Read this (An interview with Boris Kagarlitsky arrested under [Leonid] Brezhnev for publishing samizdat (clandestine dissident materials), and then under Putin for attending an illegal demonstration.) and The first detailed academic paper about the impact of economic sanctions on the Russian economy.

North Macedonian Ministry of Defense confirmed transfer of T-72 tanks to Ukraine
 

The Ministry of Defense of North Macedonia confirmed the transfer of T-72 tanks to Ukraine after footage of a convoy of vehicles appeared on social media. The Ministry of Defense noted that the tanks were in service of the unit, which will soon be disbanded. The decision to transfer them to Ukraine was additionally based on the fact that this equipment will become obsolete in a few years, and it still needs to be replaced with modern ones. It is not specified how many tanks are transferred to Ukraine. In general, as far as it is known, the army of North Macedonia has about 30 T-72 tanks in service.

opinions are a dime a dozen. :03:

No one knows what is going on inside Russia. The only thing we can really tell is that the Russian economy does not look like it will collapse in the next 6-12 months or that sanctions are having any appreciable effect on Russia's will or capacity to carry on this war.

The only real question is who will blink first and we all know the will to absorb economic shocks is a lot lower in the EU and USA than in Russia, so they are more likely to cry uncle first.

OTOH we do know that Ukraine's economy is cratering, their government is bankrupt and they are only able to keep hanging on due to massive western aid. As soon as that goes, Ukraine will be forced to surrender.

Who said that it would be painless to the west? We accept and expect this.
The US sure, when the Reps win. Europe? Mabye Hungary and Turkey :haha:

Boris Kagarlitsky knows he is a rusky and I talk with several people in Russia, they feel the pain of the sanctions. Russian economy has a couple of months to collapse, we in the west can go on for decades as shown in the Cold War, and we will help Ukraine buildup their economy in the meantime.

When I saw the video Jim had posted a page back I picturing a massive cannon barrage from the Ukrainian forces-Where they use their own 152 mm and ours 155 mm shells and HIMARS and MLRS. Before the tanks start moving with SU25 as close air to ground support and with other fighter jet as air support.

Maybe it's not done this way.

Markus

No doubt the ordinary citizens in Russia feel the sanction, how about those in power, oligarks etc.

Do they feel it too ?

Markus

They will production is slowing hard, so the elite will feel it soon if they gone lose their investments in Russia.

As a result of the business retreat, Russia has lost companies representing ~40% of its GDP, reversing nearly all of three decades’ worth of foreign investment and buttressing unprecedented simultaneous capital and population flight in a mass exodus of Russia’s economic base.

Putin is resorting to patently unsustainable, dramatic fiscal and monetary intervention to smooth over these structural economic weaknesses, which has already sent his government budget into deficit for the first time in years and drained his foreign reserves even with high energy prices – and Kremlin finances are in much, much more dire straits than conventionally understood.

Russian domestic financial markets, as an indicator of both present conditions and future outlook, are the worst performing markets in the entire world this year despite strict capital controls, and have priced in sustained, persistent weakness within the economy with liquidity and credit contracting – in addition to Russia being substantively cut off from international financial markets, limiting its ability to tap into pools of capital needed for the revitalization of its crippled economy.

The Russian car industry is on hold, for example. It’s just not producing anymore, because it’s so dependent on German, Japanese, and South Korean parts. The military-industrial complex is also suffering because they’re not getting enough spare parts. The same is true in aviation: many domestic companies are already bankrupt and now being cannibalized by the larger carriers like Aeroflot and S7.

As I have posted earlier Putin & Co is earning truckload of money due to the high price on Gas and Oil. Even when they sell to SA under the market price they earn money.

Even now when they have lowered the Gas flow to Europe they earn money-Not so much though.

What will be a problem as the war goes on will be hardware. Because of these sanction embargoes Russia will soon be in need of important things to their military.

Markus

Putin’s illusions that Russia can return to a Soviet-era state of economic self-sufficiency, the Russian economy has become highly globalized over the past three decades with significant reliance on western technology and international supply chains – and is thus more vulnerable to external shocks and disruptions. On the flip side, modern Russia’s economic allies in Belarus and Eritrea are unlikely to add as much value to the economy as the former COMECON, and Russia’s current dependence on European markets and entry into the global economy has been dependent, to a much greater extent, on western technology and know-how.

Russian economy is that of an internally corrupt, western technology-dependent resource behemoth, which provides both the revenue to sustain the Kremlin’s foibles while also saddling the country with a natural resource curse accompanied by a self-serving oligarchic elite trying to reap as much economic value as possible from the oil and gas sectors. But this is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the insolvable, systemic problems facing the Russian economy.

