How Well Are European Sanctions Against Russia Working?
spiegel.de
spiegel.de
What the fuck is going on with our news?
Russia claims to help Russians, but all they want is Crimea with the newly found gas ( that could replace Russia's).
In the mean time, they are trying to take every territory from Ukraine that is resource-rich.
And burning/killing everything that lives on it ( since they are not interested in the people)
The hostile one yes, but in those areas you have strong pro-Russian sentiments. To the point that the local population collaborates with the Russian troops. And Ukrainian shellings on the rebel strongholds and secret police arrests of potential "traitors" is amplifying the polarization
There's non shady sources like understandingwar.org which have given pretty good tracking of the war.
"understandingwar", for instance. Who are they, who funds them and why on earth should I trust them?
I'm critical of cnn etc but personally I think they're more credible than some NGO-sponsored blog IMO
Funny you should ask! Bill Kristol is on their Board[1], and for those who don't know who Bill Kristol is, he is one of the foremost Neocons in the US, behind such hits as WMD's in Iraq and 20-years of Adventure in Afghanistan.
Most of the rest of the Board appears to be like-minded neocons who beat the drums of war (and more importantly, intervention) every chance they get.
Here's what Wikipedia says:
"ISW generally advocates to increase American military involvement in international conflicts. Their political stances tend to align with the business interests of the ISW's funders, whose activities include producing tanks and weapon systems."
There's a list of their board members at https://www.understandingwar.org/who-we-are.
There are two former generals listed, General David H. Petraeus who was the commander of US forces in Iraq for a while, and General Jack Keane. Keane was an advisor on the US occupation of Iraq on the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee. Along with Frederick Kagan, Keane wrote a paper called "Choosing Victory: A Plan for Success in Iraq". Kagan's wife Kimberly Kagan is the president of the ISW.
You've also got William Kristol listed as a member of the board, Kristol is a neoconservative who argued for the "surge" in Iraq, he is a co-founder of the "Project for the New American Century" which is a neo-conservative think tank. PNAC argued for regime change in Iraq starting in the 1990's. The other co-founder of PNAC was Robert Kagan, Frederick Kagan's brother.
Another board member listed is Joe Lieberman, who was a major support of the Iraq war when he was in the Senate.
There's another half dozen or so people on the board that I don't recognize, but I don't have to dig much further to know that if somebody wants to get their news from the neoconservatives who brought us the Iraq war, understandingwar.org is definitely a go-to source.
Then again, I don't trust CNN either.
Essentially none of the news outlets have provided good coverage on what is happening, because if they did it would reveal how poorly the western powers navigated this, and how much of a disaster this entire thing has been for Europe, irrespective of its effect on Russia.
People who thought Russia didn’t know the probability of taking Kiev in a blitz is effectively zero are propagandized.
It isn't some grand conspiracy - war is hard and only fools have believed otherwise. "Be home by Christmas" is a synonym for foolishly optimistic for a reason.
Nothing out of the ordinary, you also thought that the Cubans used to eat babies in Angola, or that the Iraqis honestly threw out babies out of incubators?
Come on
John Stockwell has got couple of very good book on how The Agency used to administer news outlets and black information operations back when he was team lead, forget chomsky forget the church committee and Bernays, Stockwell goes quite deep into how it all actually operates
Likewise, while it's obvious that whatever comes from the Russian state media is complete garbage I think it's safe to assume that most of the news we see here in the west is also distorted propaganda as well; to some degree, at least. If by omission if nothing else ...what they say may be true, but it's clear they're leaving a lot of things out.
In short; treat everything like Pravda.
FWIW Washington Post reported on Russian success in Lysychansk just this morning.
Learn to take news feeds from all over the world. Get a more balanced picture. You may be surprised that news from other countries that doesn't have a Western slant is likely to be just as accurate or even more accurate than Western News media.
The West is a mere one-eighth of the world. We in the West tend to forget that. China alone is half as big again as the entire combined West. As also is India.
The "Ukraine is beating Russia" and "Russia is running out of everything" rubbish that was all the go back in March, all of a sudden has to be walked back due to Russia's continuing gains. The 'other' news didn't bullshit back then and does not have 'egg on its face' now like Western News media does.
Oh and by the the way, you know that "International Community' that every one talks about? This is what it looks like: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FOFo3TaagAEYvUa?format=jpg&name=...
Only a minor one. Russians have taken some chunk in the East, they lost some other chunk on the South near Kherson, retreated from Snake Island in the black sea, unable to advance on the North around Kharkiv.
I don’t think these advancements is newsworthy, at least not for the global audience. In Donbass, Russian army advanced by ~20 miles in one isolated place, that’s over the whole June. Not insignificant, but not dramatic enough to generate many clicks on the google’s ads.
What exactly are you complaining about? Be honest, how closely have you been paying attention to this issue and how various sources cover it? It seems that so many people are only capable of ingesting the very first headline, declaring their knowledge complete, and then ignoring any further information. How is this the fault of the media?
A higher resolution Ukranian perspective here [3].
If you have Russian, [4] is representative of "patriotic" (Russia must declare war, start mobilization, etc... ) point of view.
[1] https://www.understandingwar.org/
[2] https://twitter.com/JominiW
this meme is still missing one arrow set going from Chernobyl and Crimea to Kyiv. Russia is not retreating, they just keep backpedaling their ambitions.
I don’t think that situation can last much longer, unless we’re ready to give ground to the anti-EU fantasy of the union turning into some kind of techno-fascist regime. The scale of the measures she’s been involved with those past 2 years are beyond anything acceptable for any reasonable democracy.
As for democracy in EU, i don't see it ever happening. In my mind the EU is a new kind of state (despite its horrible inefficiency), one that aims to work with process alone and not politics, and which can thus survive post-politics (in a way the US cannot). Given time, i would expect the commission and parliament to be replaced by AIs.
Lack of semiconductors takes a while to set in. I suspect that their tech will greatly decrease within 6 months.
A lot of tech workers already fled Russia.
Other than that, a lot of things were targeting the oliarchs. That changed by now.
In order to sell oil/gas to, say, Brazil instead of Europe, Russia now has to charter tankers that ① aren't banned from working for Russia and also ② whose insurance provider isn't (because tankers are usually required to carry insurance), ③ whose bank isn't (because tankers are usually financed via a loan), ④ whose supplies and maintenance provide is't, and…that's not the end of the list.
AIUI Russia isn't diverting its exports, it's cutting production (which is very, very harmful to Russia in the longer term), so that leaves two possibilities: Either that sanction is working, or tanker owners are boycotting Russia on their own volition.
(More generally, I'm disappointed by how many people write "sanctions are/arent't working because x", without arguing or even stating that some part of the sanctions was intended to achieve x. This article is only partly guilty, it's better than most IMO.)
Russia has its own free floating currency and can fund all activity within Russia using that.
For the most part it just swaps excess resources for Chinese output. The Chinese can send their own boats to pick up the exports if necessary.
Probably the same with India.
What the ineffectiveness of the sanctions is showing is that “export led growth” is a essentially a myth.
Did that stay low tech despite there being nobody else to exchange technology with at the time?
Or did it just invent them itself?
As to whether Russia needs to export — developing these oil/gas fields took a lot of effort. Clearly the Russians believed that there was benefit to doing it.
I suspect so but in the longer term it may even be beneficial. If some technological business will still exist there they will need to establish their own silicon industry. And they have a pretty skilled labor force that could do that (if they don't flee en masse)