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Russia/Ukraine conflict

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U.S Army Mechanized Infantry Unit that is Claimed to be heading toward the Ukrainian Border in Romania
Nope, it's going actually the opposite way. Not only had been geolocated as 2/2 Armored Cav moving from the Babadag Training Range towards Mihail Kogalniceanu Air Base, but Romanian MoD put out a press release about it.


Google translation:
Știre falsă despre un convoi de vehicule militare americane care s-ar deplasa din România spre Ucraina. MApN face precizări

That said, the area is not that far from Focșani Gate which is NATO's vulnerable belly on the eastern flank of the alliance. A major point of interest if the balloon goes up in Transnistria or towards Odessa.

Interesting watermark in that video: PMR_History. PMR as in Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic aka Transnistria? If that's the case the Russians used to be very good at маскировка. Not anymore seems like 🤡
 
Polish state radio confirmed this morning that Poland has sent 200 T-72 tanks and “several dozen BMP1s (IFVs)” to Ukraine.

[edit : it seems they will be backfilled by suplus UK Challenger 2s]


[edit, full list appears to be:]

Love this. Russia cuts off gas to Poland, Poland responds with the big middle finger.

Unlike Germany, they know how to respond to a bully.
 
Not that it really is a precedent as there is already extrajudicial asset-forfeiture in action.

Not so fast. My somewhat casual reading is that the US has frozen assets of 'bad actors' but not claimed them in peace time. The instances of taking assets without due process have been limited and occurred during wars.

I can understand the hesitancy to give this kind of power to the executive branch. Can you imagine what a fascist like trump would do with that kind of power ? The devil is in the details of the law. They better write it so that this can only be a one-time event.
 
Love this. Russia cuts off gas to Poland, Poland responds with the big middle finger.

Unlike Germany, they know how to respond to a bully.

Every time I would read Poland refusing to shut down their coal power plants I would roll my eyes.

Germany is still insisting they are going to shut down their nuclear power plants early.
 
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Not so fast. My somewhat casual reading is that the US has frozen assets of 'bad actors' but not claimed them in peace time. The instances of taking assets without due process have been limited and occurred during wars.

I can understand the hesitancy to give this kind of power to the executive branch. Can you imagine what a fascist like trump would do with that kind of power ? The devil is in the details of the law. They better write it so that this can only be a one-time event.

Civil-Asset-Forfeiture Abuse: Why It Should Be Ruled Unconstitutional - Steve Forbes | Forbes
 
The entire Russian gas infrastructure is built out to deliver to Europe. The bulk of their oil infrastructure is too. They can't just load more oil onto ships because they don't have the pipeline capacity of port capacity to do it right now.
This article says Russia mostly exports oil via ships:.
"About 70% to 85% of imported crude oil from Russia is shipped from its western ports on the Baltic sea and the Black sea and in smaller volumes from its Artics terminals, while the remaining is directly delivered through the Druzhba pipeline. In 2019, crude oil coming by pipeline accounted for 4% to 8% of the EU’s total crude imports."

Russia is holding up right now, but they have some huge expenses coming up. They need to rebuild their military, and they are facing steep import costs for everything they can import.
They've completely lost access to some high tech parts, and that's a real problem. But they can build the low tech stuff themselves (after some interruptions), and can afford the rest even at black market prices. Just redirect some of the cash that used to go to Louis Vuitton, ha.

Investing billions USD into oil infrastructure is going to be difficult, even if they can find foreign expertise willing to take their money.
No real need to invest in oil infrastructure. Just redirect the ships.

If Europe quits taking Russian oil, that will leave them cash strapped when they most need it to build new infrastructure.
Which brings us back to simple arithmetic. Blockade the 5m bpd flowing westward out of Russia and somebody has to cut consumption 5m bpd. Who will it be? The west can't consume normally and order China, India, Africa to cut back. And we can't let price do it. That'd wreck economies across the globe while Russia still runs a trade surplus from sending 2.5m+ bpd eastward to China and smaller Asian countries at the new world price of 200+/bbl..

Only wartime rationing can cut 5m bpd without raising prices. That would truly "bring Russia to its knees". Anything else is just empty posturing.

But he can't ever admit defeat. That is worse than losing 200,000 soldiers and the Russian economy.
Yeah, he's pot committed. Ukraine has to destroy the Russian army. Or at least convince the generals that Putin is the easier target.
 
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Is it true this time?

