Why the West is reluctant to deny Russian banks access to SWIFT | Hacker News Reader

Why the West is reluctant to deny Russian banks access to SWIFT

economist.com

353 pointsdoener493 comments

It is definitely the last one.

>Last, using swift as a weapon against Russia could hurt long-term American interests. America holds sway over international finance thanks to the dollar’s dominance and its pre-eminent role in global settlement systems. Further politicising swift would give China an incentive to bolster cips, its rival to swift for cross-border payments in yuan. It would also help China court any country with uneasy relations with America looking for alternatives.

I would imagine there are additional politics in play with disabling SWIFT. I dont how many countries will need to agree before shutting down SWIFT access, if it is at the will of US it would be more like a semi-nuclear option.

Although I am already surprised by CIPS, one eighth of transaction volume of SWIFT is not "well behind". From many POV this already seems like a battle the west are clearly losing.

Will sanctions need to broaden to include China or other countries supporting Russia?

If the EU is unwilling to stop gas shipments from Russia, so much more is the USA unwilling to stop shipment of everything from China.

Why would China be willing to stop gas shipments from Russia? USA is also not willing to stop oil shipments from Russia, although Russia is the third-biggest oil exporters to the USA.

Independent states usually don't do anything that would harm them directly, they force their colonies and vassals to harm both themselves and the enemies. In this case, it's the EU harming themselves and Russia with sanctions, while the USA and China being relatively unaffected.

The EU isn't harming itself it is protecting 70 years of peace on the continent that is now threatened by a paranoid Russian Czar.

I would argue that this is less of a problem for the US than it is for Europe. China is an American problem Russia is ours.

Isn't it far more important to ensure that they can't use dollars, than avoiding giving them more? They already have dollar reserves.

If we can make dollars worthless for them, they will have given us the gas for free from their perspective.

> Isn't it far more important to ensure that they can't use dollars...

It's in America's National Interest to maximize the usage of dollar reserves. Denying China the use of dollars would have a (relatively small) detrimental direct effect, and will set a precedent and likely accelerate the popularity of other reserve currencies.

That's like using high-velocity lead to remove an ingrown nail.

Many sanctions so far are limiting Russia's ability to use money (in exchange for securities, other currencies, goods or services). I am only proposing that we proceed along the current path.

As an example, denying them imports is reducing the value of their dollars.

The more countries you cut off, the less you hurt them and the more you hurt yourself.

If you sanction every country you're effectively sanctioning yourself, not that that is what you're suggesting :).

Sanctions only work when imposed by a stronger country on a weaker one. Ecuador, for example, cannot impose sanctions on the U.S. For this reason, it is quickly becoming unfeasible to impose sanctions on China. Imposing effective sanctions on Russia is already hard enough, and Russia's economy is much smaller than China's.

China has hinted before at imposing sanctions on the US.

It's the first country that has been able to make that threat credibly in.... ohhh, a long long time.

They've imposed sanctions on US weapon companies recently. Soon once their domestic airplanes are semi-competitive with Airbus, they may even sanction Boeing.

This is what I suspected would happen once the US sanctioned Russia.

What would that even mean?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_trading_pa...

China is heavily dependent on trade with The West, in a way that The West is not dependent upon China. And that doesn't factor in Asian economies like Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and Vietnam that are generally likely to side against China.

That ship sailed awhile ago - as was quite clear during the Trump admin, the US can't effectively apply sanctions to China, and even moderate trade disagreements didn't actually go the way the US wanted it to.

Additionally, if you want to see a crushing economic situation, imagine if China started to raise prices during already high USD inflation.

How do you sanction China when a good chunk of western industries rely on Chinese factories? Without a collapse of western economies? Maybe the people who outsourced all our manufacturing and know how to China should have thought about all that...

We're still in the middle of a chip crisis and haven't still figured out that relying on the region constitutes a threat to our way of life. Are we bringing back all these plants to the west? We aren't...

Yes, this is the problem with sanctions and blockading without actually going to war. The chip crisis will pale compared to the steel etc. crisis in magnitude and importance.

A severe reduction in size of the global economy is not necessarily a "collapse," it's just that -- a severe reduction under either direct or indirect war conditions.

> A severe reduction in size of the global economy is not necessarily a "collapse," it's just that -- a severe reduction under either direct or indirect war conditions.

We have crazy levels of inflation right now among other economic problems and the FED or the EU central bank are running out of instruments to "tamper with". Anything at that point could trigger violent unrests across the west.

Whatever the consequences of "sanctions" are, they won't be happening in a vacuum.

The Fed’s tampering is the main reason for the inflation and the corner that they have painted the US economy into. Raise rates to proper levels to fight the inflation they created and risk recession; allow inflation and risk eventual revolt.

Which choice will they make? Should they alone have the power to make these decisions is the true question.

If there isn't peace in Ukraine soon and/or if Taiwan is invaded, it's WWIII and a rate hike won't matter and frankly the depreciation would be so rapid that it would be quickly irrelevant going forward. There would be rationing and a centrally planned economy, like in the previous world wars. Hopefully there are speedy and peaceful resolutions to this so that the worst of our problems is inflation.

The government's debt problems are mostly "to itself" -- the commitments to give free drugs and unlimited surgery for old people. Under war conditions obviously those commitments will be defaulted on. But then there comes a much larger and worse commitment to enormous war expenditures, and a far smaller private economy. A couple weeks ago it'd be nuts to say all this stuff but obviously things have changed now.

Unrest in Ukraine alone is not likely to cause a new world war. There has been a civil war mainly in eastern Ukraine for many years already. Ukraine has historically been an unstable area mainly due to its unfortunate position between the major powers Germany and Russia. Ukraine government is better served to remain neutral and avoid provoking the angry bears that exist on each side of the country in my humble opinion.

Not sure what you mean by depreciation during war. Some things will depreciate like fluffy tech stocks, luxury goods makers, and real estate, but other things like certain commodities and possibly food will increase in value.

Inversely, China is highly reliant on the U.S. for agriculture, Brazil and Australia for meat, etc. China has 1/5th the arable land that the U.S. does, with five times the population. You can't eat silicon chips.

China is nutritionally only reliant on the rest of the world for meat. If they reduce meat consumption, they can provide nutrition for all of their citizens with their arable land alone.

China produces cheap manufactured goods. But the U.S. is the world's largest producer of cheap agricultural goods. In fact, China's largest sources of meat source much of their feed from the U.S. The U.S. also pretty much only produces soy for export to China, as does Brazil. My point is that people thing the global economy would collapse if China stopped exporting manufactured goods, but China would starve without the rest of the world feeding their people.

China may be able to feed its people with its arable land, but the reality is that it would be only at a sustenance level. This is why China is investing so heavily in African agriculture.

A little under half of soybean production is exported from the US. The rest is used here for oil products, protein products and animal feed. Apparently, 90% of our cooking oil comes from soybean (usually sold as vegetable oil).

https://www.bizvibe.com/blog/agriculture/us-soybean

They wont, Which is why I said in the last sentence the west are clearly losing.

US Food and Agriculture are already beholden to China. From corn, soy beans, potatoes to Pork ( Smithfield is owned by China ), Tyson has 25-30% of their business in China. If you buy Beef or Lamb from AUS you have a 25% chance buying it from Chinese Owner. Or To Tech from Intel, AMD, Nvidia, where the growth are in E-Sport or PC Gaming in China. Manufacturing or assembly where they have a contingency plan to Foxconn as ICT or more commonly known as Luxshare. RISC-V ( Nearly all Chinese startup getting on RISC-V gets much better funding ) and IMG PowerVR, ARM China. YMTC against Samsung and Micron on NAND and DRAM, BOE against Samsung and LG on OLED. If you exclude Apple and Samsung, the rest of Smartphone market are 80% Chinese Brands. Solar Panel is partially all Chinese. NBA. ( And English premier league which seems to have some following in US, they will be targeting F1 soon ). Even Amazon clothing are losing to SHEIN. Unless someone make a revolutionary leap in battery otherwise the current trajectory would be China winning the price / Whr. ( Not even Tabless Battery from Tesla / Panasonic ). They are gunning for electric car manufacturing and are also the largest customer of Boeing and AirBus. But are working on their own JET. The increasing percentage of patents on 5G to Video Codec from China. To inside influence on tech companies via employees. We have another thread about Reddit and Youtube moderation, that happened already in 2019 during Hong Kong protest. And Tik Tok I mentioned in [1], expanding financial services like AliPay and WeChat Pay via tourist influence. And all these circulate back to SWIFT and US dollar as dominant currency. I could talk about it for hours and this list is just for US, there are whole lots of other things from Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and SEA perspective.

For a long time I try not to be blunt but I am sorry I have to write this out so clearly. I hope Ukraine is enough of a woke up call.

I have been wondering if start up linked to certain political agenda will ever get accepted. We cant sit just here and watch.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30463767

I had the same thought as your last point. Regardless of what happens with SWIFT now China will keep pushing hard to reduce it's US dependencies and is clearly well on their way.

Keeping your powder dry isn't so useful when it's evaporating in front of you.

China has one dependency they cannot get rid of - Americans buy tons of their stuff, and if they get rid of that, China has a big problem.

Not just Americans. If all 30 NATO nations threatened to halt trade, China would be in a tough position.

Convincing Americans to stop buy their wares is a huge task. Any political group that halts those wares from coming in would face huge upheaval. People are much more interested in their day to day comfort than something halfway across the globe (from a US perspective).

I agree completely. However, there are many situations where it can be reduced. For instance, I've heard chatter about people wondering about Apple's exposure to China[0] should China back Russia in the Ukraine conflict. At some point, it would be within Apple's best interest to look at reducing their dependency on a possible opponent.

[0] - Obviously we can pick any number of company and country matchups for this discussion, but China is obviously the relevant discussion point to this topic, and Apple is a huge American company, so the example is much less esoteric than others. I'm not picking on Apple here at all.

iWatches might just got sanctioned because of their glass comes from Russian company with state links. They chose to save on Corning's glass, with dire consequences for themselves.

Always nice when a company with 70% margin chooses to save a few pennies

Exactly. Like all things Apple, I have no problem with them choosing money over something else. ( May be I do but it is up to them to decide )

I have problem with them constantly lying ( or spinning ) all the the glass they use are from US Corning.

A huge task indeed but perhaps less than people think.

Chinese imports are heavily overrepresented in certain sectors (Tech for instance) but the US imports far less than most other countries. It's one of the peculiarities of the global economy.

Tech is really important. But there is also all the little things that you just interact with on daily life. Things like cutlery, soap dispensers, and so much more. Sure the US could make all this stuff but the country deeply relies on the cost imbalance to maintain the standard of living they have had for decades. Thats most people's entire lives.

I am reminded of this Purism phone that you can buy as a US made or China made version. https://shop.puri.sm/shop/librem-5/ China: 799$ (now 1200$ due to rising supply chain costs) USA: 2000$

I guess we are lucky in that most of our food and infrastructure related items seems to be local.

That specific example is not as revealing as it might seem, because in addition to a difference in supply costs, there's a difference in how much a hypothetical person who doesn't care about money but cares about it being made in the US will pay on top of supply cost differences.

Yeah I guess you are right, its just that there is not many examples I can provide because they just don't exist at all. Could Apple with their supply chain experience and clout get that 2000$ price down? Yeah probably. But it helps to illustrate my main point: The West has essentially been cheating by exploiting the purchasing power differential for decades and eventually it may finally collapse on them.

In an idealized situation, every company in the world will all move to a country to make an extra $0.01/unit, if they can all make it and make it reliably.

Almost all of the lumber purchased in America is grown in China, and Chinese concrete and steel are increasingly more common, despite political half-measures intended to change that.

This is hilariously completely the opposite of true. China is a net importer of American lumber, almost no Chinese lumber is exported, especially to the USA.

Almost no concrete is ever shipped more than 150 miles or so, concrete is almost always extremely locally produced.

Only steel has any appreciable trade volume with China.

I'm just curious if this is true if you back china into a corner. I'd imagine they'd take over taiwan and south korea? Is our tech sector really immune from this kind of major conflict?

How much flash RAM etc do we produce locally etc?

Hypothetical military campaigns against Taiwan or South Korea would be much more difficult than what's going on in Ukraine right now. Russia can drive tanks into Ukraine from three sides. Taiwan and Korea would require naval battles in oceans full of submarines.

Large-scale amphibious assaults were incredibly precarious in the era before AWACS and spy satellites. Now they're probably impossible against a modern adversary.

Also - as someone else mentioned - China doesn't want to be a pariah state.

>China doesn't want to be a pariah state.

Agreed. In particular, they rely on international trade to keep the economic prospects of their young men rosy enough that they won't participate in huge riots that bring down the government, which is the historical fate of most governments of China.

> Large-scale amphibious assaults were incredibly precarious in the era before AWACS and spy satellites. Now they're probably impossible against a modern adversary.

This is quite a bit naive. Do you not think ships are capable of planning their movements around satellites? Do you know how fast a ship can leave a US port and dock up in an Asian port (ships have an unclassified, and a classified speed)? Are there no other methods of camouflage that can be employed to hide from a satellite when it is over you?

You don’t think it’s possible because how it’s done has layers upon layers of classification walls.

> Convincing Americans to stop buy their wares is a huge task.

Its actually super easy, you impose 200% tariff, and people will start buying from Korea, Indonesia, Brasil and India.

You're skipping the step where all of the US retailers must switch to new suppliers at the flip of a switch. How long does that take before their current supplies run out and customers go else where? Looking at the current supply chain conundrum, I'd suggest that would be a larger issue than you're giving it credit.

You can do it gradually (2-3 years). Trump already imposed 25% tariff on China goods, and nothing dramatic happened, and I bet many people switched to goods from other countries. One example: I am into electric guitars, and almost all manufacturers moved from China because of tariff risks.

I still think that the global supply chain debacle was partly due to the Trump tariffs. People were already scrambling to find new suppliers before the pandemic. The situation is a culmination of all of the stuff that happened in just a short time frame.

This disruption actually makes things worse for China, since once/if new supply chain components established outside China, it will be hard for them to get business back.

It has more to do with ship docks being backlogged. Then when a docks storage fills up, they turn the ship away or make it circle.

Yeah, when you control the global economy like the USA does, it’s pretty easy to just make sure there are always starving countries to move your sweatshops to.

Another way to look at this, since you know since the US literally had nothing to do with why it’s starving, is the US is trying to help a smaller country (and gain an ally) by trading with that country.

Whatever you need to tell yourself to sleep at night.

Here you go:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_Ukraine

Where’s the part where the US caused poverty?

These items were already purchased, so the payment was in the past. OR, they buy the item from the supplier the minute it’s sold, in which case they can just return the items to the supplier.

You would need to do that slowly or you'd really piss off voters. And even if you do it slowly, you'll probably piss them off enough that they'll vote in someone who will erase what you've done.

I think if things will come to 200% tariff, it would mean something serious happened already, and voters will be enraged/educated to some extent already.

But yes, it is multi-factor optimization (voters, economy, geopolitics), though it looks like there is some consensus over certain topics between politicians, e.g. Biden didn't remove Trump tariffs, and didn't stop withdrawal from Afghanistan.

That's a great way of skyrocketing inflation.

A market that can support fair trade, carbon-neutral, organic, and gluten-free markups can support a human-rights /value-subtracted/ tariff: goods produced by slave or child labor or under authoritarian regimes can be assessed a tariff to bring their prices in-line with those produced in better countries.

Stickers marked "Three children assembled this iPhone for you." or "These sneakers were stitched by slave laborers in Xinjiang" might be as effective as the USDA's "Certified Organic" in persuading those with money and a conscience.

Sounds as likely to deter as much as cigarette packages with "Causes cancer, birth defects, etc" warnings. Majority of consumers just don't care about the package, and just care about what's in the packaging.

The sticker is to explain the price increase: why do these sneakers which cost $109 last week cost $179 now? The price increase is the deterrent, not the information.

Companies would be free to market their products as they see fit: “Nike Freedom Airs now made with 33% less slave labor.”, “IPhone 14: Apple’s first Child-Labor-Neutral phone.”

People will throw out whoever in the Whitehouse …

Wouldn't China just ship their wares there, change it to say "Made in (Not China)", and then ship ot to the U.S.?

I don't know how this work. I assume tariffs work on direct import from China. China can try to ship through different country with relabeling, which makes it more complicated on large scale, and that country will want cut, but it also can be tracked and penalized.

" If all 30 NATO nations threatened to halt trade"

That would be effectivly the same as launching nuclear missiles? Mutual destruction economically.

Why do you think that? For the major countries of NATO, China is one of many trading partners. China is only about 16% of US trade. Would it hurt? Sure. But nowhere near as much as having nearly 90% of your major trading partners disappear.

NATO coordinated economic action is extremely asymmetric. Compare these two lists:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_trading_pa...

> That would be effectivly the same as launching nuclear missiles? Mutual destruction economically.

No. Nuclear war potentially would kill many millions of people. Let's keep matters in perspective.

This is the difference between China and Russia.

The CCP is in power because it has promised Chinese citizens wealth. China actually really doesn't want to be a pariah.

I disagree. I think Putin actually aspires to be more like China. I think the difference between Russia and China today stems from the Soviet Union’s priorities of national independence and socialist ideals. China has played a long-term global strategy that Putin, or virtually any other country’s leaders for that matter, is bound to be jealous of. Ideology can never account for these discrepancies in potential.

and why would that happen? 1. it's utterly, completely out of scope of NATO's purpose 2. Europe does not share America's attitude towards China

So why do we do this already? The longer we way, the more money and influence they get. I don’t buy Chinese goods anymore. If I can’t confirm it didn’t come from China, I don’t buy. If we had govs onboard, and another supplier of chips, this would be easier than you think.

Reducing dependencies on rivals is a good idea. China is doing it because they know what they would do if they hold the dependency of a rival (like the US) firmly in hand. The US should take very serious heed of this because if we are too dependant on China for something critical it will eventually come to bite us. The supply troubles caused by the pandemic are a tiny foreshadowing of what will happen if we ever find ourselves too dependent on something important from a country like China.

This is far too logical for the United States to implement. People want cheap stuff and companies want cheap manufacturing. It took the great political shock of an unstable outsider getting elected as President of the United States who was not afraid to counter the globalists and a pandemic to alert the citizens of glaring shortages of manufacturing capacity to finally bring this issue into discussion. However, it appears this realization will not be enough to alter course and begin manufacturing more products at higher cost in the United States.

What realistic measures beyond tariffs can accomplish a shift toward a reduction of US dependency on China? A dependency which creates more risk for not only the US but the world as a whole due to the obvious potential for conflicts that will arise when China uses their manufacturing prowess to apply the screws to the many nations that depend on it.

