Ukraine invasion:Putin 'sacks eight generals' in anger at slow progress - "Putin is also said to be enraged with leaders of the FSB security service for handing him intelligence suggesting that Ukraine was weak, riddled with neo-Nazi groups, and would give up easily if attacked... ‘He blames them for seeding him the advice that led to the poor decision-making in Ukraine,’ he said. That poor decision making has led to Russia suffering much higher casualties than it expected... It is not clear exactly why Russian intelligence received ahead of the operation in Ukraine was so poor. Andrei Soldatov, who has monitored the Russian secret service for two decades, told The Times that one possibility is that the organisation is simply not fit for purpose. Most FSB agents are brought into the service as legacy hires based on their parents or grandparents being agents and are removed from mainstream schools to be educated in-house. This is unlike western security services, which tend to recruit from elite universities so they get ‘the cream of the crop’. Another theory is that the organisation did gather good intelligence – but was simply too afraid to tell Putin the truth, instead doctoring their reports to appease him... ‘The tailoring probably takes place somewhere between the rank of colonel and general in the FSB.’ It comes after it was claimed Kremlin officials are ‘privately denouncing’ Putin’s ‘clusterf**k’ invasion... an anonymous report thought to be written by an FSB said the security agency was not forewarned about the invasion and was unprepared to deal with the effects of crippling sanctions. The whistleblower said ‘it is simply impossible’ for Russia ‘to complete the task now’, adding: ‘Russia has no way out. There are no options for a possible victory, only defeat.’"
When you believe your own propaganda...
Or maybe he's upset at them for failing to stop him from being manipulated by the West and NATO into being forced to invade Ukraine
Goods Media - Posts | Facebook - "All I want to say to German, English, Swedish, and all European people, is this: You are being lead off of a cliff. By your dishonest, manipulative, and abusive Uncle Sam. Washington has engineered this entire horror show in order to break Europe (especially Germany) away from the rising Eurasian economic block, only so that the US empire can hold onto global tyranny a few decades longer. In this process, chaos, misery, and ruin is right now being created on this subcontinent that will last decades, which you can not yet feel or sense because your eyes are blinded by your media, all of which is controlled by and conforms to the fabricated and fraudulent narratives from the USA. You are being lied to, and you are being sacrificed. The economic future of your countries is being sacrificed. The future of your children is being sacrificed. And you are manipulated to enthusiastically go along with it out of your belief in previous lies from the last Century, out of your allegiance to Atlanticism, out of your irrational fear of the East. Why do you think I say this? To win friends? No, saying the truth will only earn me ostracism and hate. Do you think we communists want to enslave you? No. We have always, everywhere, every time, fought AGAINST slavery, AGAINST tyranny, AGAINST unfreedom. Please don't insist on believing the lies of the slavers, of the actual genocidaires, the butchers of history. Please take the time to hear what I, we, those who actually want peace and prosperity for Europe, for Africa, for all, have to say. Please turn around from this madness that might drag all of us off of that cliff up ahead with you."
Wilfred Reilly on Twitter - "I attach virtually all blame for atrocities etc in the Russia/Ukraine war to Russia, because...wait for it...they voluntarily started the damn war."
China pulls Premier League TV coverage over shows of solidarity with Ukraine
Putin victory in Ukraine is ‘no longer inevitable thanks to heroic Ukrainians’, says head of Britain’s Armed Forces - "Chief of the Defence Staff Admiral Sir Tony Radakin said the invasion in Ukraine “is not going well” for the Kremlin, with Russia’s military might not proving as strong as expected in the face of the Ukrainian resistance... Sir Tony told the broadcaster morale in the Russian forces was low and that the Kremlin had lost more troops in a week than the UK did in 20 years in Afghanistan."
Watch | Facebook - "Well when you're known for poisoning people......
#ukraine #russia #ukrainevsrussia #war #invasion #narrativedesmantled #2022 #news #ukrainecrisis #eu #europe #putin #handshake #nope #noonelovesyou *People refusing to shake Putin's hand*"
Meme - Kamala Harris @KamalaHarris: "President Biden is taking action to help moderate the price of oil and reduce the price of gas."