According to Swedens biggest tabloid, Poland have signed a deal to send the Slovakian Mig-29s to Ukraine. In return Poland have committed to defending Slovakia with their F-16s if necessary. The Swedish paper has the German national and international television news service Tagesschau as their source.

Anyone that can read German?

EDIT: The source in German seems to be some sort of live feed. You'll have to scroll down a bit to get to the part about the Migs.


EDIT 2: Here's Google's translation. This doesn't seem to be 100% accurately translated though:...
.../ Slovakia and Poland have reached an agreement allowing to hand over Slovak MiG-29 fighter jets to Ukraine. This was announced by the defense ministers of the two countries in Bratislava. Poland has agreed to secure Slovakian airspace with its American F-16s if the MiGs are no longer available, said Slovakian Defense Minister Jaroslav Nad. His Polish counterpart Mariusz Blaszczak described it as "perfectly natural" that the Polish Luftwaffe expand their area of operations to the southern neighboring country. Slovakia is much smaller than Poland, both EU and NATO countries border directly on Ukraine and support it intensively with humanitarian and military aid. Nad and other representatives of the Slovakian government have always denied that Slovakia is supporting the Ukrainian desire to hand over the MiG fighter aircraft of Soviet design could meet. They want to get rid of these planes in the long term because only technicians from hostile Russia can service them. For the time being, however, they are indispensable until Slovakia receives the F-16s that the USA ordered a few years ago. /...

About Tagesschau:
 
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Per Uk Telegraph lead story:
“Vladimir Putin could announce the mass mobilisation of Russians on May 9, Ben Wallace, the Defence Secretary, has said.

Mr Wallace said that Putin could declare that "we are now at war with the world's Nazis and we need to mass mobilise the Russian people”

How would that impact Ukraine?

In the short term not at all. The Russian economy is not on a war footing right now, which means their military production is still running mostly at peacetime volumes. It's been kicked up in existing plants where possible, but its mostly still at a peacetime level. That means they are not stockpiling uniforms, boots, rifles, other basic infantry gear.

Their boot camps are set up to train two classes of conscripts a year, one batch in the spring (in training now or being fed into combat without training) and one batch in the fall. Each batch is about 150,000 men. They need to expand facilities to train more troops, or through hoards of untrained men into combat with whatever they can scrounge.

No country has fully mobilized for war since the 1940s. The US did a partial mobilization for Korea and Vietnam and I believe the Soviets may have for Afghanistan, but a full war mobilization is a major project. The US had seen WW II coming since the late 1930s and started preparing long before Pearl Harbor. On Dec 8, 1941 full mobilization was started, but it didn't peak until 1944.

The famed 8th Air Force which did the strategic bombing of Germany did a very small scale raid using borrowed British aircraft on July 4th, 1942. But the B-17s didn't conduct their first raid until mid-August 1942 and they didn't start large scale raids until 1943. And Europe was the US's #1 priority in the war.

In WW I the US surprised the world by mobilizing quicker than most people thought was possible. The US entered the war on April 6, 1917 and the first troops to enter action was October 21, 1917, more than 6 months.

And those US mobilizations happened with an economy in good shape and not harmed by any kind of external limits. The Russian economy before the war was vastly weaker than the US economy in the first half of the 20th century (in 1940 the US had 50% of the world's production capacity). It's been weakened further due to the sanctions. The sanctions haven't been perfect, but Russia is facing a lot of shortages that would be needed for mobilization.

They also just lost their biggest chemical factory that is required to make ingredients for munitions.

When a country mobilizes its manpower, that shifts the economy in a large number of ways. All those job vacancies need to be dealt with. Some jobs can be eliminated for the war effort, but others can't. If the municipal workers in Moscow go off to war, somebody has to do their jobs or the lights don't stay on. Those people have to be found and trained.

Ramping up factory production requires more people to go work in the factories. For a fully mobilizes war economy, this is a terrible demographics map
Demographics of Russia - Wikipedia

There is a pinching in the population among those born around 2000. That's the prime demographic to go to war. The largest demographic are born in the late 80s and are in their mid-30s now. Those people are often in mid-career and are holding down jobs of responsibility. Most will still be in good enough health to be drafted and go to war, but the impact on the economy taking those people out of it will be tough to fill.

Once you start drafting 40 and 50 year olds, you're getting into desperation territory. Those people are well suited to something like the Ukrainian Territorial Defense Forces which are static units of older people who are literally defending their home towns. They are a purely defensive force. Mobilizing them for offensive operations would be difficult.