US (and maybe Canada too?) fostering IT infrastructure plants in Central America. The whole "huge migrant forces leaving Central America for the US" (to the extent that it's a factor) could be stemmed with more infrastructure jobs there. The IT infrastructure we need to maintain independence from larger potential adversaries. Intel and others have some chip manufacturing in some Central American locations - increase that. Increase chip and other IT related manufacturing plants closer to our hemisphere. Lift up these economies closer to home - reduce shipping/transit costs.

Tax policies that favor more IT manufacturing in Central America may already be in place. If not, put in place. If there, tweak some levers to increase activity to closer to our borders and further away from countries that are gaining too much control over strategic resources.

Not sure there is enough talent in many of those countries to staff IT related manufacturing.

Migrating investment to Latin and South America is certainly a better direction from the perspective of businesses under an environment where investment in China is discouraged as they gain the protection afforded by the Monroe Doctrine. However, it still does not adequately address the weak manufacturing industry within the United States and it’s ability to produce necessary goods when global trade is impacted by a shock event like a pandemic or war.

How much do you think the GDP of China would be impacted if there was nothing left of NATO to buy their wares?

We're all dependent on each other. This retreat into isolationism just presents an illusion of non-dependency.

We need to start thinking more collectively

A lot of weapons are a lot scarier when you don't know what they are and what their impact is. You can't kick the BRICS out of SWIFT and expect the world to still take you serious.

Decades of crippling sanctions have also taught China and Russia how to bypass altogether with certain countries. Short term it will probably sting, but long term its a death sentence to SWIFTs position.

Isn't the fact that the US controls it already a death sentence to it as far as Russia and China are concerned?

Yes.

They don't have the power to change it, though China might eventually. And they do benefit from it - international relations are rational, not so partisan; just because a competitor is involved doesn't make it wrong. The rules-based, US-led interational order brings enormous benefits to China and Russia.

> You can't kick the BRICS out of SWIFT

Why would you need to kick BRICS out of SWIFT? India is a US ally on Quad, South Africa and Brazil aren't allied with Russia either. And at this point, no one is talking about kicking China out of SWIFT.

> India is a US ally on Quad

India has a different perspective for what does that exactly entail. India has its own UPI and Rupay systems. It sure would see SWIFT falling.

Are you sure that India is an US ally wrt. Russia?

Well considering US was ready to bomb India and it was a Russian submarine that saved India, it makes sense. Also don't forget about US supplying arms and aid to Pakistan which Pakistan in turn would use to arm Talibans and Kashmiri insurgents. On top of that, US was pretty vocal about wanting sanctions on India for testing out nuclear weapons. Given the history, who would be an ally in that case?

> US was ready to bomb India and it was a Russian submarine that saved India

> Given the history, who would be an ally in that case?

If such history prevented alliances, there would be none. France and Germany are allies. India and the US are allies when their interests align - less so regarding Ukraine, more so regarding China - which depends significantly, but not completely, and especially in the long term, on their values (democracy, human rights, etc.) aligning.

> ?

In 1971, the US actively supported the genocide committed in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) by the Pakistani Army. When the Indian Army intervened, Nixon sent the 7th Fleet that included the USS Enterprise into the Bay of Bengal to intimidate India. In response, the USSR sent their own flotilla.[1][2][3][4]

[1] 1971 War: How Russia sank Nixon’s gunboat diplomacy (https://www.rbth.com/articles/2011/12/20/1971_war_how_russia...)

[2] 1971 War: How the US tried to corner India (https://www.rediff.com/news/2006/dec/26claude.htm)

[3] US forces had orders to target Indian Army in 1971 (https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/US-forces-had-orde...)

[4] Bangladesh Liberation War - US and USSR (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangladesh_Liberation_War#US_a...)

Some historical context is probably needed that most non-Indians won't have. During the 1971 war between India and Pakistan, the US sent a carrier group from the Seventh fleet into the Bay of Bengal as a means to deter Indian invasion of what was then East Pakistan. The Soviet Union countered this move by sending a nuclear attack submarine into the Bay of Bengal to prevent freedom operation for the carrier group. The move apparently worked, and the carrier group backed off. India defeated Pakistan and East Pakistan became what is now the independent nation of Bangladesh. Hopefully, I have the historical facts right.

As to how the mere presence of a nuclear attack submarine can scare off an entire carrier group, I still don't understand. But then again I build web apps not submarines.

I went back and refreshed my memory. It was two groups of cruisers and destroyers and a nuclear submarine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Task_Force_74

I would think Wikipedia is a particularly unreliable source for something that apparently inflames partisan feelings.

You can say this about almost anything these days. I provided you with a source, if you aren't sure about it and think otherwise, I think you need to provide a link that actually backs up your claim

Not just a war, also a genocide perpetrated by Pakistan against Bangladesh: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1971_Bangladesh_genocide

> General Yahya Khan is reported to have said "Kill three million of them, and the rest will eat out of our hands."

>the US sent a carrier group from the Seventh fleet into the Bay of Bengal as a means to deter Indian invasion of what was then East Pakistan The Soviet Union countered this move by sending a nuclear attack submarine into the Bay of Bengal to prevent freedom operation for the carrier group.

This isn't accurate. The carrier group was to deter any invasion of West Pakistan. India had already invaded East Pakistan and that war was already effectively over when the US decided to send the fleet. It's true that the US tried to dissuade India's intervention and armed Pakistan, but they weren't about to bomb India over East Pakistan.

The Soviet ships also did not chase away the carrier group. They stayed a few weeks after the war ended with Pakistan's surrender and India's decision not to invade West Pakistan.

That's fair and there's hardly any evidence to claim US's desire to bomb India. However, it was still noted as an bullying attempt in India. US was also acting in cohort with Pakistan at UN, which was countered by Russian votes.

> As to how the mere presence of a nuclear attack submarine can scare off an entire carrier group, I still don't understand. But then again I build web apps not submarines.

Escalation concerns - USA and Russia both really want to avoid direct conflicts to avoid escalation into nuclear war (and sometimes - as in this case - use that as a shield).

> India and the US are allies when their interests align - less so regarding Ukraine, more so regarding China - which depends significantly, but not completely, and especially in the long term, on their values (democracy, human rights, etc.) aligning.

China is probably the only thing India and US agree on, especially considering Pakistan has been warming up to China now. Regarding the values, when has that stopped US ever? Only time US cares about democracy is when they the ruler is not friendly to them. US is an ally of - Saudi Arabia which is committing a genocide right now and actively sells arms to them (there goes your democracy and human rights) - Israel, again human rights go out of the window when it comes to Gaza occupation

Of note, the Indian Diaspora in the US is also becoming increasingly active in policy shaping and civics within the US. Over time, it will be interesting to see how this dynamic influences the alignment of US and Indian interests [0]

[0] https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/remarkable-pol...

Indian diaspora in the U.S is extremely tiny. Less than 2% of the population. Not large enough to have any notable impact on policy shaping.

2%, well-organized, can have an impact.

> China is probably the only thing India and US agree on

India and the US work together on many things, including development in India. Why is it important to you to downplay India's good relationships?

The US's record certainly isn't perfect, but nor is the other extreme realistic. Democracy has spread to almost every corner of the globe - almost all of the Americas, for example, almost all of Europe - with the US being its strongest supporter and advocate, with money, expertise, political pressure, etc. One reason is pressure from the American public, which (for most of history) has strongly supported freedom and democracy. I know well that the US also opposed some democratic governments and, especially in the Cold War, supported right-wing dictatorships.

The events of 1971 were preceded by events such as the US admitting Pakistan into SEATO (NATO like alliance in South East Asia). India had no other alternative but to choose USSR back then.

I'll just leave this right here from the time the USA told the USSR a nuclear attack on China is a nuclear attack on the USA:

https://www.scmp.com/article/714064/nixon-intervention-saved...

In the past, India had good relations with the USSR and bought weapons from them, but now they are more more tied to the US economy than to Russia's. They buy from and sell to the US much more than to Russia.

When it comes to arms, Russia still takes precedence over the US for India. Russia is willing to sell their state of the art weapons to India and the deals involve significant tech transfer which helps in propping up local defense industries.

Historically India has been closer with USSR/Russia but I think in the future this will change. Obviously as other posters have noted India has stronger trade ties with America now, and there are lots of Indians in America in influential positions (like CEOs of big companies). I also see a natural coalition with anti-Islamists in America and India.

India has its own interests (of course). During the Cold War, India was part of the Non-Aligned Movement, a coalition of countries which sought a third path, supporting neither side.

https://www.nti.org/education-center/treaties-and-regimes/no...

India is far from Ukraine and so doesn't have many geopolitical interests at stake, unlike European countries and (by very close alliances and relationships) the US.

India does have at stake the rules-based international order, for which a fundamental rule is respect for national sovereignty, and respect for the legitimacy of democracies. Sharing borders with Pakistan and China, India has a special interest in those.

"rules-based international order"

Where are these rules written, do you have a link?

Does the US follow these rules in terms of action in places like Syria (almost certainly CIA providing weapons) Libya, Iraq, Vietnam etc? I'm actually kind of curious to see how the US measures up on these rules.

I thought the US had an interest in things like regime change rather than some of the stability focuses others have had.

Of course the US follows the rules, by definition.

The "Rules Based International Order" is just a euphemism for "Post War US Hegemony". And the rules are "The US state department tells you what to do, and you do it".

Anyway, a rules-based international order already exists. It's called the UN charter, but that's not what they mean.

> The "Rules Based International Order" is just a euphemism for "Post War US Hegemony". And the rules are "The US state department tells you what to do, and you do it".

Sarcasm and hyperbole are fun, but can be misleading. The US-led rules-based international order certainly doesn't always follow the rules, and the US can be a major violator, but the rules have great influence and power. Generally, the US considers it in its interest to have an internation order based on rules, not on military power. But lacking a soveriegn international government, the US's military power has underwritten those rules since WWII.

The UN charter is one part of the rules, but international law is based on many institutions and agreements. Here's a great source with leading experts (e.g., top lawyers from the State Department and White House) for anyone who wants to know about it:

https://justsecurity.org

Where are the rules? You're all over this thread taking about RBIO and you haven't cited any rules. Not a single one. Where is it written? May I read a list of your rules?

I am. Russia is moving towards china and so is moving away from india.

India was one of the abstain votes on the Ukraine resolution in UNSC, so we have our answer.

India is only loosely a US ally on issues of mutual interest. They also have fairly good relations with Russia and don't much care what happens to Ukraine.

The Quad is threadbare pseudo-alliance specifically designed around containing China, period. India has long been friendly with Russia and is non-committal on the Ukraine situation and is apparently talking about "how to establish a rupee payment mechanism for trade with Russia to soften the blow of Western sanctions"[1]

It would be wise to assess how much the rest of the world is willing to go along with isolating Russia before we go in sanction-guns blazing and wind up isolating ourselves instead.

[1] https://twitter.com/SamRamani2/status/1497162914586898475

Brazil is completely dependent on China for export/import. Current president is a Putin fan boy and tyrant wannabe.

Swift won't die until either the US Dollar dies, or the government replaces it with something newer.

EDIT:

Technically, the US Government doesn't "control" SWIFT, but through banking regulations, their influence is way bigger than it looks than their 2 board seats would suggest.

The supremacy of the US dollar is partly held up by SWIFT. If most countries move to non-SWIFT payments, the US dollar will weaken.

The Dollar may indeed weaken, but then Americans will not be able to afford to buy as much imported goods from other countries, which will hurt those exporters. China will probably lose the most.

I notice this post got some downvotes. My statement is not a political one, it is a practical one.

Anyone who works with SWIFT understands that the system exists at the pleasure of the Americans. If the US decides to not allow SWIFT, then it will disappear quickly. Likewise, the US has the ability to regulate, and does regulate, the systems that are used for transferring money.

And to quote from the FFIEC [0], who regulates this stuff (well, one of the regulators at least):

  "SWIFT is used to transmit foreign exchange confirmations,
   debit and credit entry confirmations, statements,
   collections, and documentary credits."

That's a ton of US Dollars that aren't going away, so SWIFT won't either.

[0] - https://bsaaml.ffiec.gov/manual/RisksAssociatedWithMoneyLaun...

> Decades of crippling sanctions have also taught China and Russia how to bypass altogether with certain countries.

What crippling sanctions have been imposed on China and Russia for decades? China's economy in particular has been very involved in international trade - probably more than any other.

I figured the sanctions would drive Russia into the arms of CIPS

I don't buy this logic. If China can get dominance, there is no reason for it to wait for the SWIFT to ban those bad actors. They can start their own system on the side right now.

>They can start their own system on the side right now.

CIPS is their own system.

Why would people trust CIPS with China in charge of it?

they wouldn't point is use both then you are reliant on neither.

The end result is multiple payment systems so that the countries can do whatever they do without single entity being able to shut the valve. And you do not have to trust any single one. Consider it free market competition.

Why not? The world trusts China to make their products and corporations entrust China with their sensitive intellectual property to manufacture goods. Even Charlie Munger and Warren Buffet (two conservative investors) trust China enough to invest in China. Doesn’t seem like a big stretch to trust China for money transfers.

People don't need "trust", they need alternatives. SWIFT is currently in a monopolistic situation right now. Any abuse of that position will lead to eroding trust.

I've been saying this for awhile, the US is screwed when the dollar loses reserve currency status and kicking Russia out of SWIFT accelerates the timeline for that dramatically. The fact India hasn't said a word about Russia and Pakistan PM is meeting with Putin right now is telling

The US has been outplayed by China so badly it's almost laughable, Chess vs Checkers for decades now

> India hasn't said a word about Russia

Why should we? When China killed 20 of our soldiers in 2020,[1] the whole world prayed for "de-escalation and a peaceful resolution." And that is what India will say in the Ukraine-Russia conflict.

[1] 2020–2022 China–India skirmishes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020%E2%80%932022_China%E2%80%...)

I'm agreeing that it is a wise decision. I put that in there because people in this thread are acting like India will blindly follow the US against Russia/China with things like sanctions. The US is in a weak position right now due to a number of dumb foreign policy decisions, going nuclear by kicking Russia off SWIFT would have even allies questioning SWIFT and cause the US to lose even more control over the financial system

India is doing what's in the best interest of their people, which is what a government should do

https://www.reuters.com/world/india/india-explores-setting-u...

Every country in the world has suffered many such slights, but somehow we have to and we do cooperate, to our great mutual benefit. The slights are used by those who want division, in every country (and if they can't think of one, they make them up anyway). Why should India sacrifice it's larger interests to temporary outrage - never a good idea in international or personal relations.

(Also, China didn't attempt to conquer India, attacking Delhi, Mumbai; annexing the south, etc. The comparison is very exaggerated.)

> China didn't attempt to conquer India

China illegally occupies Aksai Chin. Pakistan illegally occupies parts of Kashmir. We have fought multiple wars with both countries over the last 75 years with very little help from outside parties. When the rest of the world goes beyond mere words to help restore these territories to India, I am sure India will be more than happy to move beyond mere words in similar situations.

> with very little help from outside parties.

You might have missed the part of history where Bill Clinton pretty much ended the Kargil War and stopped Pakistan from nuking India [1][2].

[1] https://www.mea.gov.in/articles-in-indian-media.htm?dtl/1541... [2] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/pakistan-india...

This isn't to say that the world goes often beyond mere words; every democratic nation's leadership is obligated to act in the best interest of their citizens, and what's in their best interest is not always clear at the outset. There's a reason diplomacy and statecraft are full-time jobs, and defense pacts like NATO exist. These pacts tie populations together and organize some of the decision-making process. Even then those pacts have steps that need to be triggered before action is taken, and NATO Article 5 [3] has been invoked only once in its history. The really interesting thing is that according to NATO Article 6, an attack on Hawaii or some Spanish cities may not trigger a NATO response [4]

[3] https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/topics_110496.htm [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Atlantic_Treaty#Article_...

If you're looking for an example closer to home, consider the Pandavas' exile; they went to war only after all other options had been exhausted [5].

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurukshetra_War#Background

Much as we as individuals want nations to act emotionally as we would, democratic nations simply do not make decisions that way. There are tens, perhaps even hundreds, of people involved at all levels of government in any major decisions around foreign policy. It is possible to subvert that machinery like with the 2nd Bush administration, and trash it altogether like with the Trump administration, but for the most part it works fairly rationally, if not always in the long-term interest.

> stopped Pakistan from nuking India

That was never going to happen. Neither Musharraf nor Sharif are stupid people. The Americans have always been a cowardly lot when it comes to nuclear weapons.

The Pakistan situation is a result of the gross incompetence on the part of the Indian and American establishments. India chose the wrong politics, the wrong friends and didn't contain Pakistan when we were in a position to do so. And America funded and protected them for imaginary achievements of their political objectives. The only winner in all this was the Pakistani establishment that made out like a bandit.

> China illegally occupies Aksai Chin. Pakistan illegally occupies parts of Kashmir.

Border disputes are everywhere, even between close allies like the US and Canada, the UK and France. Both sides have claims and arguments. That has nothing to do with conquering other other countries.

> When the rest of the world goes beyond mere words to help restore these territories to India

What should the world do? Fight a war? What has India's government asked the world to do?

> I am sure India will be more than happy to move beyond mere words in similar situations

India does a lot in concert with the rest of the world, and benefits enormously from it.

The grievance-based nationalism also is common these days. Everyone has grievances - both in international relations and personally - but what party benefits from inflaming and acting on them?

> Border disputes are everywhere, even between close allies like the US and Canada, the UK and France.

Such a weird thing to say. When was the last time Americans and Canadians beat each other to death with barbed-wire wrapped clubs?

> Both sides have claims and arguments.

In that case, both Russia and Ukraine have claims and arguments over parts of Ukrainian territory. Why should other countries interfere in their dispute?

> What should the world do?

Apply pressure? Isolate Pakistan and China completely like they are trying to do with Russia? Stop selling and gifting them weapons that will be used against India? But we know none of that is going to happen. Everyone knows that in American and European circles, Asian and African lives have far less value than European lives.

The qualities of the claims, and the harm caused by the actions, are very significant factors.

I hereby claim Perth. Can I now insist that Australia be isolated and cut off from the financial system? Is that the same as Russia invading Ukraine?

> The qualities of the claims, and the harm caused by the actions, are very significant factors.

You do not understand.

We are Indians. We have no expansionist agenda, designs on other people's territories and don't feel the need to play policeman or marriage counselor to the world unlike some other Great powers.