Brooke Singman @BrookeSingman: "Vice President #Kama on record #gasorices: 'Price to pay for democracy'"
Stephen Colbert Says Skyrocketing Gas Prices Are Worth 'A Clean Conscience' - "As the prices of food and gasoline skyrockets to levels never seen before in American history, multimillionaire propagandist/late-night talk show host Stephen Colbert is here to tell you why that’s a good thing... Colbert explained to his progressive New York City audience how the pain at the pump is a price that we need to pay to send a message to Russia... “OK, that stings, but a clean conscience is worth a buck or two,” Colbert declared to the thunderous applause of his New York audience. “It’s important. It’s important. I’m willing to pay $4/gallon. Hell, I’ll pay $15 a gallon because I drive a Tesla.” For those who don’t know, the average price of a new Telsa is $52,000 and upwards of $100,000 for certain models. Also, just moments before claiming that paying more at the pump will keep your conscience clean he cracked a joke about the United States discussing banning imports of Russian oil in favor of purchasing it from Saudi Arabia. He stated, “Russia has been hit with a number of crippling sanctions, and it looks like there’s more to come. Because the US and its European allies are now discussing imports of Russian oil. Take that, Putin. We are not going to buy our gas from a war criminal.” “We’re going to buy it from the good guys. Saudi Arabia,” he stated. Also, just moments before claiming that paying more at the pump will keep your conscience clean he cracked a joke about the United States discussing banning imports of Russian oil in favor of purchasing it from Saudi Arabia. He stated, “Russia has been hit with a number of crippling sanctions, and it looks like there’s more to come. Because the US and its European allies are now discussing imports of Russian oil. Take that, Putin. We are not going to buy our gas from a war criminal.” “We’re going to buy it from the good guys. Saudi Arabia,” he stated... This is not the first time Colbert has made ridiculous and borderline dangerous statements on his show for the sake of towing the progressive left-wing line. Last month when interviewing Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, Colbert made the argument that the United States should remove the Senate, one of the founding institutions of this country. His reason? Because the filibuster was preventing Democrats from passing their full agenda onto the American people"
British spies use gay dating app Grindr to track Vladimir Putin's soldiers - "As Russian forces mobilised on the Ukraine border, UK spies grew increasingly certain that Vladimir Putin was planning a full invasion after tapping into messages exchanged on sites such as VKontakte, known as VK for short, which is the Russian equivalent of Facebook."
Meme - "Inspired by Putin's speech for former USSR land, Italy claims former Roman Empire territories... L'Impero Romano Ai Tempi Di Traiano (A. 98 - 117 D.C.)"
Meme - Stephen King @Stephenking: "Coca Cola is continuing to sell their products in Russia. #BoycottCoke"
Anthonyneo @_anthonyneo: "Stephen King books are still being sold in Russian book stores..."
Putin says Russia to use Middle East volunteer fighters - "Russian President Vladimir Putin gave the green light on Friday for up to 16,000 volunteers from the Middle East to be deployed alongside Russian-backed rebels to fight in Ukraine, doubling down an invasion that the West says has been losing momentum... Putin says the "special military operation" in Ukraine is essential to ensure Russia's security after the United States expanded NATO up to its borders and supported pro-Western leaders in Kyiv."
Russian soldiers could freeze to death in convoy of metal tanks due to cold snap in Ukraine - "some armoured vehicles have been observed to have been abandoned as its Russian occupants might not have enough fuel to even keep the machines running just to keep warm."
Outcry over 'barbaric' air strike at Ukraine children's hospital - "An apparent Russian air strike destroyed a children's hospital in the besieged Ukrainian port of Mariupol... The United States condemned the bombing as "barbaric" after the strike buried patients under rubble despite a ceasefire agreement to allow people out of the besieged city... Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, asked by Reuters for comment, said: "Russian forces do not fire on civilian targets." Russia calls its incursion a "special operation" to disarm its neighbour and dislodge leaders it calls "neo-Nazis"... Ukraine's nuclear power plant operator expressed concern for safety at Chernobyl, mothballed site of the world's worst nuclear disaster in 1986, where it said a power cut caused by fighting meant spent nuclear fuel could not be cooled. Russia's defence ministry blamed Ukraine for the power cut."
