adam2 wrote: ↑30 Mar 2022, 15:48
The possible requirement to pay for russian gas in roubles seems very odd to me.
Most banana republics and dodgy dictatorships insist on payments in hard currency such as dollars or sterling, to insist on payments in ones own funny money seems very odd.
Some of the revenue from gas sales is presumably to be spent on weapons. Surely international arms dealers would prefer or require hard currency ?
How do you think Germany is going to get the roubles? The tables are being turned on the west. Our fiat currency system has become a bluff, and Putin is calling it.
"We fail to mandate economic sanity because our brains are addled by....compassion." (Garrett Hardin)
Putin is definitely raising the stakes with the threat to turn off the oil and especially the gas. It is a clear attempt to split the European and NATO unanimity in the face of the invasion. Germany is going to be in a world of hurt in a few months without Russian gas, but Putin cannot redirect the gas quickly to other customers, so the Russian finances will be further hurt as well. Oil can be easily redirected and $110 a barrel will suit Putin just fine. Which is the bigger source of had currency for Russia? Are German power stations similar to UK ones, able to burn oil to some extent instead of NG?
The longer the military stalemate lasts, the more the economic warfare on both sides will decide the outcome.
His argument on the psychology is correct but I don't think that he has applied it correctly. The action against Putin has been taken despite the short term pain to make sure that we don't suffer the much greater longer term pain of Putin picking off non NATO nations one at a time and then coming for former USSR republics just like his predecessor Adolf Hitler did to Europe in the last century.
Some people with the sense to take the deferred box of chocolates rather than the smaller, immediate box made the decision that enough is enough and the psychopathic poison dwarf has to be stopped now.
“We hit it thanks to the gifts from Her Majesty the Queen,” the fighter said with a smile on his face, standing in front of a destroyed Russian vehicle, yellow tape on each arm marking him out as a Ukrainian fighter.
“Give us more toys like these and there will be more destroyed tanks.”
He finishes by saying he would like to put a Belfast-built anti-tank weapon into the hands of every civilian.
I don't see much of a difference between a Ukrainian pulling the trigger on a British gifted weapon and a British soldier pulling that same trigger. I wonder how much of a difference Putin sees?
clv101 wrote: ↑31 Mar 2022, 14:38
I don't see much of a difference between a Ukrainian pulling the trigger on a British gifted weapon and a British soldier pulling that same trigger. I wonder how much of a difference Putin sees?
I've been wondering the same thing. Currently this is a dream come true for NATO, they get to destroy significant amounts of Russian armour for very low cost to themselves.
I hear Ukraine saying "help us or you'll be next", and they're right, but Ukraine wants a quick victory, NATO might be happy to let Putin keep sending armour into Ukraine for as long as we can send missiles to destroy it.
I was reading on Al Jazeera that Russia has had to stop tank production because of the ban on the export of some of the parts that they use. Also a lot of electronics production has stopped because of a shortage of chips which they imported. I wonder how much our, UK, arms production could be curtailed for want of imported parts? Some that was dependent on imported chips, I presume, but I would think that this has made a lot of people in the defence industry and the MOD think about where we buy defence equipment from.