We have our territorial claims and Russia has its own. No other opinion is relevant. The only thing that matters is the answer to the question: does the claimant have the power to enforce their claim? Russia does. We don't.

The problem in Ukraine is of their leadership's own making. They trusted a notoriously untrustworthy ally like Washington whose military policy has been in control of neoconservatives since forever. The neocons wanted a war with Russia. Biden and the Comedian gave them one. Ukraine had a chance to be independent as long as it had a government that practiced neutrality. That is no longer possible. It is going to be embraced by the Bear and there is no military power on Earth that can do anything about it.

If Pakistan is illegally occupying Kashmir. Why is India not illegally occupying Hyderabad and Goa? Unless you agree they are.

India are very wary of US led wars, they do not have a good track record and when this all blows over and everyone forgets about it, India will never get support from the US against Pakistani sponsored terrorism. So why should India fight its wars for them?

It's this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valeriepieris_circle

Half the world's population lives with a 2500 mile radius circle centred over the South China Sea. There's a market.

I really love maps like this

But how's this related to SWIFT?

One post up. China, CIPS, strategic interests.

is proximity to the country that owns a transaction processing system relevant in a fully digital world?

Do you see India and Japan (and Vietnam and South Korea, all within the circle) joining a system controlled by China.

India has its own SWIFT alternative as a matter of fact

Countries in the proximity of other countries are more likely to have larger trade volumes between them, increasing the chances they hold each others currencies in reserves and have incentives to use a common payment network. This is why geographic proximity is relevant even in a fully digital world. At least while a significant portion of trade consists of physical goods that have to be moved across borders.

>> is proximity to the country that owns a transaction processing system relevant in a fully digital world?

Very much yes. Think of two people trading rice between china and the Philippians. That rice is not digital. It is traveling across a not-digital ocean on a not-digital ship. If something goes wrong with a payment they would much rather be dealing with someone in the same timezone who can address the issue before the non-digital ship gets locked down somewhere. When things go very wrong, they don't want to be shopping for a European lawfirm to help with a matter between two Asian businesses. Timezones, language and local understanding still matters for realworld trade.

> something goes wrong with a payment they would much rather be dealing with someone in the same timezone

These systems are for the banks to transfer between them..

If a payment goes wrong, it's still the bank's problem. This is opaque to the end user if I understand it correctly.

And Going by this logic would the entire world also stop using Gmail and start using Alibaba/Tencent's email service?

One nit, many developing countries do pick overseas legal systems to resolve commercial disputes because local systems are not workable / usable. So you might be in india and philippines, but use a london bank for a letter of credit and agreements / bills of lading that are handled in London

https://www.gov.uk/courts-tribunals/commercial-court

A winning combo is a functioning, fair, nonpolitical legal system that works QUICKLY and predictably (fairness a bit secondary) and banking / finance so decisions can be enforced more easily.

No, India will not let its financial graph be owned by China. US or EU its a different matter -- even then, as India becomes stronger economy would carve its own platform.

I love how this widely quoted term originated on reddit. You can get something named after you after as a layman, like Fermat's Last Theorem, just best avoid coming up with it on a reddit account with an obscene name!

> how many countries will need to agree before shutting down SWIFT access

Its HQ is in Belgium, so technically, this can be a unilateral decision by Belgian PM De Croo. In practice, as it was the case with Iran, US and EU have to reach political agreement before De Croo would budge.

isn't it a private company? If so, it would seem they could "de=platform" anyone at any time for any reason.

It is a cooperative https://kbopub.economie.fgov.be/kbopub/toonondernemingps.htm...

Huh didn't know that there's new Belgian PM. In my mind the Belgian PM is still either di rupio or Charles Michel.

> Its HQ is in Belgium, so technically, this can be a unilateral decision by Belgian PM De Croo.

How does the Belgian PM have power over it? The United Nations is headquartered in New York, but that doesn't give anyone in the US unilateral power over it.

Presumably the PM could coerce the SWIFT staff to do some action (see the fears European countries have about the relationship between the US government and its tech companies).

This is how it worked for Iran sanctions.

The Belgian PM coerced SWIFT to sanction Iran?

I must correct myself. For Iran sanctions, SWIFT implemented EU Council decision passed on by Belgian Treasury. When I was talking about PM, I was simplifying a bit.

https://www.swift.com/insights/press-releases/swift-instruct...

I suspect that the semi-nuclear option will get pulled sooner rather than later. Ultimately we are seeing a world where the west is extending financial, economic, societal, and diplomatic infrastructure to countries which actively disagree with the security, co-operation, and economic principals required for those institutions to exist.

This situation is untenable in the long run.

Is it feasible to throttle swift transactions to/from a country? Wonder if that could be a middle ground between full throughput and complete disconnection..

> I suspect that the semi-nuclear option will get pulled sooner rather than later. Ultimately we are seeing a world where the west is extending financial, economic, societal, and diplomatic infrastructure to countries which actively disagree with the security, co-operation, and economic principals required for those institutions to exist.

There's another option, which is growing the rules-based international order (as it's called). It had been growing for decades, and despite a bad few years, it is bigger than ever from any perspective other than ~2010 - for example, consider it from the perspective of 1985. And growing it is incredibly beneficial economically, for security, and for freedom - a far better outcome.

The semi-nuclear option only achieves short-term survival; it does not build a world for our future.

The main obstacle to growing it is not China and Russia, but the far-right nativist, reactionary political movements in democracies, especially the Republicans in the US. They oppose it (though being reactionaries, have no solution with which to replace it).

That is a scary paragraph you put down there.

Yeah, I am sure CIPS won't be used politically.

> Further politicising swift would give China an incentive to bolster cips

It's not just China, but also crypto. This can already be seen with Ukrainians using stablecoins because they don't have access to banks.

But if SWIFT is already in play, everyone already has a reason to diversify, and will do so.

You can't be making threats and not expect people to try to avoid the thing you're threatening.

Also you can't be hesitating on everything that seems like a one-off. Then you really don't have a lot of sticks to shake at people.

This whole thing is so embarrassing for the West. We won't let Ukraine into NATO, we won't promise not to, we won't send troops, we won't send much help at all, we won't sanction all Russian nationals (yes it's heavy handed), we won't sanction a few thousand top regime officials, we won't sanction just the oligarchs, we won't stop them living in the West, we won't even stop them sending money home.

> we won't sanction all Russian nationals

It would be nice to see a mass deportation of Russian mafia.

Why should dual citizens living in other countries suffer, especially if they've lived there for decades?

Asking for myself.

Slightly disrupt, in a pretty small way, a few thousand people connected to the regime

a bunch of Ukrainian civilians get killed, their homes destroyed, thousands of refugees, and troops on both sides die and are horribly injured.

No idea if you're connected to the regime, but it would be unfortunate to mess up your life in the west. But there's a tolerable amount of collateral damage. This goes back to hurting yourself to hurt the bad guy, it's not a western ideal to harm the innocent, but we might end up where it happens and we shouldn't be paralyzed by the possibility.

Not exactly a convincing expression of support for people's human rights, especially those of fellow citizens with dual nationality. Wouldn't exactly be a good look.

A better solution is to clean up the financial sector, especially the City of London, and to move to renewables ASAP to break the hold of all petrostates on the West.

Russians in America (dual citizen or not) have inalienable lights outlined in the Constitution.

Dual citizens should renounce Russian citizenship if they don’t support their government and tax dollars going to war.

If you aren’t willing to overthrow the shithole government of Russia, you don’t get to complain when your allegiance (especially when you have dual citizenship and can easily renounce it), makes life hard for you.

So when Russians in USA go back to visit their family they should pay for visas? I don't see how that helps the fight against Russian goverment in any non-symbolic way.

Maybe stop trying to punish ordinary people for their (effectively unelected - see how opposition in Russia can't survive) government?

2 things here:

1) Russians can own firearms. They can start a rebellion to overthrow the gov. Why haven’t they? There’s some level of comfort the residents are getting that they don’t want to give up.

2) Punishing residents for their govs misdeeds (it is listed as a democracy after all) is a good way to get them to comply and overthrow or vote out this gov.

People in the US pay everyday for Russian misinformation campaigns, while Russian residents sit by and do nothing. What’s that saying from BLM? If you do nothing you’re just as guilty?

Yes. Or perhaps don’t go visit a country actively murdering other people unproked and encourage your family to leave. Leave or revolt. Otherwise you are complacent.

So yes, if you maintain citizenship with Russia, there ought to be consequences.

Exactly. Alternatives to swift are already growing and will continue to do so. What’s more important, protecting Ukraine, Taiwan and anywhere else under threat, or slowing down the erosion of something already being eroded. Lives matter, swift will do just fine without Russia.

This asshole is at war with us. It’s about time we went to war back. Yes it would be costly, but it would have been a lot less costly if we’d done more than wring our hands over Crimea. The cost of dithering is going up and up, so what’s the answer? More dithering?

> What’s more important, protecting Ukraine, Taiwan and anywhere else under threat

Ukraine, Taiwan, etc are under "threat" because the West is using them as political/military pawns. If NATO/West didn't exist, there would be no invasion of ukraine. Taiwan would have unified with China already. It's going to anyways. We are just bleeding Taiwan as much as we can before china takes it back. It's silly the amount of useless weapons we are forcing taiwan to buy.

> This asshole is at war with us. It’s about time we went to war back. Yes it would be costly, but it would have been a lot less costly if we’d done more than wring our hands over Crimea.

You have it backwards. We are at war with him and he finally decided to stand up for himself. We invaded ukraine first. We broke our promises first. It's NATO expansion that is the threat to the world. Not russia.

Is it China, Russia, Iran, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq, Myanmar, Venezuela, Haiti, etc the problem or is it the West? Think about it. The world has a common problem. It isn't "China, Russia, Iran, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq, Myanmar, Venezuela, Haiti, etc". It's the imperial west.

Just because the US/West is in the lead of the empire game at the moment doesn't mean the other empires aren't a problem. We aren't the first empire and won't be the last. China, in particular, is in a massive expansion into Africa. If there was not competition from US/West for power, it would be moving much faster and more aggressively/violently as it had in the past.

The ideal for the common person would be no empires. If that is a fantasy, then the next best thing would be some sort of minimally violent stalemate.

Sounds like someone actually knows some basic history and political theory instead of just blabbering whatever the Western media is saying at any given moment.

Scott Ritter[1] talking to Richard Medhurst[2]

(Speaking of Gorbachev) “… you have to agree not only not to bring NATO troops into the eastern portion of uh of Germany but you can't bring NATO troops east of the Elbe, you can't go into Poland, you can't do do this. And uh and he was given assurances and everybody said well it's just verbal, we now find out it's in writing um that this wouldn't happen. So you know right off the bat we have an expansive NATO, now NATO says that's okay you don't be worried about an expansive NATO because we're a defensive alliance. Really? Then why did they bomb Belgrade in 1999, there was nothing defensive about that, that was offensive military action against a Slavic state. Why did they, why did NATO send a training mission to Iraq in 2004? Why did NATO members participate in the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003? Um you know they say well it's just a training mission. No, it's a training mission in an occupied state that was occupied uh you know from an illegal war of aggression so you're facilitating, you're legitimizing, an illegal war of aggression. That's what NATO did. Why did NATO go into Afghanistan what business is Afghanistan of NATO's? None. Zero. Um you know and what did NATO do to Libya? Offensive aggressive military operations but it's not just these examples it's a transatlantic organization. Why then did they start a partnership in North Africa where they were seeking to expand their sphere of influence (there's a word we're not allowed to use) in North Africa? Why did they set up offices in um in the United Arab Emirates to create a sphere of influence in the Persian Gulf? Why are they talking about a North Atlantic Treaty Organization operating in the Pacific to create a sphere of influence to counter china? They're not a defensive organization it's an offensive minded expansive organization with a proven history of carrying out regime change operations in countries they view as a threat. Who's the number one threat today per NATO's own words? Russia. So you know NATO not only has no reason to exist NATO is a suicide pill for Europe.”

A couple of comments about this.

We, in the West (I live in Western Europe), can pretend that NATO is a force for good in the world, that it is some sort of benign defensive pact but our adversaries do not see it that way. And our adversaries are correct. They do not have the luxury of pretending that NATO is something that it is not. If they were to then that would spell the end of them. The reason people in the West don't see NATO for what it is is because they see themselves as the good guys and their adversaries as the bad guys. It's that simple. Even though people throughout the West are critical of their governments domestically when it comes to matters of foreign policy even though people say they care about peace and that they care for the people of Ukraine, they don't in actual fact care about peace and they don't care about the people of Ukraine. If they did then they would have asked their governments why NATO wasn't disbanded in the wake of the fall of the Soviet Empire and with it the Warsaw Pact. NATO was created to counter the Warsaw Pact countries. When that alliance disbanded and German was reunified NATO should have been consigned to the dustbin of history as they say. But it was not. With the Soviets out of the way NATO emboldened by its success began to expand its remit, expand its sphere of influence. That's fine, but at least admit that the nature of the organisation has changed. That's fine, but don't be surprised when your sphere of influence overlaps with a nation that has its own sphere of influence is its own independent agenda. It's at times like these the the narrative that most in the Western media pump out day after day is revealed to be at odds with reality. The West, when it comes to foreign interventions, is morally compromised – it has no business telling others what they cannot do when it does those very same things year in year out and has done for decades. The hypocrisy at times like these is, frankly, nauseating.

I recommend watching that entire interview. Ritter does not varnish reality, and that's a good thing. People in the West need to wake to what is being done in their name and own the consequences of their actions. See also Max Blumenthal's analysis on the Jimmy Dore Show[3] and Russell Brand's take[4].

[1] William Scott Ritter Jr. (born July 15, 1961) is a former United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991 to 1998. He later became a critic of United States foreign policy in the Middle East. Prior to the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, Ritter stated that Iraq possessed no significant weapons of mass destruction (WMD) capabilities, becoming according to The New York Times "the loudest and most credible skeptic of the Bush administration’s contention that Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction."

[2] "NATO Too Weak to Face Russia: Scott Ritter on Russian Offensive" https://youtu.be/3GkmdCaBECs?t=1988

[3] #TheJimmyDoreShow "Truth About Ukraine/Russia NOT What You Think" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sm8QfxZ3HHw

[4] #Ukraine #Russia #War "This Changes Everything" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=595Esg6Mz0U

Hmm... The interview in [2] starts out with them seemingly taking different sides, but about 6 minutes in Scott Ritter starts arguing that the invasion was a reasonable response to problems with right-wing extremists in the Ukrainian military (which I've heard is a problem in many countries, not only in Ukraine).

The interviewer appears to be a writer for RT. Is this interview some kind of good cop/bad cop routine to make the propaganda go down easier?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Ritter

Ritter was born into a military family in 1961 in Gainesville, Florida. He graduated from Kaiserslautern American High School in Kaiserslautern, Germany in 1979, and later from Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, with a Bachelor of Arts in the history of the Soviet Union and departmental honors. In 1980 he served in the U.S. Army as a private. Then in May 1984 he was commissioned as an intelligence officer in the United States Marine Corps. He served in this capacity for about 12 years.[2] He served as the lead analyst for the Marine Corps Rapid Deployment Force concerning the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Iran–Iraq War. Ritter's academic work focused on the Basmachi resistance movement in Soviet Central Asia during the 1920s and 1930s, and on the Basmachi commanders Fazail Maksum and Ibrahim Bek.[3][4] During Desert Storm, he served as a ballistic missile advisor to General Norman Schwarzkopf. Ritter later worked as a security and military consultant for the Fox News network. Ritter also had "a long relationship [...] of an official nature" with the UK's foreign intelligence spy agency MI6 according to an interview he gave to Democracy Now! in 2003.

That's Scott Ritter's background. What's yours? Oh, we can't tell because you've used a throwaway account, which of course is your right. But I would suggest that if you go around insinuating about a person's character you'd better have some sort of proof or evidence to back it up. But the best you can do is:

> The interviewer appears to be a writer for RT.

So he's written op-eds for Russia Today. The way you state it without elaboration it's like we're meant to fill in the blanks. I'm sorry, are we not allowed to write for news organisations any more? Yes, we all know what you're implying, Russia Today is some kind of unAmerican news corp. Tell you what, let's bring back the House Committee on Un-American Activities and drag Scott before them.

God damn it, humans are so disappointing. As to:

> Scott Ritter starts arguing that the invasion was a reasonable response to problems with right-wing extremists in the Ukrainian military (which I've heard is a problem in many countries, not only in Ukraine).

Listening comprehension much? He never said that. He said, contrary to what the regular media is portraying there are actually neo-Nazi elements within Ukrainian military which (given the Russians history with Nazism – you know, how they more or less single-handedly beat back Nazis until the UK and USA got their shit together) explains what Putin meant in his hour long speech pre-invasion and allied to the eastward expansion of NATO shows that the Russian response while a gross violation of Ukrainian sovereignty is entirely rational, and given Putin's demands, entirely predictable.

But because we (the West) have to be the good guys – our adversaries must, by definition, be either evil or tyrannical or insane or any combo of all of these characteristics.

Heaven forbid that we might have a hand in all this, also heaven forbid that we look critically at our own part in all of this. And heaven forbid we try to imagine other people around the world as human beings like us with concerns (whether legitimate or not it doesn't really matter) about national security like us.

This moral issue is really easily resolved - what do the people of Ukraine and Taiwan want? It's quite easy to ask them.

The answer is "not Russia" and "not China". That's why the Ukrainians are fighting for their lives now, and why the democratically elected government of Taiwan is prepared to do the same.

> This moral issue is really easily resolved - what do the people of Ukraine and Taiwan want? It's quite easy to ask them.

What did the southerners want? What did the native hawaiians want. What did the aborigines want. What did the inuits in alaska want? What did the samoans want? What did the maoris want?

The ukrainians wanted russia. They voted for a pro-russian president. In 2014, the US/EU staged a coup and forced out a democratically elected president. Funny how people forget that.

As for taiwan, 1.4 billion chinese vs 20 million chinese. You do the math. And of course nobody is interested in what the aborigines in taiwan want. Taiwan lost the civil. Just like the south lost our civil war. It's only our imperial foolishness that delayed the unification.

> That's why the Ukrainians are fighting for their lives now,

They aren't. Instead of watching propaganda all over traditional and social media, go watch some real footage on the war. It's harder to find now that most social media is propagandized, but it's there. 99.99% of ukrainians are not fighting. And miles of trucks, tanks, etc abandoned by ukrainian soldiers at the first sound of war.

Go look at footage of kiev or any other ukrainian city. Nobody ( civilians or soldiers ) is preparing for the defense of the cities. And russia is doing this not with millions of troops, just thousands.