Damn NATO, provoking Putin into attacking a children's hospital! This is all on them
Russia will stop 'in a moment' if Ukraine meets terms - "Dmitry Peskov said Moscow was demanding that Ukraine cease military action, change its constitution to enshrine neutrality, acknowledge Crimea as Russian territory, and recognise the separatist republics of Donetsk and Lugansk as independent states... Russia had been forced into taking decisive actions to force the demilitarisation of Ukraine, he said, rather than just recognising the independence of the breakaway regions."
Russia can 100% be trusted, just like with the 1994 Budapest Memorandum
Facebook - "1) Putin apparently forgot that Ukraine was ALWAYS an unwilling part of the Soviet Union and that Ukrainian civilians are the ones who put up most of the hard fight against Hitler's army. (See map below - also note that the borders of Poland shifted westward following WWII; L'viv was a Polish city prior to the German-Soviet split of the country.) Ukrainian civilians fought the German army and practiced slash-and-burn tactics as they retreated with the Soviet army across Ukraine and into the western part of Russia. *Ukraine* suffered massive losses - more per capita than Russia, though Russia's losses were also massive. (There are historians who posit that Stalin deliberately did not put up the best defense at the beginning of the German invasion to help him maintain control of eastern Poland and Ukraine due to population attrition.) If Putin had remembered this, he might have been more prepared for this level of resistance.
2) If Russian soldiers are realizing that they're an unwelcome invading force and not liberators, why are they still fighting? - I recommend that folks read Christopher Browning's _Ordinary Men_ about a German battalion of average men who committed horrible atrocities - not because they were fervent Nazis, but because it was their job and most didn't know what else to do.
3) Why aren't more Russians protesting the war/Putin? - It's amazing that as many have been protesting as there are. Russia has been under authoritarian rule since Putin came to power in 2000 (more about his election in a later post), with much of the media going back under state control"
White House briefs TikTok creators on Ukraine - "The White House on Thursday briefed around 30 social media creators covering Russia's invasion of Ukraine"
Fact-checking Putin’s claims that Ukraine and Russia are ‘one people’ - "“It’s a complicated history. But I want to be clear that what’s going on in Ukraine now is a brutal act of aggression with absolutely no justification,” says Matthew Lenoe, an associate professor of history at the University of Rochester, who is an expert on Russian and Soviet history, Stalinist culture and politics, the history of mass media, and Soviet soldiers in World War II. While the history of the Ukrainian state probably cannot be traced back any earlier than 1918, Lenoe says “to be clear—today Ukraine is a nation state” where polling in elections indicates that the “vast majority of Ukrainians” want to preserve their independence. Russian President Vladimir Putin has made several dubious historical arguments, most notably in his 5,000-word essay “On the historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians,” published on the Kremlin’s website in July 2021. In it, he elaborates on his assertion that Ukrainians and Russians are “one people” as a precursor to and defense of Ukraine’s invasion... “When Putin says this is the heritage of these three Slavic peoples—in one sense, he’s not wrong. But there’s no continuous line to be traced from this loose river confederation to the Russian state. And there’s also no continuous line to be traced from this loose confederation to the Ukrainian state”... Ukraine, for its part, also points in its declaration of independence to a continuously existing state from 1000 CE. Says Lenoe, “Today, both Russians and Ukrainians are making claims about their direct descent from Kievan Rus that are simply mythical and wrong.” Over the course of centuries, the area that is today Ukraine has been alternatingly swallowed up, controlled, or taken over by the Mongol Empire, later the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the Russian Empire, while Crimea was at one point a client state of the Ottoman Empire. Between the World Wars, portions of western Ukraine were ruled by Poland, Romania, and Czechoslovakia...
How would you describe Putin’s decision to invade?
It’s an irrational move driven by Putin’s perception of a threat to Russia.