Russia can fully mobilize its economy and it would help their war effort, but it would have little impact for 6 months, if they're lucky. And they might find resistance to the war climbing as they draft large swaths of the population. They have fewer internal security troops because many were already sent to Ukraine and many were lost. They can't just draft people into those forces because they need people loyal to Putin's regime. At a time when Putin's popularity is fading (full mobilization scenario), they will have trouble finding loyal enough recruits for those forces.

This article says Russia mostly exports oil via ships:.
"About 70% to 85% of imported crude oil from Russia is shipped from its western ports on the Baltic sea and the Black sea and in smaller volumes from its Artics terminals, while the remaining is directly delivered through the Druzhba pipeline. In 2019, crude oil coming by pipeline accounted for 4% to 8% of the EU’s total crude imports."

The number I find seem to be all over the place. I found some data compiled by the US government that pegged oil exports via ships to about 2 mil bpd, but looking at it again, the numbers were from 2020, which is a bad year to examine. The links to previous year reports were broken.

This is a recent report from Bloomberg indicating that Russian exports via ship may be down
Bloomberg - Are you a robot?

It may be paywalled. I was able to read it on one browser, but not another. It does look like the port in the Black Sea is operating again, but at a very low rate.

They've completely lost access to some high tech parts, and that's a real problem. But they can build the low tech stuff themselves (after some interruptions), and can afford the rest even at black market prices. Just redirect some of the cash that used to go to Louis Vuitton, ha.


No real need to invest in oil infrastructure. Just redirect the ships.

It looks like that is the case to a large degree. Though it also looks like a lot of the world is avoiding their oil.

Which brings us back to simple arithmetic. Blockade the 5m bpd flowing westward out of Russia and somebody has to cut consumption 5m bpd. Who will it be? The west can't consume normally and order China, India, Africa to cut back. And we can't let price do it. That'd wreck economies across the globe while Russia still runs a trade surplus from sending 2.5m+ bpd eastward to China and smaller Asian countries at the new world price of 200+/bbl..

Only wartime rationing can cut 5m bpd without raising prices. That would truly "bring Russia to its knees". Anything else is just empty posturing.


Yeah, he's pot committed. Ukraine has to destroy the Russian army. Or at least convince the generals that Putin is the easier target.

Politically most of the world's population are not open to the deprivations cutting out that much oil. It's easy for western hemisphere countries to pass on Russian oil and it's even easier if your primary mode of transport doesn't use oil.

Europe has more than 2X the population of the United States and only a very small domestic oil supply. They need oil from external sources to full fill their needs. China and India are the world's most populous nations and they have very little oil production of their own.

The entire world has severe pandemic fatigue and is trying to rebuild economies after the havoc the pandemic caused. Getting the public in those countries to agree (or just Europe) to the difficulties restricting oil would cause is a political bridge too far and politicians know it.

I do think that politicians should be talking about what cutting off Russian oil entirely would mean to get the public thinking about it. Just calling to cut off Russian oil without considering the consequences is a fool's errand.

Putin may be holding on to public support, it's hard to tell because people are afraid to talk to pollsters and tell them what they really think. But his recklessness has been causing people within the government to think about a replacement. At least according to WindOfChange. Though there are also war hawks within the military who think Russia isn't doing enough and should be fully mobilizing and/or nuking Ukraine.
 
Propaganda masquerading as news is very powerful.
I heard a radio interview with a former Gasprom Bank VP who left Russia to fight in Ukraine on the Ukrainian side.

He said he doesn't contact people he knew in Russia for fear of getting them into trouble, but when he was in Russia he didn't know anyone who supported the war.

He was obviously moving in more affluent educated circles, and had family in Ukraine, but there is a spectrum. Opposition to the war in Russia is currently very effectively repressed, many might hold opinions in private that they don't dare express in public. We don't know the split in terms of for/against if there was no repression.

What can change, is if the war start dragging on, losses mount, defeats happen, progress is slow and sanctions start to bite, Some in the for camp might slowly drift to the against camp. But more particularly, educated people with power and influence, might decide they want the war to end.

So is there some point when repression and propaganda stops working? People are herd animals, a trickle can quickly become a flood.
There is no certainty this will happen, but powerless people don't have much to lose, and powerful people have a lot to lose.
The powerless can only act if the powerful enable it.
 