>What’s more important, protecting Ukraine, Taiwan and anywhere else under threat, or slowing down the erosion of something already being eroded. Lives matter, swift will do just fine without Russia.

I might be completely clueless, but Ukraine doesn't have anywhere near the same amount of strategic or economic importance that Taiwan does. As I understand it, what should have been done was for NATO to promise to not add Ukraine and keep it as a neutral zone between Russia and the US. Adding Ukraine to NATO was effectively putting US troops on Russia's doorstep and I can see why that makes Russia nervous. It seems pretty clear that Ukraine wasn't going to get NATO membership anyways.

I don't know if the promise would have given Putin the gall to invade, but the way I see it being ambiguous about it didn't help at all.

I’ve reflected on this argument recently but I struggle to see the real logic behind it. Putin claims he wants Ukraine as a neutral zone between russia and NATO. He then proceeds to invade Ukraine … if successful, territory under his control (whether explicitly shown or not, he could instil a puppet government) will now border NATO countries. How does that provide him with any security ?

Russian Federation I guess will guarantee the security of Donetsk and Luhansk and liberate further Russian-speaking areas.

Proximity to the Russia heartland presumably. Flight time of missiles to key military positions within Russia.

I'm no military strategist but how is this not obvious?

It's not about a neutral zone, it's about a buffer zone between more sensitive areas and where NATO can place troops, tanks, and missile systems. I mean a sea separates Alaska from north-east Russia and those places are deep into permafrost territory and then there's the entirety of Western and Central Russia between Moscow (say) and there. Russia is huge. 90% of the Russian population live in the 10% of Russia that is considered part of the European continent.

It's like nobody bothers to study geography or geopolitics before they open their mouth these days.

We already have American troops on Russia's doorstep in Alaska, is it really about proximity to Moscow? Does that even matter these days?

There are multiple NATO countries that already border Russia. If Putin takes Ukraine it will nearly double the amount of NATO countries that will border Russia.

Sure, but it makes it harder for an invasion force to reach Moscow or the industrial heart of Russia.

Nobody in NATO or the world period is invading Russia - cmon now

Putin really ran with FUD on this one

That is true now, but what about 23 years from now (23 years being how long it was between the defeat of Germany in WWI and the Germany's invasion of Russian lands)?

Putin thinks Russia's military strength will decline relative to the US, which is why he is widening Russia's buffer to invasion now even though it will probably be many years before it is needed.

This. Putin is just looking for excuses for why he wants to take Ukraine.

This is valuable reading, from a military historian frequently posted on HN:

https://acoup.blog/2022/02/25/miscellanea-understanding-the-...

Here's one of the many good bits:

----

Instead, the clearest understanding of Putin’s complaints about NATO is that they are reflections of his real fears, but that as diplomatic negotiating tools, they were red herrings, designed to create exactly the sort of smokescreen that some media personalities worked to create and exploit domestically. The ‘tell’ here in many ways were the initial demands, which amounted to rolling back NATO positions to pre-1997 status; such demands would be utterly unacceptable to NATO countries (like Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and Poland) who would thus be left outside NATO’s line of protection. Putin – and the Russian Foreign Ministry – knew those demands were obvious non-starters, that’s why they made them – presumably to generate that smokescreen and to try to divide NATO internally. But the demands themselves were never serious, as Putin’s actions this week prove.

----

The "promise Ukraine won't join NATO" demand was not made in good faith and conceding it would not have mattered.

This is a very good and thorough article. The truth is I am clueless - it seems the writing was on the wall for a very long time for anyone who was paying attention

I call bull.

Evidence for “the initial demands, which amounted to rolling back NATO positions to pre-1997 status;”

> This asshole is at war with us. It’s about time we went to war back.

This just shows how blind you are to the shortcomings of Western liberal cosmopolitanism, which is entirely defined by its lack of sense of responsibility for anything at all. It’s a post-modern mindset that just presumes everyone else will always play the same delusional game that it plays, simply because if they don’t then they will be forced to. So, when Putin shows that he is not going to play along, they simply have no plan. They never made a plan, not only because they never thought they needed one but primarily because they had their heads so buried up their own asses.

> But if SWIFT is already in play, everyone already has a reason to diversify, and will do so.

> You can't be making threats and not expect people to try to avoid the thing you're threatening.

> Also you can't be hesitating on everything that seems like a one-off. Then you really don't have a lot of sticks to shake at people.

Exactly. It's possible to be too reluctant to "save" a weapon for next time. You can get to the point that you wasted it because you let it gather dust until it was ineffective.

SWIFT is an interconnecting protocol, like the IP in TCP/IP. It's absurd to my mind to talk about weaponising shared/common protocols. It's not only bad because of how it might affect us, it's bad because it's bad in principle. That this way of seeing things is not a more universal way of seeing this matter is telling and disheartening but I guess ultimately not that surprising.

> This whole thing is so embarrassing for the West. We won't let Ukraine into NATO, we won't promise not to, we won't send troops, we won't send much help at all, we won't sanction all Russian nationals (yes it's heavy handed), we won't sanction a few thousand top regime officials, we won't sanction just the oligarchs, we won't stop them living in the West, we won't even stop them sending money home.

I think this is actually the idea behind "strategic ambiguity".

"We" should just have left Ukraine well alone 10 years ago. We effectively cut checks that could never be cashed.

Yes. Western liberal “democracy” may have to come to terms with its collective ignorance much sooner than it planned to. (it never planned to)

> You can't be making threats and not expect people to try to avoid the thing you're threatening.

You should assume reasonable people already know SWIFT was going to be used as a threat at one point or another. So I'm not sure you're saying anything new. Those people continue to use it because it's permeated all over financial world very much like the dollar is. The cost to move away from it is non-zero and the alternatives aren't subsidized enough by the likes of China to incentivize others to join them and if not enough people are joining you won't have a network effect.

"Why the West is reluctant to deny Russian banks access to SWIFT"

Because Europe is dependent on Russian gas (thanks to an ill thought out denuclearization drive), and both Europe and US governments prefer their economic and electoral interests over Ukraine or the international order. The rest of the article are really silly excuses (Russia is a relatively small economy and can't meaningfully hurt the dollar etc.).

Not the whole of europe tho. Its mainly germany.

It is the whole of Europe: http://edition.cnn.com/2014/06/16/business/eu-gas-russia/ind...

Yes and the largest is germany, hence “mainly”.

The largest number they show is for Germany. The coloring of others indicate they are more dependent than Germany.

No, this is not "dependence". Czechia is darker, but it's less dependent on Russian gas than Germany is - thanks to the nuclear powerplants.

Just fill the tanks and then cut off swift: oh we would habe paid if only we could...

There has been less gas flowing from Russia to Europe for months now, leading to large price spikes. In hindsight that was clearly preparation for this war - the tanks are the opposite of filled.

Gazprom fulfilled their contractual obligations. Putin being responsible for our MBAs gambling on falling prices and not making long-term contracts just so he has an easier time invading Ukraine? That's stretching it so thin that it's utter non-sense.

Except they were happy to send gas above the "contractual obligations" previous to the ramp up to invading Ukraine. This was clearly planned as a way to exert more pressure on NATO allies.

It's like falling out with IT support. Suddenly your ticket to fix a printer takes 2 days, rather than 5 minutes because that is the "SLA".

And then? Countries exist on a larger timescale than the average dine and dasher. How big of a tank this should be in your opinion to work?

I guess we can work something out with the president that follows Putin. Maybe the oligarchs overthrow Putin after losing their assets.

Or the gas ships from the US will be there in the next month. Russia is not the only one who sells gas. Just the lowest bidder

Italy is also dependent and didn't want to sanction russia in this way

Well there will be some damage to eu countries. East europe accounts for 15% of all german exports, being the largest market, should they start playing the sanctions game as the eu seems to enjoy whenever someone is out of line? Basically buying russia’s gas means financing a potential war against nato member states.

We are all connected. In Spain we get no gas from Russia (it comes mainly from Algeria), but there are already news that we will send gas up north to help Northern European countries that may experience outages.

Greece gets half its gas from Russia

Any shutdown would increase gas prices worldwide. Just because the UK doesn't use Russian gas direct, it does buy gas on the open market, when Germany can't buy it for €1 per unit from Russia, they'll pay €1.20 from the UK (which has 50% domestic production, Norway having most of the rest), pushing prices up for the UK and other countries despite not using Russian gas direct.

The failure here was the inability to boost nuclear and renewable sources in Europe over the last 8 years to reduce reliance on Russia.

The anti-nuclear push in the last few years in Europe has been extremely short-sighted, and undoubtedly helped make Russia's decision to attack Ukraine easier.

The opposite is true, nuclear energy has lits of problems in the long run. Many french reactors are shut down because of damages and the US ones have a problem with fake parts.

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/counterfeit-parts-pr...

Germany shutting down their most reliable source of clean energy, nuclear energy, is an incredible self own. Hopefully now they will reverse that and quickly for all our sake.

In the vain hope that it'll prevent at least _some_ of the bullshit on this issue, here's actual data on the import dependency of European countries from Eurostat: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

It's this 75%. Europe needs gas because it's still winter and therefore needs the ability to pay Russia for it.

The next biggest reason is probably just keeping arrows in the quiver. Why exhaust all sanction options up front and then be unable to influence in the future? Keeping the SWIFT sanction option keeps the ability to influence Russia in the future.

Lastly, a minor component is all of the CIPS and other reasons people bring up.

Also, politically most of Europe seems to have worked itself into a corner where the only politically tenable power source that works well regardless of the weather (which is also when most of Europe has peak power demands) is unbuildable and very expensive (nuclear) or puts them at the mercy of Russia and very expensive (nat gas/fossil fuels)

Instead of sanctions, Germany could break ground on fifty nuclear power plants tomorrow. That seems like it might actually give Russia pause.

50 nuclear plants are neither cheap or fast to be built. I don't even know if we have the supply chain in the whole world and the technical man power to build 50 nuclear plants at the same time.

Not to mention Germany had just decided to shut down all of their reactors, following Fukushima.

Yeah well, doesnt seem to be working too well for them with record high energy prices and a geopolitical situation where their hands are tied because they need to keep importing gas.

To people who understand the political and environmental implications of this it is clear that this was the most anti European move this country executed since 1939.

Germany cannot be trusted

We didn't have the capacity to produce 300K warplanes in 1939 either, but we did it by 1945. It's just excuses for those with power to as little as possible.

So? The easy fast solution is what got Europe in the position of not being able to meaningfully sanction Russia.

Yes, doing something big would require many things. Building a bunch of them at the same time would allow you to save many of the pitfalls of nuclear construction: having to redesign each one from scratch.

You’d build power plant factories, fifty of the same plant around the country/continent.

Definitely do not. There are only two companies in the world with the ability to forge the steel needed for reactor hulls, iirc. One is in Japan and has a massive backlog of orders. The other? It's Russian.

And then built them the next 200 years?

Stuttgart 21 is still in construction and the Berlin airport took way longer than expected. And these projects don't have the same severe consequences if the construction is botched.

Not to mention attacks.

Europe has lost the hands and the knowledge to do that due to neglect over 30+ years. In order to be able to do such a thing, you need to educate a steady pipeline of people to become professionals that can handle the job. As for contractors who could actually be available for hire to handle this, Korea and Japan come to mind, but both are probably booked out well into the foreseeable future.

When you build a reactor, you probably don't want "first-timers" working on the project for you.

Germany is closing their nuclear power plants and increasing dependence on gas for "environmental" reasons - so this isn't happening.

This the most nonsensical argumentation they could ever use.

Given Germany's track record in screwing Europe (on top of shutting down nuclear power plants, have a look at the damage Gerhard Schroeder did) this country is dangerous to other EU members.

France recently announced they’re building 14 new reactors. By 2050. It’s not a short term solution.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/feb/10/france-to-buil...

This is a popular view on HN. I have never understood why.

Wind and solar are the cheapest sources of power. A decades long propaganda campaign has tried, but failed, to cover that up.

Yet this zombie opinion persists in certain political bubbles that get their information from fossil fuel interests.

And now, when one of those fossil fuel interests invades another nation, the prime culprit is... renewable energy? And it's used as an excuse to talk about how utterly indespendible natural gas is, even though experts want us to dump it as fast as possible? Isn't that oddly convenient for Putin, who seems really well liked by all the same people who tell obvious lies about climate change.

Wow, that’s impressively disconnected from reality.

The reason why Germany and indirectly most of Europe hasn’t stopped buying gas from Russia is because, despite being a massive (the most massive?) solar and renewable economy, those don’t work very well during the winter.

I’m literally pointing out the emperor has no clothes which is why they’re freezing?

If they were in a climate with better insolation and more predictable renewable sources, then they’d probably be fine. But they aren’t.

If they had adequate storage to deal with peak energy demand during minimum insolation, or had another adequate source, then they would have cut Russia off years ago. But they don’t.

They used to, but they have been shutting them down and not building replacement capacity.

Instead they’re paying out the nose and scrambling because they don’t have viable options, and resisting the political motions they would otherwise do because Russia has them over a barrel.

> The reason why Germany hasn’t stopped buying gas from Russia is

The reason why Germany hasn't stopped buying gas is because there are 12 million gas heaters spread across the country, heating 20 million homes (nearly 50% of housing).

We currently bring up 150k heat pumps a year (mostly in new developments). At that rate it takes some 60-80 years to convert all existing gas guzzling real estate over to electric heating.

> because, despite being a massive (the most massive?) solar and renewable economy, those don’t work very well during the winter.

Last I checked it's winter and we just broke wind power records, multiple times in a row. Wind power has approximately the same installed capacity as solar (60GW each). But it still doesn't help those gas heaters keep people warm.

Another reason why those gas heaters are still there is because even with those wind and solar numbers, it can’t replace the amount of energy those gas heaters are using - and Germany is already charging insane rates for electrical power. And those numbers are peak, during good conditions. There will be lulls in the wind, clouds, etc. coming over and over again.

What then?

The main reason _this_ house (in Germany) still heats with gas is because it's nigh-impossible to book the professionals who can install a heat pump and modernize the rest of the heating system in a sensible time frame.

As mentioned by another comment: even if we were to send all that gas used for heating into gas turbines instead and use the generated electricity to operate the heat pumps, we'd use less gas (because it's using environmental heat energy in addition to the intrinsic energy of the gas).

That brings the bonus that we could look into alternative power sources (of whatever kind: I'm sure France would be more than happy to assist bringing up nuclear reactors again, although that's unlikely to happen in Germany for a whole bunch of reasons) when gas is difficult to obtain because electricity is electricity.

But apparently we don't have a sufficient number of people who could do the installation, plus it'd be expensive, and even discounting that, I'm not sure if "We need 12 million heat pump systems. Next quarter?" is something that could _possibly_ work even under normal circumstances (nevermind the supply chain issues we're currently dealing with globally).

That's why I brought up the 150k installed units per year: There's probably room for improvement (I've been thinking that there must be a very profitable career in heating installations), but even if we can install 600k a year, we're still looking at 20 years before we get all the old cruft converted.

Let’s say all non-trivial natural gas usage (for simplicity) is heating, and due to heat pumps you could reduce energy required to 1/3 of the energy currently provided by burning natural gas (and at 100% efficiency)

you’re still looking at about 4 trillion kWh of energy/yr (possibly a month - hard to get good data) that would be needed to do that switch.

most of it during winter.

Germany currently produces a little over 500 billion kWh of electrical energy a year.

So to replace natural gas for heating in this scenario, Germany would need to produce 9x the electrical power it currently produces. Most of it during the winter.

And not having enough production would kill people.

It isn’t a matter of not having enough heat pumps or people to install them, that’s just the immediate road block if you individually wanted to switch.

It’s a fundamental economic issue that would require investment on a scale heretofore not considered outside of world wars. And maybe not even then.

Right now, we don’t even know of a storage technology that could even work at that scale, let alone what it would cost to do it.

And depending on which way climate changes go, the size of storage needs to be potentially arbitrarily large. The more uncertainty you have, the larger it needs to be.

Unlike a fossil fuel, we don’t have (essentially) arbitrarily large reserves we can pull from, it all has to be made and stored in advance by the same infrastructure that produces your normal production.

As I wrote: Even turning gas into electricity would reduce the amount of gas required. Which might make buying from other suppliers more realistic. Or reduce the amount of cash sent towards Russian military spending. Plus, no matter what is ultimately done, we'd gain flexibility.

The "gas boiler in every second home" scheme locks us into gas to a degree that even "a natural gas burning turbine in every city" wouldn't. But locked in we are.

The push for renewables or the rejection of nuclear power plants is orthogonal to why Germany is stuck with Russian gas.

It would trade gas burned with capex - and that capex is very, very high, as you’d need to spend more on turbines and electrical transmission gear than all of Germany’s existing electrical grid. Many times over most likely.

It seems to me that the whole gas debacle between Germany and Russia has been foretold for the last 20 years. That'd have been a good time to start booking the contractor. And I'm really baffled as to why Germany is shutting down nuclear power plants _in the midst of all this_. Is the public opinion's balance so much in disfavour of nuclear vs. peace in Europe?

The plan to shut down nuclear power plants is from 2000 and ended a (for German terms) fierce societal debate. It was delayed a bit in 2010 (and then un-delayed a smaller bit in 2011 following the Fukushima incident), but the plan has been in force for 22 years.

By now, even the power plant operators aren't very interested in keeping them running for longer because they already planned to turn them off and dismantle them. Keeping them on for longer means a significant investment to them, for unknown benefit as the societal rift will inevitably break open again. They might invest (so they can continue to operate things safely), delay the dismantling (probably also costs money because they likely started hiring companies already), only to be told a year later to shut things down again (all that money for nothing).

An issue in that has been that renewables build-up has been all but sabotaged politically in the last years, and that storage technology didn't develop as well as estimated, making gas necessary as a peak load compensation mechanism, "hopefully" temporarily. Gas turbine operators are whining for years that they're operating at a loss but they're forced to continue to operate (getting the loss just about compensated I think) to ensure the grid's safety.

Other than _that_, gas is mostly used for heating which is a distinct system. As such, any consideration of "nuclear vs. gas dependency in Germany" is something that seems to be mostly discussed outside Germany: No matter how many nuclear power plants we keep up, gas boilers just don't run on electricity (except for their controller module).

As for booking a contractor 20 years ago: There are funding programmes to encourage folks to go for heat pump systems and other modernizations. The last electricity heating system that was widely deployed in Germany _was_ horribly inefficient, which is no surprise with technology that was already old in the 70s, and the idea "electricity for heating is a waste" has stuck. The political sabotage that I mentioned extended to not really caring about correcting such misconceptions.