LENOE: This is the act of a desperate man who actually thinks there is an existential threat to Russia because of a possible NATO expansion. And it’s his hubris. It’s a sign that people aren’t necessarily rational, and that simple-minded versions of rational choice theory don’t work. This is a move that’s irrational on every level, that might even lead to Putin’s being overthrown by, for example, a military coup. In a sense, it’s his emotional attachment to these kinds of historical claims and also a sense that the collapse of the Soviet Union was a humiliation that must be avenged."
Germany to increase defence spending in response to 'Putin's war' - Scholz - "Chancellor Olaf Scholz said on Sunday Germany would sharply increase its spending on defence to more than 2% of its economic output in one of a series of policy shifts prompted by Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Germany this week also halted its Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline project with Russia and agreed to send weapons to Ukraine after long resisting pressure from Western allies on both issues and facing accusations of being too dovish towards the Kremlin... Germany has long resisted pressure from the United States and others to raise its defence spending to 2% of economic output in the light of its 20th century history and resulting strong pacifism among its population."
Philippe Lemoine on Twitter - "I'll add that "sure the end of the human race would suck but freedom is worth it" is a weird view from someone who has spent one year and a half arguing that we should stay locked down because of COVID-19, but this seems to be a popular combination of views these days 🤷♂️"
Meme - "Sooo, if shuttin down Russia's pipeline will hurt their economy...wouldn't shutting down ours hurt ours? Asking for a buddy."
Russia says China refuses to supply aircraft parts after sanctions
Ukrainian policeman's entire family of 5 shot dead by Russian troops while out on patrol - "A 30-year-old Ukrainian police officer Oleg Fedko lost his entire family while he was out on patrol amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine."
It's all their fault for being Nazis!
Robby Slowik on Twitter - "Bittersweet announcement but after an amazing 2 years as an infectious disease expert I am moving on. I am now an expert in no-fly zones and Eastern European affairs. Excited to make the most of this new opportunity."
Randy Russian soldiers bombard Ukrainian girls with flirty Tinder requests
Livio Di Matteo: Russia's chronically weak economy may be its undoing - The Hub - "While President Putin may have dreams of a Greater Russia that rivals the empire of the Tsars, in achieving this goal he is hampered by the same forces that held them back—a perennially weak economy that raises the opportunity cost of investing in military infrastructure. Every dollar spent on the military is a dollar less for productive investment geared to improving the lives of ordinary Russians and their consumption standards... Whereas per capita GDP in USD is just over $11,000 for Russia, for Canada it is nearly $53,000. For the U.S. it is $69,000. Even the country with the lowest per capita GDP in the G7—Italy—comes in nearly three times higher than Russia at $35,000... Russia’s military might is at the expense of the economic welfare of the average Russian. This makes the toll that Western economic sanctions are taking more devastating—especially when the flight of foreign companies in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine threatens to reverse decades of economic progress."
Meme - Reuters @Reuters: "Facebook suspends the account of former President Trump until 2023"
Reuters @Reuters: "EXCLUSIVE Facebook and Instagram to temporarily allow calls for violence against Russians"
Natalia Antonova 🇺🇸🇺🇦 on Twitter - "Putin: *attacks Georgia*
Putin: *purposefully bombs Syrian civilians*
Putin: *annexes Crimea at gunpoint*
Putin: *destabilizes the Donbas*
Putin: *MH17*
Putin: *cyber attacks*
Putin: *massing troops*
Anti-imperialists: “Why is Biden being so aggressive 🥺”"
Anti-imperialists don't hate imperialism - they just hate the West
Meme - Charles Jaco: "Trump & Trumpistas think empathy, kindness are weaknesses to be manipulated. Just like the Nazis."
Charles Jaco @charlesjaco1: "A Fox News reporter has been injured in Kyiv. If he was shot by the Russians, is that a case of friendly fire?"
Another example of how those who talk about "kindness" are the least kind of all
Meme Susan Glasser: "Please spare a thought today for the courageous journalists, Ukrainian and foreign, risking their lives to tell the world the story of this hell war."
