Tag: russia

Ukraine

Collecting a few pointers to how this might play out in the longer term. It seems clear that this will accelerate the move away from petro-kleptocracies towards renewable energy as a national security matter.

Europe can stop buying Russian gas. Russia might have trouble selling it because you can’t build new pipelines overnight. Russian oil will find a home somewhere else by boat, rail, or truck. It turns out a ban isn’t necessary anyway. Oil and natural gas supply and demand curves are inelastic. Small changes in supply or demand move prices dramatically. It costs money to produce oil and gas. Reducing the price by 40% might reduce profits by 80%-90%. And a 2%-3% demand decrease might be enough to do the trick. Focus on lowering the profits. Oil is a global market in a way natural gas is not. Europe has to do the heavy lifting for natural gas. There are many economical options available, especially for substitution. Increasing oil and gas supply requires massive changes in the law for European countries. Europe has to keep investing in new gas supply and reducing demand to prevent future price spikes. Eventually, new technologies that create synthetic gas or shift industrial processes to electricity will pick up the slack. Maybe even a few nuclear power plants will get built.

The optimal end to this war is for Russian leadership — generals, spymasters, oligarchs, and politicians — to simply remove Vladimir Putin from power, form a new government, and withdraw Russian troops from Ukraine. The whole war can be blamed on Putin, and Russia and the West can quickly go back to having good relations.

The current sanctions give them a number of incentives to do this. The fall in the ruble, the crashing of the Russian economy, the cutoff of economic relations with the West, and sanctions against Putin-allied individuals all mean that the globetrotting comfy lifestyle Russian leaders have gotten used to over the past two decades is no longer available. If the war ends, these sanctions will presumably be reversed, and something like the old normal can be restored.

And this needs to be made explicit. EU leaders and Biden need to announce clearly and repeatedly that if Russian troops pull back from Ukraine, the sanctions will all be quickly dropped. The part about removing Putin from power doesn’t need to be stated; it will be implicit.

But in fact, the EU and US need to promise Russia much more than this. The reason is that all the stuff I described in the last section — the long-term replacement of Russia’s economic lifeblood with renewable energy — is going to happen anyway, war or no war. The threat of climate change, and the rapid progress in solar, wind, and storage technology, mean that the world’s days of dependence on oil and gas are numbered. Russia is in big long-term trouble no matter what it does.

This gives the EU and US an additional lever — the promise of a Marshall Plan to help the Russian economy retool. Dropping sanctions will restore Russian oil and gas revenue in the short term, but in the long term Russia needs things like infrastructure investment, FDI in manufacturing industries, trade agreements to facilitate European and American purchases of Russian-made goods, and so on. The EU and the US can provide all this. We can make numerical guarantees and specify sectors — railroads, roads, aerospace, IT, whatever.

Siberia is the future

A great transformation is underway in the eastern half of Russia. For centuries the vast majority of the land has been impossible to farm; only the southernmost stretches along the Chinese and Mongolian borders, including around Dimitrovo, have been temperate enough to offer workable soil. But as the climate has begun to warm, the land — and the prospect for cultivating it — has begun to improve. 20 years ago, the spring thaw came in May, but now the ground is bare by April; rainstorms now come stronger and wetter. Across Eastern Russia, wild forests, swamps and grasslands are slowly being transformed into orderly grids of soybeans, corn and wheat. It’s a process that is likely to accelerate: Russia hopes to seize on the warming temperatures and longer growing seasons brought by climate change to refashion itself as one of the planet’s largest producers of food.

Gorbachev Pizza

In 1997, the former Soviet leader needed money, and Pizza Hut needed a spokesman. Greatness ensued. It’s dangerous for leaders to outlive their countries. Whether they move on or become obsessed with returning to power, they cannot escape their role as symbols of a vanished world—a condition fraught with both nostalgia and danger. Nobody knows that burden like Mikhail Gorbachev, the final leader of the Soviet Union. Since his involuntary retirement, Gorbachev has raised money for worthy causes, attempted to make a comeback in Russian politics, and, notoriously, made an advertisement for Pizza Hut.