When it comes to dollars and cents, I think the past few days have made it clear that Western Europe cares a lot less about peace in Eastern Europe than the hopes and prayers rhetoric would have you think.

There is absolutely no chance you can heat germany on solar in the middle of a cold night in winter. None.

According to the analysis, the price of electricity in Germany, adjusted for purchasing power, is 45-dollar cents (39-euro cents) per kilowatt-hour. This not only puts German electricity costs as the 15th highest of all the countries included, but it also means Germany has the third-highest electricity prices in the EU... The data included in the study refers to the second quarter of 2021, and so does not take into account the surge in prices consumers in Germany are currently facing.

or look here:

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

As mentioned in the other follow-up: Even using gas turbines + heat pumps would reduce the required amount of gas due to using environmental energy.

And then there's wind (as mentioned: we just broke records. In winter. At night.), and water (to some minor degree). And theoretically a comeback of nuclear (won't happen). Or hydrogen storage. Or fusion, or whatever. The good thing about electricity is that it doesn't care where it comes from, and there are many different kinds of sources.

On the other hand: Natural gas boilers require natural gas, and so far we don't have methods to synthesize it from electricity - or anything else - at scale. The main argument in their favor is that they're installed: a pretty important argument though.

Peak production (broke a new record) != worst case production.

When the consequence of not having enough production is people literally freezing to death, worse case production matters.

Germany is actually a world leader in making climate friendly biogas.

https://www.worldbiogasassociation.org/wp-content/uploads/20...

But yeah, big picture, gas is a poor choice for home heating, and should be phased out for health, cost and carbon reasons.

Pretty much the same order of countries as this list of cigarette prices:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/415034/cigarette-prices-...

I wonder what secret tech Bulgaria, Poland, Hungary and other nations at the bottom of both lists have that makes both electrical power and cigarettes so cheap to produce? You'd think their neighbours would ask them to install it for them in order to access cheap electricity and cigarettes.

There is also (last I looked, in Berlin) a double digit percentage tax on electrical power usage. Not sure what the tax is on gas, because my building didn't have it.

My theory is that nuclear worked best in Sim City and that's where most of us draw our governmental experience from.

Nuclear works well and economically in many countries around the world. You're just acting like everyone with a different opinion is an idiot.

>Wind and solar are the cheapest sources of power. A decades long propaganda campaign has tried, but failed, to cover that up.

Even if Wind and Solar could supply 100% of demand tomorrow, we cannot convert all uses of oil and gas quickly. Renewables may be the future, but they are not today. The attempts of some misguided politicians to reduce Western extraction* of fossils merely subsidize Putin and dictators like him.

* As opposed for attempts to reduce demand and switch supply to clean fuels which are useful.

> "Decades long propaganda campaign"

And the reality is, even if nameplate capacity is sufficient - effective capacity is not often enough it would be foolhardy to depend on it during the winter.

Natural Gas has a mind blowing amount of thermal energy, and per unit is essentially free compared to anything else. 42-45MJ/kg.

Near as I can tell, Germany imported 119 billion cubic meters of natural gas in Jan/Feb of last year. A cubic meter of natural gas has approximately 38MJ of energy in it, so that is around 4.5 x 10^18 joules of energy or 1.2 x 10^13 kWh. Something like 12 trillion kWh.

About 40% of that was from Russia (near as I can tell).

Natural gas and Electric heating probably have similar end efficiencies (taking into account electric transmission losses).

You seem a really big fan of natural gas.

Have you heard of heat pumps? If you burn the gas in electricity plants you can get 3x the efficiency of burning gas for heat. So if the heating power of gas is that impressive to you, then renewable backed heat pumps must be about 10x as impressive.

You can even hook them up to the nuclear plants that you were supposedly advocating for before this turned into a love letter to natural gas, Russia's biggest export.

I’m far from a fan of natural gas - I’m a realist.

Have you run the numbers on capex to switch everyone to heat pumps, or looked at available grid capacity required if everyone switched?

I’m not saying it’s impossible period - I’m saying no one is being realistic about the cost or trade offs, and seems to be under the delusion that some (most of the time) fanciful faceplate capacity number and cheap price for one part of the story means everything is solved.

It’s time to do the math.

Electricity prices would be 50 cents+ if germany converted to all electric now and banned gas generation of electricity. This is on the order of a few trillion in extra cost per year (even assuming amazing efficiencies in going electric).

Near as I can tell, price could be infinite and it wouldn’t matter. Even using heat pumps, the energy required is multiples higher than all current electrical energy produced or transmitted in Germany.

The replacement for nuclear and gas for heating is basically a big capital cost to convert blast ovens / furnaces etc to electric power. Then you need to replace gas and nuclear with wind / solar + battery storage.

Let's say you can get $600/kwH for storage? If you need to cover let's say 18 hrs of energy needs (electricity and heat using electricity) that would give a sense of capital cost for the storage portion of the solar + wind package for germany as a whole? This excludes cost of conversion of course across the rest of things.

This push to dump nuclear and gas for wind / solar is going to come eventually, just not clear we are there yet in available supply / cost etc.

So I don't think its infinite, but extremely high and not overnight.

Germany currently uses about 530 billion kWh of electrical energy a year. If we assume that is evenly spread across the year (it isn’t), and we’d only need a single day to cover worst case needs (really you’d want a week probably), that is a billion kWh of storage, or $600 billion at $600 kWh. Hard to say real costs, I see numbers from $200 to $800 depending on what would be included.

If you convert natural gas heating to electric (using efficient heat pumps), that adds roughly 9x the energy needs. So $5.4 trillion. And that is just to cover average ‘overnight’, with a little buffer. If there is a problematic couple days during winter? People would freeze to death.

Energy needs would likely be more ‘peaky’ during winter, so these would need to go up a bit to deal with the spikes, but it’s probably order of magnitudeish correct.

The current German population is about 83 million, so that would only be about $65,000 for every man woman and child in Germany for the minimal best case storage needs.

For realistic ‘no mass casualty events due to lack of available heat energy every other year’, it would probably need to be 3-4x higher at least.

To protect against a 100 year storm or the like, 7-10x is probably a better idea. But I doubt anyone would ever pay that.

Europe has had plenty of time since the last Russian expansion into the Ukraine. A hard future commitment to finance renewable technology now would give Russia more pause now than sanctions that don't stop SWIFT, or temporarily halt of SWIFT. Part of what gives the large fiscal buffer to Russia is that they're one of the largest fossil fuel producers in the world.

I intentionally separated extracting fossils from fossil demand reduction. We should definitely reduce fossil demand for too many reasons, and investing in renewables can help by switching demand.

However, the attempts to reduce fossil extraction don't help the climate (the West just imports from some dictatorship which doesn't care), and ironically have their own negative externality.

The cost of wind and solar skyrockets when you factor in the need for energy storage, since neither of those sources operate 24/7.

What future? after russia invades hungary or poland or ... ?

Russia won't invade a NATO country. It's not going to happen. Speculating about it does nothing because if that actually happened, we would be entering WWIII.

I think the fact that SWIFT can't be used now, shows that it can never be used, it is not a weapon at all as it is thought to be. Even minor cases like the temporary blockade of iran had small impact.

I'm worried this is optimistic but ultimately misguided thinking.

Russia is invading Ukraine because Putin knows that the consequences of invasion will be small relative to his perceived benefits. NATO/"The West" will not risk a larger confrontation over Ukraine.

Unfortunately, I think that same conclusion extends to the smaller NATO countries. Will the rest of NATO really risk a nuclear war if Russia decides to invade one of Latvia/Lithuania/Montenegro/Estonia? As recently as last year, the US had an anti-NATO President. This could happen again in the near future. If it does, Putin will be emboldened to continue expanding Russia's sphere of influence.

No, NATO is absolutely the redline and even the smallest nato baltic countries usually have allied troops stationed there. To think NATO wouldn't defend a member state is completely unrealistic and that's one of the reasons this entire conflict started. If ukraine joins NATO it becomes untouchable, even for putin, hence why they were willing to support the donbass rebels and escalate to a war now. If putin was just going for the easiest target and didn't mind NATO, ukraine is hardly the weakest target in the area.

Once you attack a NATO member you are almost automatically at war with all the members of the alliance and you'll probably have to face already present nato troops as soon as the war starts.

I understand the theory of what you are saying, NATO as an alliance is focused around the "red line". However, in practise, will the US/UK/etc risk a nuclear war over Montenegro? Even today, with Biden and Boris in command, the answer in not clear. With a potential future anti-NATO Commander in Chief there is even more doubt.

Would you say this if Trump was still POTUS? I seriously wonder if the US didn't support NATO actions whether NATO would remain whole.

Yes, because he was still very actively supporting the countries bordering russia. He didn't like the structure of NATO but that's mostly because he wanted more involvememt from European countries, not less. I don't think any president would actually back off a nato member getting attacked.

This is the theory, but let's be honest: will Western politicians really risk a direct armed confrontation with Russia - when the latter almost openly threatens to escalate (hinting at WMD) if anyone intervenes - over, say, Latvia?

Actually, that's not the right question, because Europe by itself doesn't have the military strength to escalate. So it'll be down to American politicians and American voters.

> To think NATO wouldn't defend a member state is completely unrealistic and that's one of the reasons this entire conflict started.

Depends how defending looks. I can see some drone strikes, some bombing runs, but the danger of it escalating to a nuclear war is would be high.

I just don’t believe Americans would accept turning their cities to glass to save Lithuania.

Now I understand, pretending they would, makes the deterrent work. But I hope nobody tries to call the bluff on that one.

i agree, will NATO think Montenegro is worth global nuclear war? i'm not sure.

The question shouldn't be "will NATO risk war over Latvia," but rather "will NATO risk war over NATO." Because if the mutual defense pact is not upheld, NATO is shown to be utterly worthless.

Only if you assume that all members are actually equal. If there's de facto first-class and second-class membership (e.g. those who joined before USSR collapsed, and those who joined after), then countries in the first group might be willing to give up as many of the second group as needed to avoid an all-out confrontation.

Regardless , then that will prove NATO has outlived its use and is no longer a organization worth having.

That, again, depends on which group you're in...

> Will the rest of NATO really risk a nuclear war if Russia decides to invade one of Latvia/Lithuania/Montenegro/Estonia?

American here. Yes. Fuck with us. Please.

Biden is our president right now and his temperament does seem to be less than what is required.

> As recently as last year, the US had an anti-NATO President.

There's a lot fucked up about NATO and its post Soviet history, including our recent president. However, it was largely neglected and America was bearing the brunt of its cost and few of its benefits. Seeking to make it more equitable and discouraging Russian energy dependence is not the same as being "antiNATO".

The next is most likely Moldova, as it is not in NATO and has a large pro-Russian separatist movement, funded by Russia for the last 30 years.

Ill thought denuclearization?

They are expensive and unsafe especially if you think about sabotage, not to mention the most recent problem with reactors.

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/counterfeit-parts-pr...

I actually wonder if the anti-nuclear sentiment in the EU might have been partly Russia's doing, we know how much they like to influence other countries' public opinion. Getting Germany to turn off its nuclear reactors to rely more heavily on Russian gas before an invasion of Ukraine would make a lot of tactical sense.

Here in Germany many small independent journalists were able to discover the industrial figures regularly interacting/receiving gifts, trips, stock certificates from Rosneft executives and oligarchs who are essentially actors for Russian government.

but still people seem genuinely shocked and continue to fall back on their myopic cold war view of the geopolitical european landscape by their mainstream media (without any suspicion or question of the narrative) it seems largely the result of being separated by the Atlantic ocean and a bulk of European countries that the average American cannot name.

Already I can see people from Poland and EU countries furiously downvoting and flagging my comments as "Russian Propaganda"

None of this is a surprise to us here in Germany, our relationship with Russia might be shocking to someone sitting in front of FOX or ABC news.

Even more shocking might be how the German elite and the working class view the Ukraine situation. To them, Ukraine was a source of worry due to its cheap labor wages and proximity to Russia would create a competing industrial center.

Even more outrageous might be how many in Germany are actually in favor of Russia's actions to take Ukraine away from EU/NATO.

It's funny to me how people still think EU can last like this.

Hey, i too am a german and can confirm, that ur comment about our politic view is completly wrong. Even former kanzlerin Angela Merkel said, that we need to stoo putin now. So please stop activly missinforming people

I see you just created another nick just to pretend to be german. Oh this is quite hilarious

We've banned this account for repeatedly breaking the site guidelines. Please don't create accounts to do that with.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Even more shocking might be how the German elite and the working class view the Ukraine situation. To them, Ukraine was a source of worry due to its cheap labor wages and proximity to Russia would create a competing industrial center.

> Even more outrageous might be how many in Germany are actually in favor of Russia's actions to take Ukraine away from EU/NATO.

Both of those are very strong claims. What are your sources?

Still loads of Europeans dont trust the US. 3 months ago Russia wasn't that bad and I'd expect most Europeans would be as happy to trade with Russia as the USA.

I think that's veering deep into conspiracy theory territory. I know it's been normalized in the past few year but Russia isn't actually to blame for everything wrong in every country. Do they take advantage of the anti nuclear sentiment since they sell gas? Yes. But is there some massive russian psyops campaign to push that narrative? No. Russian intelligence services can't be incompetent as what happened in the UK seems to indicate and yet also be super sneaky all powerful, election/narrative/social media controlling masterminds at the same time.

why is it that even in the face of evidence, people still give Russia so much benefit of the doubt? Putin has been playing chess since the early 2000s and is it so far fetched to think creating a dependence on its energy resources is definitely in his playbook at achieving its goal of attaining power and influence in the region?

I mean my god, have you not been paying attention to the migrant crisis, the funneling of Rosneft incentives to far-right political parties in Western Europe? It's all just a conspiracy to suggest these are successfully weakening the EU?

What? I'm not saying russia didn't pay off far right parties or whatever. The comment i was replying to was talking about anti nuclear sentiment. Changing public opinion to that extant would require a much much more involved process than just bribing a few officials.

It's not giving russia the benefit of the doubt, I'm just very doubtful that russian intelligence services are so competent while being much less well funded and having a lot less material reach than their american counterparts. Yet, it would be ludicrous to just assume that even the CIA could have the means to manipulate the public opinion so much that you'd get such a widespread anti nuclear sentiment in big country like germany, right? All of that without getting detected.

I thought social media manipulation was well known for a long time, just one example:

https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/09/16/1035851/facebook...

Quote:

As of October 2019, around 15,000 Facebook pages with a majority US audience were being run out of Kosovo and Macedonia, known bad actors during the 2016 election. Collectively, those troll-farm pages—which the report treats as a single page for comparison purposes—reached 140 million US users monthly and 360 million global users weekly. Walmart’s page reached the second-largest US audience at 100 million. The troll farm pages also combined to form:

- the largest Christian American page on Facebook, 20 times larger than the next largest—reaching 75 million US users monthly, 95% of whom had never followed any of the pages.

- the largest African-American page on Facebook, three times larger than the next largest—reaching 30 million US users monthly, 85% of whom had never followed any of the pages.

- the second-largest Native American page on Facebook, reaching 400,000 users monthly, 90% of whom had never followed any of the pages.

- the fifth-largest women’s page on Facebook, reaching 60 million US users monthly, 90% of whom had never followed any of the pages.

Didn't most of those kosovar/macedonian operated fake news farms turn out to be just random private citizens from those countries taking advantage of the situation instead of a massive Russian-run operation? If russia actually ran tons of pages and controlled the narrative we would've known by now using the same tools used to unmask the balkan troll farms. I'm sure some were intelligence operations but do we have proof that those really had any big influence on public discourse?

Unless you are saying that russia could do the same in the future, which I agree is possible but we would still ultimately end up knowning about it. The anti nuclear movement in europe is pretty grassroots and the fact is that we don't have any proof of substantial russian influence on that subject even if everyone is much more on the lookout (as your links indicate)

What are the odds that enough of them would spontaneously self organize in an unexpectedly coordinated attack, randomly located within the same region, in a long term persistent manner... just for fun?

Anti-nuclear sentiment long preceded social media and has far more to do with visceral images coming from traditional media sources around events like Cherynobyl, 3 Mile Island, Fukushima, etc.

It makes no sense to blame anti-nuclear sentiment on Russia. The evidence just isn't there, they happen to heavily benefit from it but the anti-nuclear sentiment but are not the primary cause.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-nuclear_movement

No idea what you are talking about.

They jumped on electronic warfare as a new type of weapon.

It costs practically nothing to get a huge effect if successful.

If I was a country with limited resources compared to the US , electronic warfare is getting massive funding because of the bang for the buck. There is no conspiracy theory, just common sense.

The anti-nuclear sentiment isn't universal in the EU, France is strongly in favor of nuclear power, for example.

Germany is one of the more vocal opponents to nuclear power. Reliance on Russian gas started in the 70s, as part of the Ostpolitik. It was a deliberate decision during the cold war under the theory that trade partners don't wage wars.

The anti-nuclear stance started in the 70s as well (although a bit later) as part of the peace movement (building nukes is comparably easy when you have all the tech around as a byproduct of civilian use. See IAEA) and went in full force after Chernobyl blew up (in some parts of Germany wild mushrooms and boar are still contaminated today). It took until 2000 to bear fruits though because the Green party ("anti-nuclear" is their reason d'être) first came to federal power in 1998.

The peace movement leaned left and there has been some Russian influence in left circles but it seems unlikely that 1970's Russia ran a "abolish nuclear so you buy more gas" campaign. If there has been any anti-nuclear campaign on their part it was aiming to keep nuclear weapons out of West Germany (none of the above surfaced in East Germany).

The 2010/2011 detour in German politics (delaying the nuclear turn down by 14 years, then mostly re-reversing the decision after Fukushima) is just a minor side note in that (net effect: it delayed the exit by ~5 years).

Denuclearization might not have helped, but we've been reliant on Russian gas a lot longer than the post Fukushima changes...

USA meanwhile 10% of oil imports are from Russia - more than from Saudi. https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pet_move_impcus_a2_nus_ep00_im0...

now that oil is so expensive shouldn't all the fracking wells come back online? i thought for sure there was a price ceiling on a barrel of oil at around $75. Maybe it happened too fast to bring that capacity back online?

For sure. $100 dollar oil makes a ton of supply profitable.

It just won't be here tomorrow though.

And 20% from Canada, it's dirty oil but I bet it could be bumped to 30%.

That's a bit different though.

Germany is mostly importing finished products (natgas) from Russia. This is like Russia sending bread to Germany and Germany is eating the bread.