Susan Glasser: "What a tragedy. A cameraman died covering the war for a TV network that airs a pro-Putin propagandist as its top-rated primetime host."
Olbermann Wants Tucker Carlson and Tulsi Gabbard Jailed - "Keith Olbermann suggested on Monday that Tucker Carlson and former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) should both be arrested and tried by the military. Per the former cable TV host, both are guilty of being Russian “assets.”... According to Olbermann, both Carlson and Gabbard are enemy combatants who belong in a military jail to await trial. On The View on Monday, the show’s cohosts discussed Carlson and Gabbard at length. Whoopi Goldberg stated: “They used to arrest people for doing stuff like this.”... “They are Russian Assets and there is a war. There’s a case for detaining them militarily. Trials are a sign of good faith and patience on the part of democracy.”"
When mask falls
Ukrainian 18-year-old refugee 'is gang-raped by two men' on board German hotel ship - "The woman was reportedly assaulted by two men one after the other on the Oscar Wilde hotel ship. The alleged assailants, aged 37 and 26, are from Iraq and Nigeria but also hold Ukrainian citizenship... 'Women and children are vulnerable, especially those that do not have connections - family, friends, other networks of support,' she said, adding that continued conflict will mean 'more and more vulnerable people' reaching the borders."
Apparently there is something about women that makes them vulnerable
Ukraine: How a Transgender Man Escaped Russia's Invasion - "Andriy (not his real name) thought the major change in his life would be his gender transition from female to male. But when the Russian bombs started to fall on Kyiv, Ukraine, he was forced to embark on another journey — from a citizen of Ukraine to a war refugee... He read the news that all men in Ukraine ages 18 to 60 were not permitted to leave the country and obligated to serve in the military. He told Insider he needed to stay with his mother and care for her. Leaving her to flee Ukraine alone just was not an option. With the dangers that come with being transgender and forced into a military draft in an active war zone, he felt he had only one option... "Have you had top or bottom surgery," Dubilewski asked. Andriy hadn't. They also needed to know if Andriy had his old female passport. Dubilewski told Andriy he needed to hide his ID — to tell border enforcement later that he lost it — and go as soon as possible... "I was so scared. My head was messed up, and I was so tired. Thankfully, Mom told them that we've lost all the documents and have only a copy of my female ID. The conductor looked at me closely, asked me to take off my hat, and then she let us on the train"... Andriy had to revert to being a person he was not — a shadow of the person he was before — a painful, gender dysphoria-inducing process. "We decided I had to whisper so that nobody would notice my deep voice," Andriy said. "I even painted my nails violet and wore Mom's shirt to look more girly.""
Meme - "2020: TRUMP IS GOING TO START WORLD WAR 3!"
2022: WE NEED TO START WORLD WAR 3!"
Mother revealed she drunkenly ordered a £4,500 Uber to Ukraine after 'a few double pink gins' - "A mum claims she ordered a £4,500 taxi to Ukraine to ‘help’ after ‘one too many drinks’ and was only saved by having ‘insufficient funds’ - though Uber tried to take payment nine times. Leoni Fildes, from Greater Manchester, had been out to celebrate her friend’s birthday on Saturday night when the pair turned to talk of the war in Ukraine. The 34-year-old claims she had already downed a ‘few double pink gins and ‘shots of sambuca’ when she drunkenly decided to go there in a taxi to ‘help’ the Ukrainian cause."