Europe has long been the destination of choice for Russian commodity exports, particularly energy exports, and once again, these energy exports are far more important to Russia than they are to Europe, with 83% of Russian natural gas exports received by Europe, although Europe has a far more diversified supply base drawing 54% of its gas imports from non-Russian sources, including LNG from Norway, Qatar and Algeria in addition to significant domestic supply from sources such as the giant Groningen gas field in the Netherlands as of 2021.

Europe has already become an open playing field for other LNG producers such as Qatar, the United States and Australia which can come in
and fill the void at great national profit, and they will essentially be guaranteed a stable place in the European market, as long as gas remains a bridge fuel in the European energy transition. Given the recent decision of the European Commission to label gas and nuclear (under some preconditions) as sustainable energy sources, the other players in the LNG market are set to benefit handsomely from Russia’s self-inflicted destruction of its export-oriented gas sector.

De een zijn dood is de ander zijn brood. ( One man's death is another man's bread )

I'm kind of surprised the Russian supply of Air Guns has not dried up here in the US.
May be that they were massively imported before the Invasion.
:hmmm:
The EDGuns and Atamans are still available and go for BIG BUCKS!
:o

US Sanctions Threaten Empire of Russian Steel Mogul Mordashov
 

US sanctions on Alexey Mordashov have put the steel magnate’s empire in peril, underlining how the war in Ukraine is upending the businesses of some of Russia’s wealthiest billionaires.

The move against 56-year-old Mordashov and his family on Thursday comes after the European Union imposed sanctions against the tycoon and his steelmaker Severstal PJSC in early March. By threatening to choke off remaining export routes, the US sanctions deal another blow to the fourth-richest Russian, who 16 years ago was close to becoming Arcelor SA’s biggest shareholder before being outbid by Lakshmi Mittal.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...ogul-mordashov

According to Russian propaganda “interviews”, 53 Ukrainian POWs were killed by Zelenskyy’s order. This Russian propagandist campaign is aimed to discredit the Ukrainian authorities in the eyes of Western partners and to suspend deliveries of heavy weapons.

and...

Backfired, there is already talk on more deliveries.

Not on this scale. Nobody mentioned before that Ruassia could bite back. Also nobody predicted the counterintuitive currency and exchange effects. And they based their predictions of gas security on that Putin would not cut gas, for "that would damage Russia's income".

Maybe you expected this, and certainly I expected to Russia not sitting still and just take the beating. But official politics did not told these results in advance, and I think for most they indeed came as an unwelcomed surprise.That is the continuation of a long established pattern: that is to expect that Russia balks, but not bites, that Putin means not serious what he says, that it complaies with Western demands to act in its disadvanatge, and that one could trump Russia with ones own superior moral posture to which it then will comply.

Now Germany is subject of a brutal reality check. And it fails completely. In all regards. Energy. Military. Diplomatic beliefs. Emplyoment. Finances. Diplomatic influence. As a commentor yesterday wrote somewhere: The authority to set guidelines for German political action does not lie in the chancellor's office (and certainly not there, since the chancellor is not even the head of his own party, and the other two are dancing on his nose), but in Moscow. The post of German chancellor is still vacant. Baerbocks many visits produced no reuslts, she stands there with empty hands. I gave her the benefit of doubt and wrote that sonme weeks ago, that moratorium of criticising her is over. Her visit in Turkey was a desastere, the Turkish foreign minister wiped the floor with here moral-dripping presence. The morlaisaiton of foreign politlics, the Greens "promised". Rohrkrepierer! Habeck's record is mixed, some claims he made were simply wrong, and some advances he claimed simply are lies. Especially his babblinmg abpout Quatar and his stand on nuclear popwer I take extremely queer. And that he poses a sa victim al,lt ehntime and looks sadly around to cheaply catch sympathies.

Two lead figures of the Greens, the vice president of the parliament and the ministress for something, in the recent 36 hours have categorically ruled out again an extension of nuclear power, not to mention reactivating the other three reactors that were switched off last Decembre and still are fit to be reactivated.

I hope that the Europeans simply refuse to deliver any gas aide to Germany as long as these six nuclear powerplants are not running in Germany again. We still use gas for producing eletricla popwer. In a record quantity this May. Record quantity!

"Lights off", "cold showers", "tempo limit". Populistic BS. Nothing of this nonsense is relevant for a solution of this crisis. Nothing. Pure populism and mass propaganda. The Nazis had their torchlight marches and processions, the SED had its flags and mass marches, and the scum today has these things now to activate the masses and switch off its brains. "Every kW-hour counts, says" Habecks and looks sadly into the camera like a pissed poodle. Populistic Idiot. And that we should switch off the ready-mode of the TV set, that has 1.5 Watts over here. Yeah, I do it, see how important I am, how much I do for the climate!

They run around like chickens that have had their heads cut off, clucking and wagging their wings before they make the exit.