Skibidi

Skibidi is the latest release by the Russian dance/rave/art/electro/satire Little Big. The band/collective have a reputation for their videos, which include the Disney-lawyer-baiting AK-47, Kim Jong Un tribute LollyBomb, the gangster culture Give me your money, to the retirement home Faradenza, the street life With Russia from love, the nightmare-inducing Hateful Love, and the unforgettable {definitely NSFW} piano-playing Big Dick.

Information warfare attack

As DHS, DNI, FBI, and the Pentagon come together before the public to say Russia is actively attacking our midterm elections, as we have long been warned they’d do, please remember that exactly 2.5 weeks ago Donald Trump stood next to Russian President Vladimir Putin, refused to confront him on the 2016 infowar campaign our intelligence officials all say happened, and called Putin’s denial of the 2016 infowar “strong and powerful.”

Seeing all the intel chiefs on stage say one thing, and knowing the President — who wasn’t there? — believes another was weird.

All of the directors seemed to be saying they believe the nature of the attacks was overwhelmingly psyops, or online campaigns intended to influence opinion and voting choices, rather than direct attacks on voting infrastructure.

Biggest Digital Heist

Yet experts point out that even if Katana was the mastermind, he was just one guy in a crime that surely must have had many authors. Unlike the bank jobs of yore, digital heists are amoeba-like ventures that divide over and over again as the malware proliferates. “We’ve already seen the modification of Carbanak and multiple groups using it. Same case with Cobalt.” In recent weeks, employees at banks in the Russian-speaking world have been receiving emails that appear to be from Kaspersky, the security company that unearthed Carbanak. The messages warn recipients that their PCs have been flagged for possibly violating the law and they should download a complaint letter or face penalties. When they click on the attachment, a version of the Cobalt malware infects their networks. It turns out cyberheists may not die even when their suspected perpetrators are nabbed.

Trump Dirt

It should be trivial to find dirt on Trump. This is very plausible. Then why was the oppo research so incompetent? You have a guy with decades of mafia activity, probably the most of anyone who ever ran for office, and you can’t find it? More fuel for my thesis that the Democrats suck at fighting.

So, okay.

Let’s say that you’re Trump. You’ve spent your entire career in the vaguely mobbed-up world of New York real estate developers, and after being forcibly ejected from that by a series of bankruptcies, you enter the even more mobbed-up world of international financing for hotels intended for Saudi princelings and Russian oligarchs in countries with a lot of natural-resource wealth.

No one will lend you money through normal channels because, again, whenever anyone lends you money you piss it all away on gold toilets and giant shit-fights with subcontractors, so you have to rely on things like Bayrock Group, headquartered in Trump tower, which developers describe as just a weird giant money pipeline from Kazakhstan and Russia to New York. And in the midst of all of this, you decide that you’re just going to stop paying taxes, not pay your contractors, and basically act like a sexual-harassing parody of a 1970s boss.

It’s not that Trump can’t stand up to an investigation of his Russia ties, although that will produce an embarrassment of minor revelations immediately — Felix Sater, for instance, who’s a minor Russian mafioso who provided financing for Trump projects in the 1990s. It’s that Trump can’t stand up to literally any investigation whatsoever. Turn over literally any rock in Trump’s life, and you’ll find a weird squirming nest of maggots underneath it.

There might be not much to the Russia story: the worst of it might be that Roger Stone was scheduling document dumps with Wikileaks. (He has already strongly implied that he was doing this.) But if you start pulling on any loose thread in that sweater, the entire thing is going to come unraveled and a giant pile of borderline criminality is going to come spilling out.

I would be surprised if even Trump has a strict accounting of where all the bodies he’s buried in his career are. Which means that he has to prevent an investigation of Russia ties whether or not he’s guilty.