Defending Kyiv: How the city’s fighters have held their ground - The Washington Post - "This front line in Irpin, on Kyiv’s northwest outskirts, had not moved in two weeks despite the Russian military superiority. That itself was a victory for Commander Casper and his fighters... “The Russians were not ready for unconventional warfare,” said Rob Lee, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and an expert on Russian defense policy. “They were not ready for unconventional tactics. They are not sure how to deal with this insurgency, guerilla-warfare-type situation.” To be sure, most military analysts and Western officials still predict that Russian forces will eventually encircle Kyiv and push into the capital, possibly aided by airstrikes. While this could prove true, it’s far from clear whether Russia will prevail. For the Ukrainian forces, this war is one of attrition. They appear to be trying to slow and wear down the Russian military, creating conditions for a stalemate on the outer boundaries of Kyiv. That would buy the Ukrainians time for other pressures on Russian President Vladimir Putin. Off the battlefield, these include tightening international sanctions on Russia and diplomatic efforts for Russian concessions. On the fronts, Putin’s forces face more Western heavy weaponry delivered to Ukraine, and growing global outrage for killing civilians and bombing residential areas and hospitals — acts that could be war crimes. In interviews, Ukrainian soldiers also said they capitalize on the Russians’ own flaws, including the use of predictable strategies, a lack of knowledge of local terrain and even a surprising unpreparedness for a grinding conflict. Reports have surfaced on social media and on battlefields of Russian soldiers running out of food, water and fuel for their vehicles. Some have reportedly surrendered after getting lost or losing morale. Russian military convoys have slowed down or halted because of mechanical failures... Across the country, Ukrainian forces have fallen back to the cities, refusing to engage with Russian forces in rural areas, out in the open. While Moscow has gained control of southern cities such as Kherson and Melitopol, it is struggling to take over nearby Mariupol and other hubs across Ukraine, such as Kharkiv, Chernihiv and Sumy. That is also the case in the southern city of Mykolaiv, where, for more than a week now, Ukrainian forces have prevented a major Russian advance west toward the strategic port of Odessa... “The biggest problem is that [Russia] didn’t organize a proper military operation,” Kofman said. “They thought they were just going to drive in and they weren’t going to get a fight. That led to a lot of disasters because they didn’t plan.”... The tanks and other military vehicles were crawling slowly on the open highway, making them an easy target. They also were bunched up close to each other, which allowed a single artillery shell to knock out multiple vehicles. There were also no dismounted infantry troops moving parallel in the woods or alongside the column to detect potential ambushes. What was also surprising, analysts said, is that some of the tanks were generations old and not well-equipped, including the T-72, a Soviet-era tank that first entered production more than 50 years ago... The ambush also led to civilian casualties. The Russian soldiers who fled the convoy hid in nearby villages and shot anyone they deemed suspicious. Over the following two days, 23 civilians and soldiers arrived at the Brovary Central District Hospital, many with bullet wounds, said Valentin Baganyuk, the hospital’s director."
Update on Russian equipment losses: Oryx numbers - "TLDR: analysis of Oryx figures suggest Ukrainian figures are accurate, at least since the start of March. This is bad news for Russia. I hazard a prediction that if this rate of equipment loss up for another 60 days the Russians will probably need to get out, and if this keeps up for 90 days the Russians will very probably have to get out... The methodology of the Oryx website is to count each loss only when evidenced by photographs or videos on the internet. As such, it is almost certainly an undercount though apparently it does contain a few double and triple counts, due to different photographs of the same equipment from different angles, though the website curators do their best."
Russia's staggering losses over 3 weeks of Ukraine fighting already exceed entire wars - "Russian military deaths are now much higher than the number of American troops killed in either the Iraq or Afghanistan wars, at 4,825 and 3,576 respectively. The Russian casualties appear to be of a scale similar to those at Iwo Jima — one of the bloodiest battles in Marine Corps history – where about 6,852 US troops died and around 19,000 were injured in five weeks of fighting against an entrenched Japanese force, which sustained an estimated 18,000 dead and missing. If Russian forces were to continue losing troops at this rate, in a year about 121,000 Russian troops would be dead, with injured likely to be three or four times higher — suggesting Russia's offensive must break the Ukrainian resistance or suffer unsustainable losses."
