Chinese yuan becomes Russia's main foreign currency, replacing dollar and euro

Yeah. But nothing critical has happened yet due to sanctions and unlikely to happen anytime soon. At current rate Putin can fund war indefenetely just by pumping money into economy and making society pay for it.

Old soviet joke:

  Dad: Looks like vodka will become more expensive.
  Son: Dad, are you going to drink less now?
  Dad: No, son, now you are going to eat less.

the west only cares about this to weaken russia. Weapons will only cost more lives.

"Weapons will stop this war"? How? What's the end game? When it started the people believed it would be over in 3 days. Now all of a sudden people believe ukraine can destroy russia? How many more ukranian and russian soldiers must die?

This war will not be stopped by weapons. Just like any other. But if it was, i can't see a defeated russia, but a destroyed world.

Or what is the end-game here with the weapons? What do you think is a feasible outcome here?

>> Russia is sinking despite becoming the 4th largest economy

What part of it is 'sinking'? It increased its oil exports. It increased its other resource exports. Europe is still buying Russian gas and oil, except through India and its now called 'Indian oil'. It achieved independence in a lot of things that it was buying from the West, mixing it with homegrown products and global south imports. The sanctions HIT EUROPE MORE, with all the European companies losing their market share in Russia and their market share being taken over by Russian companies and Chinese ones.

The references are from REUTERS, none other than one of the Angloamerican establishment mouthpieces that sells every war including how they sold the WMD lies, and some aggregate of Wikipedia articles that are tangential and supposed to be relevant?

Here's what's relevant:

https://siepr.stanford.edu/publications/policy-brief/fragile...

> This isn’t uncommon in a war footing [4]. Labour and necessities are diverted to the front, raising prices for both. That squeezes disposable income, which moderates price growth in luxuries. The effect, if you’re measuring with a pre-war basket of goods, is rising real earnings and falling disposable income.

None of that is applicable to the actual reality that Russians themselves report, you are just flat out theorizing what 'should happen' with absolutely no connection to the actual reality.

Everything you say and believe is in line with things like 'ghost of kiev', "ukraine will reach Moscow in a month", "Russia wanted to conquer Ukraine in 3 months but it couldn't", "Chinese economy is set for a hard landing (yet) again" and all that sh*t.

...

Really, you people live in la la land. Your worst enemy is not Russia or China. Its you and your delirious 'I prefer to believe what I like to hear" attitude.

Downvote this post. It will make the reality go away.

While some people do left Russia many are returning back because there are very few countries that make it easy to immigrate there from Russia and in some of them there are no jobs or no one hire english speaking staff.

Unfortunately west do nothing to deprive Russia of it's human resources. If only EU and US offered easier path for immigration there would be literally 100,000 of IT personnel who would happily left the country.

Lont-term country is gonna be in terrible conditions, but not because of people leaving.

> Everyone I personally knew in Russia has left > People I know

Everyone I know in my home country which has absolutely no relation with any of these has also left. The 99.9% of the population have not. Your personal circle and the specific demographics you belong to do not constitute statistics.

> 3) Indisputable military points of clarity from global news are that Russia failed to capture Ukraine's capital after planning and attempting to do so

Angloamerican and satellite media outlets are not 'global', not to mention that all the 'experts' that they rely on are full of sh_t just like how they were back in 2003. Their sole job is to sell this war so that US and satellite taxpayer money can be channeled back to US defense corporations via Ukraine. The result is that Raytheon et al are posting record profits.

> 4) Russia's petro-diplomacy clearly backfired: the entire world

You people say these delirious things. 80% of the world has increased its business relations with Russia instead of decreasing it. India even told a bipartisan British parliamentary delegation to sod off when they went to India to lecture them about how they should cut their relations with Russia. Here's 'the entire world':

https://www.politico.eu/article/west-more-united-also-isolat...

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/02/23/world/russia-...

Even NYT admits that the West is isolated and 'the world' is literally with Russia. But you people contradict your own establishment mouthpieces.

Here in Europe we are still buying Russian oil and gas, even more than before, EXCEPT THROUGH INDIA, GABON and other intermediaries. Gabon, a tiny African country, increased its merchant marine to 100 ships in a few months just to sell Russian oil and gas to Europe. Europe's exports to Russia cratered, but its exports to Tajikistan, Kazakhstan and various neighboring countries skyrocketed with the EXACT percentage with which its exports to Russia cratered. Go figure. Everything is the same as before in Europe related to Russia, and yet imports are more expensive because it goes through intermediaries.

> the entire world has pivoted away from fossil fuels

Another self-propagated delirium that is the product of too much Angloamerican media consumption. Hasnt happened.

> I think any summary version of reality that includes Russia 'winning' at this stage

The summary version of the reality in which Russia is winning is this reality.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/27/opinion/ukraine-military-...

"Ukraine Doesn’t Need All Its Territory to Defeat Putin"

Your establishment has gone from "Ukraine will get to Moscow in 3 months" to "Ukraine doesn't need its territory to win". They are making 'perception management' to manage you people as if you were idiots. And they seem to be succeeding too.

> The Chinese will suffer too, because this aids Xi Jinping's narrative of resisting the west during a period in which he is asserting authoritarian nationalism and increasing financial, economic and cultural controls.