This article says Russia mostly exports oil via ships:.
"About 70% to 85% of imported crude oil from Russia is shipped from its western ports on the Baltic sea and the Black sea and in smaller volumes from its Artics terminals, while the remaining is directly delivered through the Druzhba pipeline. In 2019, crude oil coming by pipeline accounted for 4% to 8% of the EU’s total crude imports."


They've completely lost access to some high tech parts, and that's a real problem. But they can build the low tech stuff themselves (after some interruptions), and can afford the rest even at black market prices. Just redirect some of the cash that used to go to Louis Vuitton, ha.


No real need to invest in oil infrastructure. Just redirect the ships.


Which brings us back to simple arithmetic. Blockade the 5m bpd flowing westward out of Russia and somebody has to cut consumption 5m bpd. Who will it be? The west can't consume normally and order China, India, Africa to cut back. And we can't let price do it. That'd wreck economies across the globe while Russia still runs a trade surplus from sending 2.5m+ bpd eastward to China and smaller Asian countries at the new world price of 200+/bbl..

Only wartime rationing can cut 5m bpd without raising prices. That would truly "bring Russia to its knees". Anything else is just empty posturing.


Yeah, he's pot committed. Ukraine has to destroy the Russian army. Or at least convince the generals that Putin is the easier target.
You keep arguing about oil as if oil production is 0 sum. It's not. There is plenty of slack potential in the world. SA, UAE, Libya, Iran, Iraq, Venezuela are all operating below where they could be for various reasons. Then the USA where production is also below, quite a bit, what it could be. Throw Canada in and in total you could replace Russia and more.

Then you are also ignoring demand destruction from the conflict and pandemic. China's demand destruction won't last forever but for now it's taking a couple million a day out of demand.

A recession in the USA (likely) and EU (likely) will further erode demand.

If the EU embargoes Russian oil Russia will have to ship it much further. The pipelines provide about 750k bpd so much of it was shipped by tanker already but an embargo would mean that they have a much longer cruise distance and that is going to strand some oil.
 
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In the short term not at all. The Russian economy is not on a war footing right now, which means their military production is still running mostly at peacetime volumes. It's been kicked up in existing plants where possible, but its mostly still at a peacetime level. That means they are not stockpiling uniforms, boots, rifles, other basic infantry gear.

Their boot camps are set up to train two classes of conscripts a year, one batch in the spring (in training now or being fed into combat without training) and one batch in the fall. Each batch is about 150,000 men. They need to expand facilities to train more troops, or through hoards of untrained men into combat with whatever they can scrounge.

No country has fully mobilized for war since the 1940s. The US did a partial mobilization for Korea and Vietnam and I believe the Soviets may have for Afghanistan, but a full war mobilization is a major project. The US had seen WW II coming since the late 1930s and started preparing long before Pearl Harbor. On Dec 8, 1941 full mobilization was started, but it didn't peak until 1944.

The famed 8th Air Force which did the strategic bombing of Germany did a very small scale raid using borrowed British aircraft on July 4th, 1942. But the B-17s didn't conduct their first raid until mid-August 1942 and they didn't start large scale raids until 1943. And Europe was the US's #1 priority in the war.

In WW I the US surprised the world by mobilizing quicker than most people thought was possible. The US entered the war on April 6, 1917 and the first troops to enter action was October 21, 1917, more than 6 months.

And those US mobilizations happened with an economy in good shape and not harmed by any kind of external limits. The Russian economy before the war was vastly weaker than the US economy in the first half of the 20th century (in 1940 the US had 50% of the world's production capacity). It's been weakened further due to the sanctions. The sanctions haven't been perfect, but Russia is facing a lot of shortages that would be needed for mobilization.

They also just lost their biggest chemical factory that is required to make ingredients for munitions.

When a country mobilizes its manpower, that shifts the economy in a large number of ways. All those job vacancies need to be dealt with. Some jobs can be eliminated for the war effort, but others can't. If the municipal workers in Moscow go off to war, somebody has to do their jobs or the lights don't stay on. Those people have to be found and trained.

Ramping up factory production requires more people to go work in the factories. For a fully mobilizes war economy, this is a terrible demographics map
Demographics of Russia - Wikipedia

There is a pinching in the population among those born around 2000. That's the prime demographic to go to war. The largest demographic are born in the late 80s and are in their mid-30s now. Those people are often in mid-career and are holding down jobs of responsibility. Most will still be in good enough health to be drafted and go to war, but the impact on the economy taking those people out of it will be tough to fill.