Whereas Russia is sending the US unfinished products (crude). The US is then refining the crude and selling it to someone else. This is like Russia sending wheat to the US, the US making bread out of it, and then selling the bread.

It's much easier to stop baking and selling bread than it is to stop eating bread (if that is all you're eating).

I really hope all of Europe gets serious about reducing their fossil fuel consumption now that it's a short term existential threat.

> both Europe and US governments prefer their economic and electoral interests over Ukraine or the international order.

This is a natural consequence of democracy. By design, leaders of a country can't do something their voters don't agree with.

>This is a natural consequence of democracy. By design, leaders of a country can't do something their voters don't agree with.

LOL.

That is not how bureaucracy works. Most of the key positions, that have power are not voted in. Most democraties does not vote president into his position, like it is done in US. So, it has nothing to do with democracy, but bureaucracy. And bureaucracy does not have allegiance to voters, but only to their own survival. And as long as democratic society is no threat to bureaucracy, it has no reasons to stick out and do something on their own initiative.

Just another reason green energy & climate change can't be ignored.

I'm more of a hawk on CCP and Russia

But I'm a mega super hawk when it comes to spending painfully NOW to stand a chance against the worst of the worst of climate change.

It wasn’t I’ll-thought out. It was an intention decision by the chancellor Gerhard Schröder. Immediately after leaving the chancellorship, he went to work for Gazprom and oversees Nord Stream and Nord Stream 2.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerhard_Schröder

> thanks to an ill thought out denuclearization drive

It has nothing to do with this. Keeping nuclear power around would help a bit when it comes to electricity in particular, but natural gas is also used for heating and industry, where nuclear power just isn't a direct replacement.

Since most reactors are old, and would need expensive refurbishment to continue using them. It wasn't so much a choice between not denuclearizing and using gas. It was between a huge and expensive investment in mostly new nuclear capacity, vs a combination of new renewable energy and inexpensive natural gas. Since natural gas is easier to combine with renewables, and easier to gradually phase out as renewables became more mature, there was some rationality behind the decision.

Maximizing investments in renewables is probably the most important thing to do, because it's easier and faster to scale, and easier to get started with in developing countries which will be so important to avoiding increased emissions, so getting the costs down on those has huge benefits.

That said, yes, it was dumb making Europe dependent on Russian gas. I guess there was some hope that this would keep Russia in check through economic ties, but this has now obviously been proven wrong.

Despite the article being clear as most commenters don’t read them anyway and considering the amount of non sense I have been reading on HN concerning SWIFT including in this very thread, I think some precisions are needed: - SWIFT is not American. It’s a cooperative headquartered and was funded in Belgium. - SWIFT is lead by a 25 members board of directors. No country can have more than two members on the board. - SWIFT is messaging system. It’s used to pass orders and it archives them. It is not involved in own these orders are settled. SWIFT is a telex replacement. - SWIFT is useful because banks have automation in place to directly process SWIFT formatted messages. It is important because banking institutions are slow moving and conservative. From a strictly technical point of view, doing what SWIFT does outside of SWIFT is extremely easy. It’s all IP based and the messaging format is standardised. - If you read articles about the impact of being disconnected from SWIFT, you will often see the case of Iran being used as an exemple. That’s garbage. Iran was hit by US sanctions threatening repercussions on anyone doing business with them using dollars. The figure quoted is not really due to them being cast out of the SWIFT network. - CIPS actually uses the same exchange format as SWIFT but on a different network. It’s a good showcase of how easy to do it is.

The actual reason is because SWIFT gives the US/EU visibility into all inter-bank transfers, which provides us intelligence to build sanctions on top of. It's the financial equivalent of kicking Russia diplomats out of a building where we have every conference room bugged.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorist_Finance_Tracking_Pro...

That makes no sense. If Russia had an effective way to conduct its business without SWIFT in the event of sanctions, it would also have a way to conduct its business outside of SWIFT any time it has something to hide.

To follow your analogy, if they had a separate office in a separate building that they could use in the event that they get kicked out of the bugged office, they would already be using it whenever they wanted additional privacy.

The only way SWIFT actually forces Russia to be visible is if it's their only option, so no visibility can be lost if they're cut off.

Think of SWIFT like the internet. You can build your own new internet, but you also need everyone else to connect to it as well. If a Russian oligarch wants to transfer money to a Swiss bank to buy a new boat, they'd need to convince that Swiss bank to be part of the new network as well.

At a practical level, swapping out SWIFT would be like changing the engine in your car. You can do it, but doing so is time consuming and prone to risk. Running more than one at a time just isn't feasible.

>"Running more than one at a time just isn't feasible."

When it comes to money everything is feasible. Banks would use a many systems as needed and will build something on top that will make operations look uniform

>If a Russian oligarch wants to transfer money to a Swiss bank to buy a new boat, they'd need to convince that Swiss bank to be part of the new network as well.

I don't think it's about being actually able to send a message. It's having the transfer of dollars recognized. Say I send $50 million from my account at Sberbank to UBS and then try to transmit from UBS to my boat builder in the Netherlands. That won't work because UBS won't get $50 million added to their balance sheet because other banks don't recognize the Sberbank -> UBS transfer since it's not on SWIFT. To them, UBS will be trying to spend money it doesn't have and the transfers will get rejected.

In short, No SWIFT = No Dollar transfers outside the country.

Absolutely wrong. SWIFT is just a financial messaging system (secure email for banks). Transfers of USD anywhere in the world ultimately require messages to/from US banks. US regulations require that those messages disclose the ultimate payer and payee of every transfer, and US banks must follow US regulations and block transfers that violate US sanctions. US banks are free to use whatever communications channels they choose, but SWIFT is used for 99% of international transfers today. SWIFT has nothing to do with balance sheets and banks recognizing fund transfers.

>. US banks are free to use whatever communications channels they choose

They're free to choose today because they all choose SWIFT. The second they choose a Russian backed system to evade sanctions is the second they lose that privilege.

Given that, I don't see how your post shows mine to be "absolutely wrong". If anything you're supporting my point that "No SWIFT" really means "No dollar transfers".

I disagree. US law and regulations are not tied to any particular messaging system. US banks are required to know their customers, and obey OFAC sanctions lists no matter how they send/receive payment instructions. If Russian banks are sanctioned, then US banks are not allowed to send dollars to or from them no matter how they choose to communicate.

The part of you post that I was primarily objecting to was that bit about this "UBS won't get $50 million added to their balance sheet because other banks don't recognize the Sberbank -> UBS transfer since it's not on SWIFT." That makes no sense. SWIFT is just messages sent between banks, other banks don't know what messages are sent between two other banks.

>I disagree

Disagree with what exactly?

Because, as far as I can tell, your contribution has been to nitpick a hand wavey explanation. Unless you have an objection to my fundamental point that No SWIFT means No Dollar transfers then I don't see what you're contributing here.

> Think of SWIFT like the internet. You can build your own new internet, but you also need everyone else to connect to it as well.

Yes, but if you include China, Russia, Venezuela, Iran, Sudan, Syria that's like 2 Billion people.

CIPS already has big Western banks as part owners. https://www.reuters.com/article/china-banks-clearing-idUSL3N...

SWIFT is more like an AOL intranet. It only kinda works because America's global military dominance forces everyone to use it. But it's not actually as great as it could be if it was an actual internet that was open and permissionless for all to plug into.

If only we had a monetary network that was open and permissionless...

>The actual reason is because SWIFT gives the US/EU visibility into all inter-bank transfers

But like clearly it doesn't if Russia and China have their own systems. How would Swift reveal Russian/Chinese internal transactions?

Doesn't have to reveal all transactions to be of extreme value on the whole.

Given the the EU did remove all of Russian from SWIFT. A lot of these replies are looking very speculative and a bit silly -- simply imagining convoluted explanations where are none like "kicking Russia out of Swift will hurt Europe more".

Lack of traffic is also g2.

For me it looks like all of those banking / swift sanctions will mostly affect regular russian people and small businesses, who will not be able to work with foreign markets. Russian goverment will continue to trade oil and gas like nothing happenned, and will find way to trade other goods through non-Western countries like China. And sanctions regarding high-tech export will take many many months to have an effect. Honestly, it looks like western countries try to decieve people, that they are actively helping to solve this situation, but actually want to leave everything as it is.

Part of the power of sanctions are to weaken a leader's power over their people. If they lose the mandate to lead, the people may revolt and decapitate the leadership causing the issue.

People fear being jailed, tortured and having their lives ruined by its own government much more than any consequences of economic sanctions.

It hasn't worked before with Putin but people still believe that if the pressure is strong enough he will change. He clearly doesn't care and no one is going to take power from him.

It is true that that is the logic, but there are so many modern examples to show it is a flawed logic (Cuba, Iraq before the 2nd war, Venezuela, etc.). I do wish that policy makers were as open about this as they were in the early years of the Cold War, that their goal is to inflict massive pain on the population and pray for unrest. Instead, nowadays it is framed as a direct punishment on the leaders or an abstract notion like the enemy nation or their supposed ideology.

These are just falsehoods as well. America opposes Cuba and Venezuela because of socalism, not because they care about the people of those countries. The reasons for Iraq should be obvious by now.

I don't know what you think is false. I agree that the US opposed Cuba, because of socialism, and in order to counter/end socialism there, it inflicted sanctions, consciously as a means to "to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.". https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1958-60v06...

I agree that they didn't (and still don't) meaningfully care about the people of those countries. The goal of ending socialism was not to help those people (Reagan had a lot more rhetoric about fighting socialism because he cared about the people, but I think like in the Kennedy era, this was mere rhetoric). The people are merely instrumental tools.

You don't have to be pro-socialist or anti-US to believe these things, they're quite well documented.

Great.

From my first-hand experience of being under sanctions, they do the opposite.

In 2015 Visa and MasterCard banned all transactions in Crimea. It hit hardest the people who were naturally the least loyal to Putin - the upper middle class, IT professionals, and everyone who relied on receiving international payments. I don't know anyone who has changed their opinion about Putin to worse as the result, but a lot of people, myself included, changed their attitude towards West to worse. And even if sanctions will result in the fall of the regime eventually, you can be sure they will be remembered as a hostile action.

Dropping bombs on poor civilians looks bad, but starving them to death with sanctions looks good. It's humane really.

Putin was well aware of all the possible sanctions when he gave the order, so he believes that he is prepared for the consequences.

And no, it doesn't actually work like that. If the West does come up with sanctions that significantly affect the quality of life in Russia, the Russian government will simply use it as fuel for its propaganda that the West is out to get Russia (to remind, that's the stated motivation for the invasion!).

Basically Russia and China have alternatives and the west doesn't want to lose Swift's dominance.

A bit of this but mostly as others pointed out, EU nations reliant on Russian gas also happen to hold large sway over other members is what is causing reluctance to destroy their own economy to serve the interests of US security umbrella.

One EU country went as far as to remove ALL nuclear source of energy to increase dependence on Rosneft. In this same country many DO NOT WANT another Greece mooching off them and WANT putin to take Ukraine out of the picture before other EU smaller member states with US backing will demand them in.

Likely some talk took place between Xi and Putin to create a barter system, to trade Grain for Oil and vice versa. This explains why Putin is totally unphased by threats of Western sanctions because he realizes the EU's interest is not aligned with NATO/US security goals.

Think about this by supplying cheap Russian gas, they could overnight dictate where the next industrial region in Europe would form. They could sell to Berlin at several times the markup it used to receive while supplying its industrial outsourcing in other European countries with cheaper gas to force to spread out Germany's production chain.

There's just so many ways to manipulate Europe, its no longer clear who holds the ultimate veto power in Europe. Is it the nuclear armed and hesitant Western Europe nations or is it the nuclear armed and hostile Russia?

Financial sanctions just do not make an impact if a country is determined to take its national security concerns known to its enemies.

Putin is not only cunning, he is proving to be far more capable and adventurous than any other leader in the region. Like in a game of poker, fortune favors the bold, or whoever risks more stands to gain/lose more.

Kiev will fall in a few weeks and Russia has barely used its full capacity, most likely to avoid collateral damage that would impact its political objectives: decapitation of the central Ukranian authority

Maybe because of the same reason, "West" can't even not sell Gucci bags to oligarchs.

https://mobile.twitter.com/barnes_joe/status/149719400903862...

If this is true, it is quite shameful on Italy's part

This was some story from before the agreement, and it seems the story lived on. The legal text is not yet out, but you will find it on consilium.europa.eu probably later tonight and can check then.

Why is it any more shameful than German BMWs or securing Germany’s gas?

So far the Germans haven't given up anything meaningful that they don't already have. Not a cubic cm of gas has turned away. All they’ve done is delay future flows from NS2.

One of the reasons that JFK's military advisers were initially against the naval blockade of Cuba and in favor of a full invasion, is that a blockade is essentially an act of war anyway. It is a relatively modern concept to do more than use the threat of "blockade" level sanctions without a declaration of war (declarations are out of fashion, but a meaningful mutual understanding that the parties are at war).

Just like Syria, Yemen, and several other conflicts, the situation is horrendous, but from all rational perspectives, I don't think Ukraine should precipitate a war between nuclear powers. An economic blockade like the SWIFT proposal would possibly cross over into war.

Thanks for the context. Indeed it is easy to demand the most drastic measures, but, while that may feel like revenge in the short term, it might not be the best step in diplomatic terms. Diplomacy must be so frustrating at times to work in.

Yes, it's amazing how some of the people I know who are the most embedded in the field (working 10 hours a day, 6 days a week, reading updates on movements on the ground in all parts of the world, casualty lists, diplomatic messages, policy/planning papers) are outside of their work, some of the most cheerful people. It seems extremely demanding. Especially if you're good -- having to disregard most of the information and especially commentary designed for public consumption.

I think the most stark, but in a way obvious, lesson is that we should hold ourselves responsible for the predictable outcomes of our actions. It is no good to say "our enemy is evil" and do something that we can reasonably predict will lead to an "evil" action by "our enemy". (Of course you can't always minimize in this way, but it's an important point, because there are numerous recent examples where predictable outcomes were very bad, but ideology won out).

It is an act of war, but there is a huge material difference between invading and blockading.

In the Cuba context, the military thinking was that a blockade (an act of war) would lead to very quickly to a response and hence, open conflict, so why not initiate conflict with the strategic benefit of a surprise attack. The important part is that they acknowledged that a blockade was so severe, that a response was both likely and in a sense justified (though the latter is not important if you are rational).

Thankfully both leaders at least eventually recognized the cost of such a conflict and stopped following the insane logic of escalation to annihilation.

I make no equivalence between Putin's invasion and a "SWIFT blockade". I'm focusing on the foreseeable outcomes, not any sense of what is "justified".

Out of curiosity, what do you think should precipitate a war between nuclear powers? I mean, applying this principle consistently would mean that Russia can take whatever it wants in Europe, except for UK and France.

Well UK and France are both nuclear powers, so that would be war between nuclear powers. And they're NATO members, so that would be war with another nuclear power, the US, as well. Probably more, I can't remember other nuclear powers in NATO off the top of my head, but probably more again. There's no "deciding not to be at war or to go to war" in the case you present.

I'm not advocating absolutist pacifism in any way. But a nuclear exchange could conceivably end advanced civilization on Earth. There are very few test cases in history for direct armed conflict between nuclear capable forces. The only one I can think of is the Cuban missile crisis, where we were 1 out of 3 Soviet sub commanders away from a nuclear tipped torpedo being launched at a US coastal city (they were being buffeted by depth charges, so arguably under attack, and out of communication with command). I don't like those odds.

If dealing with a mostly rational and consistent nuclear opposition, it is perfectly sensible accept certain compromises in order to avoid direct conflict. If you pay attention and read history, you'll see various instances of this happening on both the NATO and Soviet (and then Russian) side over the years.

That's why I said "except UK and France". The rest of Europe doesn't have any nukes. If Russia decides to steamroll it with conventional firepower, at what point should NATO push back?

(Article 5 is not automatic, either - if some NATO country invokes it, the rest will still have to decide if they are actually willing to risk a nuclear conflict to defend against a conventional invasion.)

Speaking of paying attention and reading history, I'd say 1938-39 is the more relevant period right now.

I just totally misread that part. My mistake.

I've been wrong about how far Putin would go before, so I won't make any predictions. I think it's too early to call this a "lebensraum" maneuver, and as I keep saying, the costs of conflict are so high, that it's perfectly sensible to pursue a cautious approach, even at some cost (even to human life). Minsk 2 was somewhat dictated by Russia, but it wasn't a hugely onerous protocol, and the causes of its failure don't lie entirely with Putin -- meaning this invasion was not a fait accompli. Also, let the dust settle and see if it's more like the 1st Iraq War/Gulf War, where "just" the military and infrastructure are cruelly decapitated.

And Russia today is a middle power like the UK or France, not a great power like the US. If your analogy is apt, it could be soundly defeated in a conventional war.

It's not a Lebensraum maneuver, of course. It's reclaiming their Sudetenland, almost explicitly so if you've read the essay Putin published about Ukraine.

That’s fair, I have read that and he is pretty explicit so that analogy is appropriate. I still think Minsk 2 had a decent chance of success though.

And my experience has been that when people make allusions to Hitler, even if giving specific time ranges before his worst actions, they are making the analogy in order to say that “whatever has happened so far, it is only the beginning”. I still don’t think it will develop into “lebensraum”. Maybe you didn’t imply that, but that was largely what I thought I was responding to.

I don't think it'll develop into "lebensraum" for the simple reason that Russia doesn't have a shortage of land - on the contrary, it has a shortage of people to develop the land that it already has. Far East and Siberia offer a vast frontier for expansion, and will continue to do so for many decades to come.

What Russia is doing is reassembling its historical empire - and this is an ideological goal, not an economic one. But if it does that, it'll also want Eastern Europe as a buffer, for the same exact reason Soviets did.

The main reason why I brought up 1938 is not because I think that Russia is ideologically similar to the Nazis here, but rather that the immediate consequences will be similar to what happened back then: if Russia is allowed to invade and occupy Ukraine, it has a long list of other territories it has issues with, and there's no clear reason why it shouldn't just keep ticking things off it.

SWIFT sanctions are nothing like a blockade. A blockade is when deadly force is used to prevent trade from states willing to trade from reaching the target (or getting from the target to willing partners), not merely refusing services to facilitate financial exchanges.

The equivalency is ludicrous.