Nobody needs to 'resist' 'the West'. Its bankrupt. Its capitalist class started to eat the societies alive by trying to profit from housing, healthcare, education and even basic foodstuffs as they exhausted the means to exploit other countries. Dollar lost its place as the foreign exchange currency and unused dollars are now flowing back to the US, causing inflation. 99% of Americans are estimated to be going to be never own a house whereas 80% of 30 year olds and 90% of 40 year olds own their houses in China, which they paid with their own money.

'The West' is so in knee-deep sh*t that this is what's happening there:

https://www.reddit.com/r/AmerExit/

You people are delusional and speak delirious. This is how it must have been in the late stages of Roman empire as it was nearing its end: Delusion and denial.

Thank you, I relied on Wikipedia to be accurate, and it wasn't.

In September China released a new map using the old Chinese name (Sea Cucumber Bay) rather than the transliterated Vladivostok.

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/chinas-standard-map-is-a...

> expect control of most of them to fall into Chinese hands over the next 20-50 years

5 to 10 if the IEA is correct [1].

[1] https://www.axios.com/2024/06/12/oil-peak-demand-iea-project...

So for all practical reasons there is very little they can use them for.

They can of course invest into India economy to get even more Rupees.

With markup. That slows down the economy and makes everything more expansive. Whcih makes the economy not competetive on the international market. Keep it that way for a few decades and you get North Korea.

> Russians simply get their stuff from others

With less variety, slower and at higher cost [1]. And they’re not getting much of the high-tech kit [2]. (The Germans also had blockade runners. Everyone does. That doesn’t make a blockade less onerous.)

Russian natural gas sales have also cratered; Beijing is leveraging its position as a monopsony to demand price concessions [3].

[1] https://www.csis.org/analysis/out-stock-assessing-impact-san...

[2] https://www.aei.org/research-products/report/the-impact-of-s...

[3] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/russia-china-gas-pip...

The size of the Russian market is irrelevant for western brands, for all intents and purpose—particularly US ones.

Europe could have cheap energy alternatives if they wanted, but they preferred to rely on cheap Russian natural gas, believing them not to be a rogue state. The attempted invasion of Ukraine has made it obvious this was a terrible miscalculation.

Arguing that Europe should try to restore the status quo ante bellum is not only foolish, senseless, illogical and irrational but dangerous too.

Your profile says you like to argue things that you don't really believe in just to "have a more lively debate". I can only imagine that's what's happening here, because no rational actor would make the sort of concessions to Russia as you argue, particularly after they have proven to be a much, much weaker military power than anticipated.

What is the cost economically of not having those bases?

Consider one result may be the USD not being used as a reserve currency as widely, or at all.

> What does the US give up not protecting the rest of the world?

The number of lives we’d lose in the next world war. The end of Pax Americana won’t be sweet.

That said, I agree there should be more thought as to the marginal benefit of the 800th base.

If you really were in the defense industry for 25 years and you're making takes like that, I can only imagine you never worked on anything of consequence. This is like saying you worked in tech for 25 years and don't get what the big deal is about version control or CI/CD.

Or at least that you have no idea how your business makes money or what your users want your code for. Explainable for a new hire, but for a 25-year vet, such a lack of understanding and perspective is really inexcusable.

> What does the US give up not protecting the rest of the world?

The very real probability of no longer having the strongest military in the world, which is something you express that you are still in favor of.

We already tried the strategy of waiting to intervene until Europe had already been violently consolidated into one enormous and war-obsessed power. Even if you don't care about the lives of people who live outside of the US at all (which, to be clear, I do care about), that mistake cost us alone over 400k lives to fix. And do you really think that if we'd just left Hitler alone he would have been too intimidated to attack us after he'd finished mopping up Europe?

What would happen is that some of those countries will switch to a different geopolitical block. It's difficult to make a proposition to a country with a foreign army stationed in their territory, maybe because they lost a war 80 years ago or needed help not to lose it. It's easier if that army goes back home. If the USA want to give up their empire to China or Russia, they start with closing the bases. The fallout is economical as well, because American culture and products are going to have more competition and less reach.

"What does the US give up not protecting the rest of the world?"

A whole constellation of mostly rich allies and friends, many of which may be forced to join some hostile power, in the same way that Czechoslovakia was forced by Stalin to abandon the Marshall Plan (1946) and later absorbed into the Soviet Bloc outright (1948).

Aren't you happy to have countries like Italy, Germany and Japan as friends? Was it better or cheaper for an average American taxpayer when they were geopolitical adversaries? I doubt that.

Yeah, for international trade I don't think it matters what currency you use. USD GBP Dogecoin or whatever. It's mostly for convenience people use USD. For domestic stuff the currency is important as people have their wages and bills in that.

> drastically reduce our overseas military presence

for what? a smaller deficit? it's unclear whether reducing the size of the defense industry helps the US economy, so maybe you get a smaller deficit but you also raise unemployment by a couple % and lower economic growth by a % or so over the next 25 years

conversely, it's pretty clear this does hurt its current hegemonic position. that's a gamble not many are willing to take so carelessly

I say this as a non-American, by the way