Once you start drafting 40 and 50 year olds, you're getting into desperation territory. Those people are well suited to something like the Ukrainian Territorial Defense Forces which are static units of older people who are literally defending their home towns. They are a purely defensive force. Mobilizing them for offensive operations would be difficult.

Russia can fully mobilize its economy and it would help their war effort, but it would have little impact for 6 months, if they're lucky. And they might find resistance to the war climbing as they draft large swaths of the population. They have fewer internal security troops because many were already sent to Ukraine and many were lost. They can't just draft people into those forces because they need people loyal to Putin's regime. At a time when Putin's popularity is fading (full mobilization scenario), they will have trouble finding loyal enough recruits for those forces.



The number I find seem to be all over the place. I found some data compiled by the US government that pegged oil exports via ships to about 2 mil bpd, but looking at it again, the numbers were from 2020, which is a bad year to examine. The links to previous year reports were broken.

This is a recent report from Bloomberg indicating that Russian exports via ship may be down
Bloomberg - Are you a robot?

It may be paywalled. I was able to read it on one browser, but not another. It does look like the port in the Black Sea is operating again, but at a very low rate.



It looks like that is the case to a large degree. Though it also looks like a lot of the world is avoiding their oil.



Politically most of the world's population are not open to the deprivations cutting out that much oil. It's easy for western hemisphere countries to pass on Russian oil and it's even easier if your primary mode of transport doesn't use oil.

Europe has more than 2X the population of the United States and only a very small domestic oil supply. They need oil from external sources to full fill their needs. China and India are the world's most populous nations and they have very little oil production of their own.

The entire world has severe pandemic fatigue and is trying to rebuild economies after the havoc the pandemic caused. Getting the public in those countries to agree (or just Europe) to the difficulties restricting oil would cause is a political bridge too far and politicians know it.

I do think that politicians should be talking about what cutting off Russian oil entirely would mean to get the public thinking about it. Just calling to cut off Russian oil without considering the consequences is a fool's errand.

Putin may be holding on to public support, it's hard to tell because people are afraid to talk to pollsters and tell them what they really think. But his recklessness has been causing people within the government to think about a replacement. At least according to WindOfChange. Though there are also war hawks within the military who think Russia isn't doing enough and should be fully mobilizing and/or nuking Ukraine.
To be nitpicking Europe only has twice the population if you'd count Russia and the Ukraine in Europe. The EU has about 440 to the USA 340. Not sure how much oil UK imports/exports today, Norway is obviously an exporter. I've followed the oil markets for a long long time, I've found that whenever anyone made a blanket statement that X or Y was impossible...the oil markets would generally show that it was possible. Time might be an issue but this has held true from small to large impacts. From the US importing 80% of fuel to being an exporter of energy all in 2 decades. To fracking needing X many dollars/barrel to make a profit to fracking only needing 1/2 X to make a profit. Oil is expensive, more will enter the market. A recession will gut demand. These things happen. Russia is imperiling it's livelihood because their actions are creating the competition that will kill their golden goose.
 
Oil over $100/bbl for a prolonged period tends to induce global economic recession, and that in turn depresses oil consumption. You can see in some of the economic data on the Energy News thread that is already happening, most especially in Western economies.

(UK is now a net oil importer, and gas importer.)

(The German nuclear fleet likely needs to be shut down for prolonged periods for a refit and refuel cycle if it is to be run on beyond its current decommissioning date. Refit and refuel work of that nature would likely take them off line for a year or more, and then they'd need to run for 10+ years to be worthwhile. That is if the nuclear regulator can be convinced that the safety cases are still ok when refit inspection results come in. Bottom line, extending German nuclear is not simple, not easy, not cheap.)

Coal is likewise at a high price, and is essentially forcing industrial demand reduction in India. Similarly China is struggling to get coal at these prices.

Add in China not exactly firing on all cylinders economically speaking.

Meanwhile OPEC are understandably not being helpful by opening the taps. And unless an Iran deal surfaces count them out. Venezuela simply cannot return to significant production even if a deal were done.

I personally think that mild recession or stagnation for the next 6-24 months is now a global given, and that will create sufficient demand destruction to manage the situation. By the time 24m are over I expect that US shale will be substantially up in volume, yielding gas as well as oil, and that the various infrastructure projects (LNG, pipelines, renewables) will have largely decoupled Russia energy supplies from the West, allowing even firmer sanctions at that point if the war has not been resolved already by then.

All this speeds up renewable adoption overall, even if some areas seem to go backwards locally.