They share a lineage. And my point was that in the past, sanctions were threatened before declaration of war, and generally only implemented after a declaration of war. I haven't read the book yet, but you can find interviews with the author: "The Economic Weapon: The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War"

> Economic sanctions dominate the landscape of world politics today. First developed in the early twentieth century as a way of exploiting the flows of globalization to defend liberal internationalism, their appeal is that they function as an alternative to war. This view, however, ignores the dark paradox at their core: designed to prevent war, economic sanctions are modeled on devastating techniques of warfare.

> Tracing the use of economic sanctions from the blockades of World War I to the policing of colonial empires and the interwar confrontation with fascism, Nicholas Mulder uses extensive archival research in a political, economic, legal, and military history that reveals how a coercive wartime tool was adopted as an instrument of peacekeeping by the League of Nations. This timely study casts an overdue light on why sanctions are widely considered a form of war, and why their unintended consequences are so tremendous.

https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300259360/economic-weapo...

> America has blacklisted big Russian financial institutions, preventing its own banks from dealing with them, and imposed strict export controls. These measures are much narrower in scope than disconnecting Russia from SWIFT, but they cut more deeply.

Is that true? It sounds counter-intuitive to me, someone who uses SWIFT payments a lot but isn't at all an economist or super into foreign policy, that the US blacklisting a few big Russian banking institutions would cut deeper than the immediate and total removal from the larger payment network. But if that is indeed the case, why not both? The answer the article gives for that is "it would hurt the West's investments/position with respect to China" which, yes, makes sense, but is that pain worth it? A few decades of land wars across the European continent would do that too, right?

If Russia is cut out of SWIFT they will just use their own system, minor inconvenience at first but long term works out well for them.

A few years ago the US said they were going to forbid oil speculation and force people to accept delivery of all trades. They backtracked on that immediately when they found out Dubai was rushing to fill the gap by opening their own commodity exchange that would allow speculation.

Likewise I think the US and even the EU might talk tough about ejecting Russia from SWIFT, but won't follow through out of fear of losing control to a Russia and/or China controlled system. A lot of western countries use SWIFT to spy on each other. The US would supposedly monitor SWIFT traffic looking for transfers to Airbus and feed that info to Boeing so they could try to undercut them on price.

Alternate link to article: https://outline.com/GpZnXy

Europe gives Russia 700 million a day for petrochemicals.

They are financing the war in Ukraine, and will continue to do so, Europe makes their war donations via the swift payment system because they rely on Russian oil and gas.

The Syrian war was largely about stopping a gas pipeline planned to go through Syria from Qatar to Europe which would have challenged the Russian gas monopoly.

The Russian pipeline travels through Ukraine.

> Why the West is reluctant to deny Russian banks access to SWIFT

Possibly because the banks using it don't really understand it. After succesfuly delivering one project at Credit Suisse I was charged with implementing a SWIFT interface, but no-one, and I really mean no-one, could tell me what such an interface should look like, or how it should be used.

After a lot of mucking around at and around Canary Wharf (which did at least get me to the top of the Canada Square building a couple of times - remarkably shoddy indoors, at least on the CS floors) I came to the conclusion that this was a project that never could work, and left.

I see this more and more. When software infrastructure become mature and stable, the people who built it eventually leave or retire. You end up with systems that people use and occasionally modify, but the real understanding is gone. The ability to make big changes is reduced. Knowing what secondary effects a change may have is nearly impossible. But you can keep right on using it just fine.

It boggles my mind the endemic shortsigtedness regarding deep knowledge of systems that is shown by software owners.

Case in point, higher salaries for new hires without deep knowledge, and lack of retention salaries for those who have years of history with systems.

Another example, getting contracted consulting developers to build business critical systems, without locking in retainer arrangements to ensure continuity of deep support knowledge.

I mean it doesn't help that the developer class has a giant incentive not to make things that last

incentives tend to follow other incentives. As noted above, the best way in the industry most of the time is to move companies to get better compensation, and sometimes better workplace conditions as well. Companies don't incentivize people staying around. At bigger companies sometimes - not always though - you can make progress in these areas by getting promoted, however that only works for N percent of a workforce at any given place.

If companies incentivized retention with realistic paths to better compensation and growing your career, they'd see lower turn over with these systems.

There's a reason that in recent times there were newsworthy stories about companies giving out retention bonuses and salary increases when some sticks started to plateau / lose value (and therefore RSUs not retaining value), because its relatively rare

That's making a giant assumption that the employer considers software development to be a core operation in their business. For a lot of companies, paying for software is like paying for a copier - you buy the thing to sit in the office, maybe you pay for X years of maintenance, and when it stops working you buy another one. Maybe at a business with tons of copiers you'll have staff trained in how to maintain and repair them internally, but that's never going to be considered a core operation.

A lot of businesses treat software like copiers; they don't want to build it (because they don't consider themselves "tech"). And for a lot of the developers that make or maintain this software, there is little incentive to build it to last.

That's exactly my point. They don't have an incentive structure so that it is not treated like copiers. We are definitely on the same page here, in that sense. When I can only get 6% increases in a year to my base compensation by staying at a place and get 10, 20 sometimes even 30 % by leaving for a competitor doing a similar job, the calculus isn't hard, all things being relatively equal.

This is just an unfortunate reality, and its true beyond even tech. I have a few friends with MBA's (accountants / finance) and they say similar things about their jobs too, switching every few years to get better compensation and once their growth starts to plateau they just rinse and repeat.

Isn’t this like saying that doctors have incentives to encourage people to get sick? What am I missing?

Which is a true statement.

There are many ongoing treatments in the medical industry, and dare I say it, active suppression of permanent cures.

There are also massive side effects to many of the medical industries treatments. Ie medicine 1 alleviates condition 1, while causing condition 2 in the future. Basically making their own business at the cost of human misery.

There's massive cognitive dissonance in this situation, and most doctors never think about it that way. But people whose lives have been reduced to ongoing suffering through the system certainly have. It's not a cynical take even, it's a realistic take without the rose coloured glasses.

Note this is not saying there aren't benefits or useful features to medical industry treatments. Just that there are also anti-features, and the market incentives have created the situation we have, instead of much better and humane treatments which would be possible without the financial incentives of the medical industry.

Assuming the giant incentive you refer to is job security, constant purposeful refactors, I don't know if this theory plays out in real life. There are a lot of reasons that software tends to be brittle and short-lived, but I feel pretty confident in saying that none of the teams I've worked with have purposefully engaged in planned obsolescence.

> the people who built it eventually leave or retire.

Exactly right. At Credit Suisse I asked questions of the back-office people regarding the proposed interface that were to use it and notionally understanding it, such as:

- what are you going to do with it?

- how are you going to access it?

- why are you going to access it?

- what's the security to it?

And so on, to no avail. I had really long given up being a systems analyst, but I had to start again, to little avail.

And I had the full (crap) SWIFT message documentation. God help us if we try to bring Putin down via this route.

(Vernor Vinge, "A Deepness in the Sky")

"There were programs here that had been written five thousand years ago, before Humankind ever left Earth. The wonder of it — the horror of it, Sura said — was that unlike the useless wrecks of Canberra’s past, these programs still worked! And via a million million circuitous threads of inheritance, many of the oldest programs still ran in the bowels of the Qeng Ho system. Take the Traders’ method of timekeeping. The frame corrections were incredibly complex — and down at the very bottom of it was a little program that ran a counter. Second by second, the Qeng Ho counted from the instant that a human had first set foot on Old Earth’s moon. But if you looked at it still more closely … the starting instant was actually about fifteen million seconds later, the 0-second of one of Humankind’s first computer operating systems.

So behind all the top-level interfaces was layer under layer of support. Some of that software had been designed for wildly different situations. Every so often, the inconsistencies caused fatal accidents. Despite the romance of spaceflight, the most common accidents were simply caused by ancient, misused programs finally getting their revenge.

“We should rewrite it all,” said Pham.

“It’s been done,” said Sura, not looking up. She was preparing to go off-Watch, and had spent the last four days trying to root a problem out of the coldsleep automation.

“It’s been tried,” corrected Bret, just back from the freezers. “But even the top levels of fleet system code are enormous. You and a thousand of your friends would have to work for a century or so to reproduce it.” Trinli grinned evilly. “And guess what — even if you did, by the time you finished, you’d have your own set of inconsistencies. And you still wouldn’t be consistent with all the applications that might be needed now and then.”

Sura gave up on her debugging for the moment. “The word for all this is ‘mature programming environment.’ Basically, when hardware performance has been pushed to its final limit, and programmers have had several centuries to code, you reach a point where there is far more significant code than can be rationalized. The best you can do is understand the overall layering, and know how to search for the oddball tool that may come in handy …

… And he learned something about mature programming environments that Sura had never quite said. When systems depended on underlying systems, and those depended on things still older … it became impossible to know all the systems could do. Deep in the interior of fleet automation there could be — there must be — a maze of trapdoors. Most of the authors were thousands of years dead, their hidden accesses probably lost forever. Other traps had been set by companies or governments that hoped to survive the passage of time."

I've always thought that Sura was the smarter of the two.

I've heard similar stuff about the Dutch iDEAL [1] system. It's probably true of a lot of complex software systems. These things always remind me of Jonathan Blow's talk (I think here [2]) about the collapse of civilization.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDEAL [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko

We should de-peer the russian ISPs from the internet.

That would just further isolate working class Russians. A dictatorship doesn’t need consent of the governed to start a war so many Russian people may not approve and now you can’t even communicate with them. I think this would be incredibly short sighted.

Or take the AT&T approach: throttle their link to 14.4k

> it seems you have exceeded your allotted foreign invasions this century; we're reducing your bandwidth until your next billing cycle

Telegram would do ok at 14.4

This will just lead to a further balkanization of the internet. China and Russia aren't going to sit by and be beholden to western tech and financial stacks when they can be cut off at any time.

Nowadays dictatorships take that decision themselves. No need to impose it on them.

Who's "we"? The Internet was supposed to be decentralized from the start, to prevent actions like this.

Probably for the same reason they didn't exclude Five Eyes from SWIFT when they invaded Yugoslavia, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria and killed over 1,500,000 people in just over twenty years...lol nah it's about money. They'd shoot themselves in the foot if they did it.

It was much more than just the Five Eyes countries involved in those invasions, so there really wasn't anybody of any significance left that could have removed them from SWIFT.

That is exactly my point; you don't dig your own grave. Sanctions are only affective when it hurts someone else, not you. That however proves to be a difficult task in a globalised world.

Is there a situation where sanctions have done anything other than impoverish the general population?

Yes, the sanctions aimed at the oligarchs impoverish the oligarchs.

Impoverished or made slightly less obscenely wealthy. How many are truly penniless and only surviving through state welfare etc?

I don't know if you can call a slight reduction in an unimaginably massive fortune "impoverishment". Putin could lose tens of billions of dollars and still not be able to see poverty with a telescope.

The treaties on conflict resources and blood diamonds in particular seems to have worked fairly well in reducing the money flow to war lords. It seems about as effective as arm trade regulations. Naturally it is impossible to prove if either is effective since we can't run a control group with identical circumstances.

For better or worse I think that is often the plan. First, presumably the government cares about the welfare of its people. Second it can make the people unhappy with the government.

That sure seems to have worked out well in North Korea and Iran and Cuba and also the last time we tried it with Russia. The presence of external threats, in general, tend to strengthen support for dictators rather than to weaken them.

Surely it has? All those countries are crippled economically and only get attention on a global stage by saber rattling or when they decide to start looking to negotiate their way out.

I hardly think Kim Jong Un has "strengthened support" from NK citizens, bar the top elite. They just get shot if they step out of line.

Iran has a similar environment of fear, though not as totally controlling.

I'm not sure what Cuba is like for political repression, but the people are hardly supportive of the government as i understand it.

For what its worth, i don't believe imposing sanctions on Iran/Cuba is reasonable now. With the right diplomacy Iran looks to want to come to an agreement, and Cuba is no threat to anyone.

Russia is in a better position while they have support from China. But there is still an affect. Also, i don't think it's possible to happily trade with Russia as if they were an ally while Putin grabs land from other eastern European countries.

Right, but it hasn't actually accomplished anything other than making their populations suffer. Every single one of these regimes are still around. The sanctions haven't succeeded in anything other than making the countries more miserable places to live in.

If the premise was that the governments would care about their people and give in, or the people would turn on their governments, then no, that's just not happened.

Just to make a counter point, we only know when this doesn't work. We don't know the times people relied in diplomatic solutions rather than suffer these consequences.

Sanctions are pretty publicly visible.

Saber rattling by Cuba?

The oil embargo against the US improved car fuel economy.

How about the sanctions on Iran to try to get them to stop pursuing nuclear weapons?

They made a deal to stop in exchange for removal of sanctions. That worked for a while but then a few years later the US reimposed sanctions claiming that the deal was not working (but was unable to cite any evidence to support this), so this time the sanctions provide no incentives.

The idea, as I understand, is that it's better to impoverish the population than to kill them (and us) in open warfare. It's not something we want to do.

What is the alternative?

More than the alternative system, the immediate problem appears to be that Europe is so badly dependent on Russian gas that cutting off swift will be a suicide for Europe.

Europe needs to move to renewables for residential and industrial use ASAP.

Or be more like France: about 70% nuclear generation of electricity.

Still dependent on gas pipelines to North Africa, but also building out its LNG infrastructure so it can buy from more sources.

They’re heavily promoting heat pumps for heating, but that also comes along with increased A/C use in a country that seems to culturally avoid it (in my depressing experience).

Curious to hear about how A/C use is culturally avoided. Is it seen as a negative social status signal to have the convenience? Or is the environmental impact a consideration?

iunno, more people than I could imagine there think air conditioning makes you sick.

To the point of opening windows on the highway instead of turning on the a/c that’s there.

My sample is limited, but it’s thinking I’ve never encountered in North America.

Having said that, construction usually has excellent shutters on windows, so you can block the sun effectively. Covered outdoor parking is common at malls in the south. Being and staying cool are encouraged, but a/c often isn’t.

EU reportedly has 40% of it gas imports from Russia. However, the European Commission President has already stated that EU is prepared for partial disruption of gas flow https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/eu-says-it-is-prepared-...

Solidarity towards Ukraine by EU, would be to step up and proceed with blocking Russia from the SWIFT system.

The thing is, such a decision would impact EU citizens negatively in the short-medium term. And I think that level of solidarity is a hard sell, and hard to quickly measure support for, within each country's electorate.

The other issue, for Germany, is that removing them from SWIFT would be like clearing Russia's billions of debt obligations.

If there was any moment for EU to swallow a hard pill, would be now, and cut of gas import, rather than try to get consensus on blocking SWIFT access. It's the perfect time to apply that form of economical pressure, especially now that we're having a bit of early spring weather (though uncertain how long that will last).

Not sure about Cyprus, and others opposing the measure, what negative implications it would have for them and why they decided the way they did.

We are in such a bind almost only because the geniuses in charge of climate and energy policy in Germany thought it was a good idea to close all their nuclear capacity and replace it with intermittent renewables. The instability was to be plugged with cheap russian gas imports. The solution is not clean wind and solar (which will fail when you get less wind and less sun, as in last September for example), but nuclear and mass electrification of heating systems.

The article discuss the benefits and drawback of SWIFT being the dominating banking system in the world, and the risk that cutting of Russian banks from it would encourage the other banking systems to take over. What I find missing from the article is that primary intention of wanting to cut off Russian banks from SWIFT, ie stopping trade between Russia and other countries. In particular, stopping Germany and Italy, the two countries most dependent on Russian oil and natural gas.

If the world want to stop countries from trading with Russia, have a trade agreement that imposes sanctions to anyone trading with Russia and goods that comes from Russia. Right now the oil and gas from Russia is just as bloody as blood diamonds.

Oil from Saudi Arabia is no less bloody. The Yemen war is dragging on for another year, and the civilian toll is unbelievable. I don't think the concept of justice is the primary motivator here, or at the very least, it's an utterly compromised sense of justice.

This is a bunch of words around "it would be inconvenient for us because we allowed ourselves to become economically dependent on a criminal state". In particular Germany gets a gold (red?) star for shutting down their nuclear plants.

Meanwhile the Chinese Communist Party has to be enjoying this. If we can't agree to take the relatively minor hit of financially cutting Russia off from the civilized world, we'll obviously be unwilling to do anything significant when they invade Taiwan.

TSMC probably already has all their facilities mined.

It doesn't take much, to turn a fab into a junk heap. You just need to break the clean room containment, and you have a billion dollars' worth of permanently useless garbage.

Heck, just turning off power would probably do it, but they'd want to be sure.

I actually have a story, from the company I worked for, that supplied lithography stuff (big, expensive steppers).

They need to maintain clean room standards from the first framing, to the final delivery (special airplanes and trains).

They delivered a set of them to a company that then went belly-up.

The power was turned off, and the equipment became junk.

TSMS is not the reason China wants Taiwan, and there is more to Taiwan than TSMC: a wonderful people, a thriving liberal democracy, and great local culture, for example. I understand why there is so much focus on HN on TSMC, but it's disheartening to observe the lack of realization that we are not just talking about a fab on a rock, but about human beings.

That’s a very good point.

People, in general (not just HN geeks), tend to have difficulty looking at other folks as “human.” This applies to our next-door neighbors; let alone, people in a distant nation.

I appreciate your making that point.

But TSMC is a very big fab on a rock…

Russia has been pushing BTC on RT for a while now. Seems related.

That would push the price up.

Counter-move: Will this precipitate the banning of Bitcoin by/in the US?

That would push the price down.

(Simultaneously, possible rate increases also tend to push the price down.)

I was asking in some forums a few days before the invasion whether Russia would start pumping money into crypto, especially things like Monero. The response I got (aside from accusing me of selling crypto, even though I don't own any), was that it's seen as too unstable and too unpredictable an asset for oligarchs and so forth to put their money into.

Switzerland also indicated they weren't doing anything about sanctions. There's other tax havens out there as well.

That seemed like a good point to me; why put your money in bitcoin or Monero when you could put it into gold, or keep your money in a Swiss account?

I'm sure these oligarchs have very solid ways of laundering money.

On the other hand, maybe this will be just the sort of thing that kicks of practical reasons for use of crypto. Today there's articles about huge donations to Ukraine in the form of BTC, so who knows.

Switzerland is imposing their own sanctions, and will make sure that Switzerland cannot be used to circumvent EU & US sanctions. https://twitter.com/BorisBusslinger/status/14972053992290222...

> maybe this will be just the sort of thing that kicks of practical reasons for use of crypto

There's already practical uses for crypto for exactly the same reasons you think there will be. All those uses currently exist and people are using them for that, no SWIFT lockout needed.

My understanding is that the US is okay doing it.

