4 million barrels per day which would last around 160 days at that rate. We use about 20 million barrels each day.
Might be the right flow rate straight out of the caverns. Distribution throughout the continental US might be much slower.
TheTalkingMule
Distributed Energy Enthusiast
Dripping 500k barrels a day, with the promise of not stopping and encouraging even more fracking, would be enough to crash WTI back down toward 30-50 in short order.
We've been structurally oversupplied since 2015, and demand already long ago peaked in the US. A little coordination with the Saudis on both crude and US refining......and we're bursting at the seams again.
IMO there's way too much incentive for these oil nations to cause chaos and juice oil pricing. As the new swing producer, we should act to neutralize that inventive.
* strictly as a response to "bad behavior"
We've been structurally oversupplied since 2015, and demand already long ago peaked in the US. A little coordination with the Saudis on both crude and US refining......and we're bursting at the seams again.
IMO there's way too much incentive for these oil nations to cause chaos and juice oil pricing. As the new swing producer, we should act to neutralize that inventive.
* strictly as a response to "bad behavior"
The other alternative is to encourage the Saudis and others to sell a bit more oil in the name of "price stability".
What the US, Europeans and others could offer in return is a "permanent tariff" on Russian oil exports, until the Ukraine issue is fully resolved.
Lobby for as many nations as possible worldwide to join the "tariff" knowing that in return the Saudis and others will let more oil flow and lower the price.
The Russians can also export to China and a few other places, but the Chinese are rapidly moving to EVs. The Russians could be looking down the barrel at a "tariff" that lasts decades, knowing that most of the world will have moved to EVs before it ends.
Realistically, Nord Stream 2 should never be activated. They should literally break the pipeline up back into scrap metal and never again add additional capacity for Europe to access Russian energy exports.
Germany, in their infinite wisdom, decided to turn off their nuclear power plants and buy Russian gas instead. Yes this is very smart. Someone should maybe tell the Germans to stop hanging themselves with the rope Putin keeps giving them.
What's hilarious is Putin literally wrote a book about exactly this back when he was in the KGB describing how the Soviet Union could become an "energy superpower" by making neighboring nations dependent on their energy exports, then they can do whatever they want and everyone has to go along with them or no more oil/gas!
Germany, in their infinite wisdom, decided to turn off their nuclear power plants and buy Russian gas instead. Yes this is very smart. Someone should maybe tell the Germans to stop hanging themselves with the rope Putin keeps giving them.
What's hilarious is Putin literally wrote a book about exactly this back when he was in the KGB describing how the Soviet Union could become an "energy superpower" by making neighboring nations dependent on their energy exports, then they can do whatever they want and everyone has to go along with them or no more oil/gas!
There are different qualities of crude oil and there are different costs to getting oil out of the ground and refined. Most North American crude is very poor quality that costs a lot to drill for, produce, and refine. It takes specially equipped refineries to refine the crude. The US has quite a few of them, but much of the world doesn't.
The only light sweet crude in the US is in deep water that requires expensive drilling techniques to tap.
The strategic reserve is light, sweet crude, but we really can't replace it from domestic supplies.
I don't see where the US could turn on the tap and flood the market very easily. Few people want US heavy oil because they can't do anything with it except spread it on their roads.
Since the 1980s the US has used the price of oil as a weapon and it's the quid pro quo the US has with Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern oil producers that are friendly. The US gives them a pass on a lot of things like human rights abuses and wars with places like Yemen, sells them arms, and otherwise props them up in exchange for the promise to manipulate the oil market when the US wants to hurt someone.
Reagan used it to cripple the USSR with low prices, then the US used it to hurt the Chinese with high prices, until Obama used it to hurt Russia again with low prices after the invasion of Crimea. On another forum I predicted back in 2012 or 2013 that oil prices were going to remain high until Russia did something that the US didn't like, then they were going to go down. It happened within weeks of Russia taking Crimea and the provinces in eastern Ukraine.
After Fukoshima the Germans turned against nuclear power in a big way. The old style of nuclear plants can be dangerous. There are new designs that can't melt down, but in the public's mind, it's too late. They are scared of nuclear power and there isn't much that can be done to change it.
Here's an informed guess about the situation, and his arguments are spot on
Artful Dodger
"Neko no me"
JRP3
Hyperactive Member
I haven't seen any updates about the explosion at a large US refinery in Louisiana on Monday which could have taken a significant amount of refining capability offline.
www.reuters.com
Six people injured in Monday Louisiana refinery explosion
Six people received minor injuries in a Monday explosion and fire at Marathon Petroleum Corp's 578,000 barrel-per-day (bpd) Garyville, Louisiana, refinery, a Marathon spokesperson said on Tuesday.
www.reuters.com
Harsh conditions mean Russian troops near Ukraine will need to be moved soon
Analysis: advance forces’ battle readiness will quickly degrade, giving Putin only days to choose invasion or retreat
www.theguardian.com
“If the troops are to be used then they will likely be used very soon, while they are as fresh as possible” and concurred with the assessment that commanders would want to move them on in “a few days” if they are to be effective.”
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