Fortress Russia crumbles - and in just one day - "IN THE space of a single day, Feb 28, Vladimir Putin's "Fortress Russia" collapsed. The rouble plunged by about 30 per cent, and Russian authorities closed all financial markets. Russians raced to ATM machines to withdraw as much money as they could, desperate to exchange it for anything that wasn't the rouble. Failing that, they stormed shops to buy whatever they could find before prices skyrocketed... the contours of Russia's economic disaster are clear to see. In the days following Russia's invasion on Feb 24, a united West responded with sanctions far more severe than those it had imposed after Putin's annexation of Crimea and incursion into eastern Ukraine in 2014. The most important sanctions have been financial. The United States has barred transactions with four of Russia's biggest state-owned banks; prohibited the trading of Russian sovereign bonds; limited the ability to lend to 13 major Russian companies; blocked key banks from the Swift financial messaging system; and, most important, frozen the Russian central bank's foreign-exchange reserves. In one fell swoop, Russia has been locked out of international finance. No Westerner will dare interact with Russian financial institutions for the foreseeable future. Other sanctions have prohibited the export of about half the key technological inputs that Russia buys from US suppliers. And hundreds of Western technology companies - led by Apple - have declared voluntarily that they will stop doing business in, or selling to, Russia. Other sanctions have singled out Russian elites and their companies. Most of Russia's top politicians were already subject to sanctions, but now Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Putin himself have been added to the list. Moreover, while top Russian oligarchs have long escaped sanctioning through their extensive contacts in the West, now they find themselves on their own. Their mega-yachts are being seized, and Putin loyalists in Europe are being hunted down like criminals - to the great satisfaction of Western tabloids. Sanctions generally introduce three kinds of risks for companies or investors in the sanctioned country. First, there is a risk that the measures, which can be changed with the stroke of a pen, will continue to evolve in unpredictable ways. Second, there is the risk that no one will insure transactions or investments in the sanctioned country. And third, there are reputational risks, and potentially even criminal ones, for any entity that continues to work with the sanctioned regime. Given these risks, Russia has become too toxic to deal with. Reputable Western companies are not only unwilling to continue buying from or selling to Russia; they also are walking away from sizeable investments there. Nearly all the big Western oil companies - BP, Shell, ExxonMobil, Equinor, OMW, and ENI - have declared that they are withdrawing from the country. The only remaining holdout is France's Total. Before Putin's war, Western sanctions on Russia were about 30 per cent as severe as those maintained against Iran; yet within just a day, they rose to about 90 per cent. The only significant difference was that Russia's commodity exports were not yet sanctioned. But on March 8, the US and the EU introduced major sanctions on Russian energy. Russia's sudden isolation and economic collapse has surprised almost everybody. Having long mocked the 2014 sanctions, Putin and his cronies simply didn't believe Western governments' threat of additional "sanctions from hell". But it is clear that the Kremlin underestimated the West's sanctioning power. Nobody can claim now that sanctions are ineffective. The only question is whether they will be enforced and sustained. While the US has persistently advocated harsher sanctions than the EU has, the two are now almost completely on the same page. Most notably, Germany has taken a harder line under its new government - an astounding turnaround that warrants future study. This united response has been more than sufficient to breach Putin's supposedly sanctions-proof citadel. Since returning to the presidency in 2012, Putin has largely ignored the need for economic growth and development, focusing instead on amassing some US$630 billion of international currency reserves... The bulk of Russia's foreign-exchange reserves are frozen, Russian stock markets are closed, and the value of the 31 Russian stocks that are traded in London has plummeted by 98 per cent - more than the 94 per cent decline in Russian stocks during the 1998 financial crash. All Russian assets have been downgraded to junk status, where they will remain indefinitely. Russia's capital markets are essentially dead. Economists predict that the rouble will continue to plummet, approaching a rate of 200 per US dollar by the end of the year (from about 70 roubles before Putin's war). And on March 8, the central bank decided to stop exchanging roubles for foreign currencies, which means that the rouble is no longer convertible. A fair guess is that the annual inflation rate will reach at least 50 per cent, and that Russian GDP will likely fall by at least 10 per cent this year. Putin might still have his generals, security services, and intellectuals under control. But the Russian economy depends on workers, many of whom are already seeing their inflation-adjusted incomes fall as a result of his pointless war. Despite Russia's extreme censorship regime, there was already a major strike in Nizhnekamsk, Tatarstan, over the depreciation of real wages. More social and labour unrest is likely. The disastrous effects of Putin's foreign and economic policies will be too extreme and far-reaching to hide"