The ones that are blocking this are Germany and Italy. Even France (where I am) said okay, even though our economic interests in Russia are quite big (I read that France companies are in total one of the largest foreign employer in Russia, la Société Générale owns a big Russian bank, and some of our energy companies have interest in Russia).True we don't depends as much on the gas.

Germany, I'm so disappointed in you :(

What’s more interesting to me is why the whole world is so energy deficient that they cannot stop using Russian oil. IMHO that was the first mistake.

It isn't that the whole world is energy deficient (in any real sense), it's that key modern economies have become reliant on specific sources, and interruptions in those sources make them very vulnerable to very expensive impacts. So they're blackmailable.

And lots of cheap energy and global trade is almost like heroin for dealing with internal problems and social ills - no need to confront inefficiencies, figure out sane monetary policies, have hard conversations on hard topics, etc.

So a lot of countries have pent up BS that will tear them apart when the heroin (I mean oil) stops flowing.

International strongarm politics 101.

I have absolutely no expertise on this subject, but I think an effective approach would be to isolate and financially cripple the wealthy people who surround him.

Make them hurt finally; basically make their "wealth" irrelevant outside of Russia. Lock down all their assets and ban them from entering the country (UK/US/many EU states).

If a large group of powerful, very wealthy people suddenly find their luxury life threatened because of the small-man complex of one person, they will turn on that person - directly or more likely secretly. There must be enough people with enough money to collectively carry out a leadership replacement action. Add the "will of the people" who also don't want this war, and it should be easier to remove the source of the problem than to fight head on.

To clarify, cutting the entire country off from SWIFT would be a clumsy approach when targeted measures could be taken as I suspect above.

SWIFT is WhatsApp for payments. It doesn't move money, it moves messages concerning the movement of money. The alternative to SWIFT for banks is picking up the phone and calling the other bank to setup a transfer, or setting up a private API between banks.

The West is doing a great job at ignoring the fact that the Ukrainians are bullies themselves:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_policy_in_Ukraine#Ukr...

Non Europeans also have trouble understanding that without Russian gas a lot of people would be without heating and Ukrainians don't care about that(their politician said so), but expect Europeans to care about them.

The US is also quite allergic to armed neighbours, see Cuban Missile Crisis.

From any adversary’s perspective, the ability to shut them out is as good as shutting them out. They need to prepare an alternative solution.

The moment the SWIFT system became political, it was already doomed, and the petrodollar along with it.

To paraphrase Hanlon's razor "Don't confuse reluctance with incompetence". The US is a rat's nest of different interests; it is too internally divided to fix hard problems. There are always wealthy political donors who control enough politicians to prevent a good solution. At this point, the US can only put lipstick on its incompetence. I do feel sorry for Ukraine but the GOP represents 40+% of the US electorate and they are now a cult rooted in disinformation (and supported by Russia). A nation this divided can't save itself; how can it save anyone else?

The funny thing about the America-divided narrative is that the majority of liberal-leaning American opiners fall back on that same explanation (and then sprinkle on some paranoia about the vast reach of Russian disinformation for good measure). Maybe a rat’s nest of different interests but still suprisingly united ideologically.

You posit that "the majority of liberals-leaning American"s hold the same beliefs in the "America-divided narrative" and yet conclude that everyone is "surprisingly united ideologically". That seems like a contradiction but it's possible we just disagree on what is ideologically important. For example, I think it is important that 74m Trump supporters think Trump is honest and an equal number of Trump haters think he is dishonest.

How do you think liberals-leaning and conservative-leaning Americans are united ideologically?

You’re right. I didn’t communicate that well.

Because the US is no longer the dominant economic force, nor the dominant military force (perhaps larger but spread too thin).

We watched the USSR waste itself in Afghanistan, and then the US did the same thing. And just as public opinion was the lowest on the war, after a botched exit, Putin attacks Europe.

The US should not have been in Afghanistan or Iraq, but oil companies said yes. It should be on the ground in Ukraine, but it can't because it is spent.

On the subject of military power, Arther C Clarke's Superiority [1] is a great short story. "It shows the side which is more technologically advanced being defeated, despite its apparent superiority, because of its willingness to discard old technology without having fully perfected the new. Meanwhile, the enemy steadily built up a far larger arsenal of weapons that while more primitive were also more reliable." Ironically, the "advanced" technology isn't advanced anymore: the weapons are out of date. But they still manage to be expensive.

The US knows this, and they can do nothing. All the screaming and howling in the media is just propaganda. They have already agreed to cede Ukraine.

Putin already won the war electronically. The US is hopelessly divided. The nation that once put a man on the moon, that dominated science, now has radicalized citizens call in bomb threats to hospitals because they wont treat a patient with ivermectin. 50% of the population believe that the election was rigged. No surprise that Trump supports Putin. The US can't agree on whether covid is real, how can it keep promises it made to Ukraine?

The US is a failed power. It is like the UK after it lost its empire: delusional.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superiority_(short_story)

> It should be on the ground in Ukraine, but it can't because it is spent.

Should it? That's not a foregone conclusion. Your justification for why it "can't" is also quite debatable.

> Meanwhile, the enemy steadily built up a far larger arsenal of weapons that while more primitive were also more reliable." Ironically, the "advanced" technology isn't advanced anymore: the weapons are out of date.

How so, can you expand on justification for this line of thinking?

> 50% of the population believe that the election was rigged.

Not true, but I agree with your overall idea about the extreme levels of division.

> how can it keep promises it made to Ukraine?

What promises? If you're referencing denuclearization in the Budapest Memorandum, my understanding that it was not an assurance of protection from third parties, only an assurance of non-aggression from each signatory. Meaning the US made no guarantee to protect Ukraine from Russia if Russia broke the pact, which they have. Do you have any reason for disagreeing with that assessment?

I dunno much about this, but I saw a tweet from someone I trust that described SWIFT in HVAC terms as the thermostat, and the new sanctions like blocking off the ductwork for a specific room; more targeted, still painful, and pulling the thermostat wouldn't do much more. [0]

[0] https://twitter.com/daniel_mcdowell/status/14969850312057036...

The difference b/w SWIFT and CIPS is the recently discussed "freedom to transact". In China you're beholden to CCP. If they get "tired" you can be cut off and there is nothing you can do about. In the west you have somewhat functional legal system you can follow up with.

Paywall Removed: https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.economist.com%2Fth...

I actually pay for the economist, journalism costs money and it’s not that expensive to sign up. Great app that reads the stories to you if you’re doing something else.

Expensive is relative to the person, there are plenty of people from developing world here. Even with economist discounts and student pricing it could be expensive for someone.

Oh, people should be allowed to take it for free then?

Don't judge someone just because you can afford it .

Economist allows this type of bypass, it is not fully paywalled locked down by their choice, and have full control on how their content should be consumed and shared.

They are fully aware of this kind of use and they are okay with it, don't know why any one should be concerned.

There's no shortage of good news sources...there is a shortage of personal budget. And a shortage of time to consume all of them.

There's been a lot of talk if the West does this Putin would react by waging an ongoing cyber war against the US. There's been plenty of articles about how they've been hacking US infrastructure for years now.

I think the fear of a cyber war is stopping them right now.

https://www.wired.com/story/sandworm-cyclops-blink-hacking-t...

ANY APPEARANCE OF a new tool used by Russia's notorious, disruptive Sandworm hackers will raise the eyebrows of cybersecurity professionals braced for high-impact cyberattacks. When US and UK agencies warn of one such tool spotted in the wild just as Russia prepares a potential mass-scale invasion of Ukraine, it's enough to raise alarms.

That seems unlikely to work. Russia will probably just attack because it can and will just deny it even in the face of undeniable evidence.

> So, instead, we have an hour-long technical discussion where I ask them questions about web vitals, accessibility, the browser wars, and other similar topics about the web.

I'd dramatically prefer a good programmer that needs to learn something new over a poor programmer applying the knowledge they already have. I've never come across a perfect interview question, but the goal should be to focus more on problem solving than knowledge.

I've been out of web development for a while so the article was an interesting review/update, though.

Did you reply to the wrong thread?

yes, that's really weird

Not the west, just 3 countries vetoed it. The ones which are 100% dependent on cheap Russian gas in the winter. Or with Germany 60%.

SEIZE THE YACHTS AND REAL-ESTATE

It's not rocket science. Physical assets. All of them.

Every country, especially USA, if there is Russian owned property, it's not theirs anymore. Every holding company or if some oligarch is dumb enough to have something in their name.

Lots of penthouses in NYC and Florida. Seize them all.

Sell them and pay for the funerals of all the innocent people that are about to needlessly, pointlessly, brutally die in fear.

That is what happened with German assets during World War 1. One of the reasons why there are two Merck companies today for example.

I was thinking last night about how the USA delayed getting into a war with the Nazis for two whole years while entire countries were taken over. But they even continued to do commerce with them.

I don't expect "boots on the ground" because I wouldn't want to send anyone to their death even if they are young and ignorant so willing to do so.

But hell, the least we can do is make Russia disappear from everything else and close down their world. No travel, no assets outside of Russia to any other country.

They aren't China, we can do that to Russia. China would be a nightmare but not Russia.

They aren't leaving Ukraine ever. Are all the events and cancellations just waiting for things to "shake out"? It's basically forever. Or at least Putin's lifetime but who know who is waiting in the wings.

If you do that, the issue is: The other side will treat the property of every US citizen, company, or state as a fair game for appropriation, and if not possible for destruction.

Would you risk seizing private property of a Russian citizen, if Russia decides to retaliate by destroying property of a US citizen, wherever in the world it may be located?

Let's please not further escalate, it's time for diplomacy. Diplomacy means agreement, agreement means compromise. We may not be fully satisfied, the other side may also not be satisfied, but we'll both claim a diplomatic win for our side and go on with life. If the alternative is war and mutual destruction, it's the only reasonable way to go.

If there are any US assets in Russia they need to be removed/leave.

Russia isn't leaving Ukraine and they had no right to go in and start killing people.

Diplomacy is before war. Not after a country invades. After they invade you have to make sure they not only stop but never do it again.

If we aren't willing/able to put boots on the ground then any US assets in Russia have to be sacrificed.

If Russia pulls this off without a scratch, next up will be North Korea or China because why not? What is the US/Europe going to do?

No imports, no exports, no travel, no Olympics, nothing. They are a rogue nation acting like a bully and they now have isolated themselves until they leave Ukraine.

What you describe here is a full blown escalation that leads to the WW3 in the end.

Of course there is diplomacy after the war is started and during the war. It’s the only way to achieve any peace barring a total defeat of one side, which didn’t happen in last 75 years.

Heck, it was diplomacy that allowed US troops to pull out of Afghanistan orderly, without diplomacy there would be a bunch of dead soldiers.

look man, if you are so excited about fighting russia, please volunteer to fight them. Americans are not your pawns.

>"Sell them and pay for the funerals of all the innocent people that are about to needlessly, pointlessly, brutally die in fear."

I bet millions of Vietnamese, Iraqis and whole bunch of others are already enjoying a windfall.

The west? I thought it was a handful of countries that russia has quite cozy relations with.

What is SWIFT, behind the scenes?

probably a TCP socket and an old, well established, EDI format.

weak arguments though. It would be a swift action, a shock with immediate effect. the long-term points are not that relevant but evenso, the non-western allied world is comparatively small. a disconnection is not going to be forever.

If the West could swallow it's pride for a while, it could go all out for fracking, reopen coal mines and build enormous gas to fuel plants etc., and buy itself time to go full carbon neutral. But it won't. Why not? Because the eco-zealotry overrides Ukrainian lives.

>"Because the eco-zealotry overrides Ukrainian lives."

Do not be so dramatic. West never had problems with "overriding" human lives. It had killed millions without any repercussions.

The following is US centric because that is the only resource extraction I'm personally familiar with.

Coal should stay dead. It has no redeeming qualities except that the cost is largely in externalizations.

Oil and LNG output is constrained by price. More and more shuttered/untapped wells will go online as prices rise and they become economically viable. This is already in progress at current prices.

I'm not sure what you meant by pride, but we don't need to drill/frack protected areas because they're cheaper to get resources out of. If protected areas are not what you meant, rest assured that unprotected areas will be "gone all out" on based on the economic calculus of extraction and there are plenty of untapped areas[0].

Price is the better incentive because it's elastic in response to demand like that created by embargoes on Russian resources, and also incentivizes a move away from fossil fuels by nature of its high price. It will be costly to average consumers at an already precarious time, but at least it aligns incentives with a more sustainable future instead of sacrificing unreplaceable ecologies by "going all out" as you describe.

[0] https://www.usgs.gov/centers/central-energy-resources-scienc...

If the west goes ahead, east will have more systems similar to Swift!

Russia is channelling Dirty Harry:

"Go ahead. Make my day."

for some reason mainstream media and politicians don't talk about it, but there is an option to maximize chances to stop Putin

detain families of all the people who have any connections to him, and freeze/seize their western assets and accounts. Until further notice. Everyone in Russia will know what it means, and some of Putin's establishment might be able to stop him to save their families and fortunes.

It's absurd that families of most of Russian elites live in the west, all their money is stored in western banks and yet the only sanctions on the table are the ones that hurt the most regular people

Why not limit the funds a Russian citizen can place at EU banks? It's a signal to all the wealthy that they do not have an easy "plan b" once shit hits the fan, and incentives them to create a more stable environment.

Also, why not sanction well-known Russia-paid European spies like Gerhard Schröder and limit their finances within the EU. The Hungarian national TV just aired a pro-russian programme, where an "expert" named Georg Spöttle put Zelensky and Hitler in parallel. Why not sanction these guys first?

Russians living in London and Paris are already the most anti-Putin/United Russia electorate. We would be hitting at the pro-West and westernized Russians, not to mention that we would have to carve exceptions all the time for political dissidents fleeing Russia. The second main reason is that it would remove the need for Putin to impose capital controls since the main place these funds would go are western banks. I understand the sentiment and why this might sound a good idea, but it would be very counterproductive.

Living in London/Paris, earning well (~being affected by the sanction), having "anti-Putin opinion" yet doing nothing lacks any merit. Who else would do the actual work of changing the regime if not the locals?

What do you want them to do? Just go rot in Moscow's prisons? You clearly over-estimate the level of leverage the citizenship has over its government, even in democracies. This is not a democracy.

On that note, do you also want to sanction the Syrian refugees? They're not personally storming the presidential palace over Damascus.

What if they add a service charge ;)

Frget about SWIFT. Why does the West not seize the assets of Putin's friends and family members? Why don't they cancel the citizenship or residence permit for anyone who has something to do with Putin and his gang? All these kids, grandkids, nephews, etc. of the Russian elite.

Because the west is dependent on Russian oil.

I apologise if I am too direct, but cannot help it, but say, that these are extremist ideas. Why should relatives or friends be held responsible for actions that are not theirs. In my former communist nation, if one person went against party line their entire family would be prosecuted. The statements you made are unfortunately not hard to find being drawn in the minds of many, however, they are a bitter memory for those who have lived in times when this kind of thought prevailed. The past should serve as a teacher. Unless there is actual proof of their wrong-doing they are innocent until proven guilty, and as such merit the same treatment as anyone else.

I am sorry if I am being too direct, but the very inability to impose strict measures on Putin's gang is the reason he doesn't hesitate to do what he does. If anything, if we seize the Russian elite money, then they might be willing to overthrow Putin's regime in exchange for getting their resources back. These are not extremist ideas, this is a pretty reasonable MO. Unfortunately, no one in the West has the stamina to do that.

I wonder what will be excuse after Putin invades Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania …

It’s almost like Putin knows the West is incapable of any meaningful action.

Counterpoints to the article:

"SWIFT ban will push Russia into China's hands" — Russia is already fully submitting to any Chinese economic terms. The swathe of Russian land the size of France was already leased to China effectively in perpetuity https://www.asianews.it/news-en/Vast-swathes-of-land-beyond-... . Russia sells its natural resources to China at unbelievable discount.

"SWIFT ban will make Russia, and China to develop an alternative to SWIFT" — Russia, and China already don't use SWIFT for trade in between government companies of each other.

"SWIFT ban will provoke Russia into all out war" — Russia is already waging an all out war.

"SWIFT ban will make Russia to switch to Chinese Yuan, and end the dominance of US dollar" - Russia already uses Yuan for trade with China, and bunch of other countries.

"SWIFT ban will make Russia to rely on China economically instead of EU" — This is the silliest claim I hear. If EU wants to trade with Russia, then don't sanction them. Sanctions are a bar on trade, and ability to extract profits.

My understanding Germany made a huge mistake in connecting with Russia. Swift and or petroleum product sanctions would just crush germany. This is going to be a key reason. Given the context, no real major war had ever happened in a long time. Perhaps Germany was connecting in order to build relationships. Which may actually be a long term benefit for everyone. In the long run maybe preventing further conflict.

Germany did halt Nordstream 2, which wasnt doing anything yet, but I dont believe they did anything else yesterday? Most likely they fear retribution.

Well, Germany got gas, very reliably, from the USSR before Russia all the way back to the Cold War. Hickups only happened when Ukraine and Russia couldn't agree on transit fees. Hence Nordstream 2. If NS2 wouod already be live, Russia could also just turm of Ukraines gas. Now they can't without directly hitting one of their biggest markets.

In a sense, not certifying NS2 limits Russias options. Not that I am convinced someone in the Gean government, old or new, ever thought this through so.

>In a sense, not certifying NS2 limits Russias options. Not that I am convinced someone in the Gean government, old or new, ever thought this through so.

The way I see it and one of my political opinions.

1. Big business runs governments around the world.

2. Big business decides the shots and war is bad for business(unless you're in that business)

3. Those big businesses are who prevent wars from happening.

Then again, this is what forced putin's hands. A ton of big business went to ukraine over US investment treaties and the EU stuff.

If there are still more than 300bn in Russia: maybe time to deinvest?

Do it. Let them feel the pain. Either the Russian people start to realise what they support with Putin or they don't deserve any more mercy than Nazi-Germany.

One reason, and one reason only: Cheap oil.

We're willing to destroy the future of the entire world for cheap oil. What's one relatively small country in comparison to that?

The West wants Russia's cheap oil. There's no other explanation.

The article lists several other explanations.

> There's no other explanation.

...that you can think of.

Canadian and in-US oil/gas is less expensive (from a US perspective) than Russia's. Taking the US off the market also makes Russia's oil/gas cheaper for other countries.

However, we're shutting that down.

Oil isn’t optional. It’s the most important commodity in the world. Nobodies lifestyle on HN would be possible without it.

It’s the natural gas too. Europe needs natural gas for power. Is Europe’s supposed to deprive its citizens of electricity?

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