Comment by DeepSeaTortoise | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DeepSeaTortoise | Hacker News Reader

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DeepSeaTortoise

> Any economical damage they think is temporary and they see it as an investment.

That's kinda what the deal is about, tho:

1. Ukraine gets rebuild, the US and Ukraine own huge portions of Ukraine's new industry through the fund

2. The fund gets richer and richer with Ukraine slowly taking over management, the US retaining a minority portion

3. Russia attacks Ukraine, captures all of it

4. Nearly all remaining industry and rights to natural ressources are retained by the fund, managed by Ukraine's exile government

5. Russia wants to expropriate the fund to cut off the funding available to the exile government

6. Russia realizes they'd have to expropriate the US government, starts sweating

7. Russia wakes up and decides not to proceed with step 3. to 6., because the downsides of taking over a country (insurgency, tons of explosives everywhere, new huge portions of population on expensive welfare and healthcare, ...) aren't worth it without any of the upsides.

> Issue is about not having any security guarantees.

Because they're not even negotiated yet. The "minerals deal" is something the US and Ukraine can negotiate right now, so it's on the table.

For all the other stuff Russia and Ukraine need to come to the same table, which Ukraine is very reluctant to do.

Trump only tried to get Ukraine to agree to a bare minimum ceasefire, to stop the killing.

Everything else is up to negotiations afterwards.

> Russia realizes they'd have to expropriate the US government, starts sweating

Not sure what you mean by that? Russia would just nationalize the assets. What would US do about it, if they are not willing to do anything so far? The ownership in this fund would just be nice to have, not make it worth going for Russia then any more than now. And in any case Russia could just make an offer to share the minerals themselves, which they already did. It wouldn't make a difference to US.

> Russia wakes up and decides not to proceed with step 3. to 6., because the downsides of taking over a country (insurgency, tons of explosives everywhere, new huge portions of population on expensive welfare and healthcare, ...) aren't worth it without any of the upsides.

Historically Russia has repeatedly demonstrated willingness to harm their economy in return for gaining more territory.

This deal is worthless in terms of deterring Russia, if Russia is not deterred currently, this deal is not going to make a difference.

The most important thing to Ukraine is - how can we make sure that Russia doesn't invade us again. Everything else is worthless for Ukraine, for the West, and for Democracy.

Russia could also agree to keep the fund as it is, just expropriate the Ukrainian government and continue paying dividends to the USA.

Maybe it has already been agreed on, by the way.

> Russia would just nationalize the assets. What would US do about it, if they are not willing to do anything so far?

I do not know what keeps governments from doing this, tbh.

But up until now Russia has done so exclusively in a retaliatory manner.

Or them paying their debts to the clearing houses, despite US citizens having been forbidden from accepting their money.

Same with the EU not outright taking over Russia's currency reserves, but taxing them at 100%.

There's something that prevents governments from screwing around on this, even if I do not quite understand what it is.

And the US gov is probably quite high up on the list of entities not to mess with.

> And in any case Russia could just make an offer to share the minerals themselves, which they already did.

Sure, but it's not about the minerals at all. The relation between minerals and this deal is about the same like the relation of a pineapple tree to pizza.

> Historically Russia has repeatedly demonstrated willingness to harm their economy in return for gaining more territory.

Or for no reason whatsoever. But it's not really fair to compare the Communists or the Tsarist Empire to modern Russia.

> The most important thing to Ukraine is - how can we make sure that Russia doesn't invade us again. Everything else is worthless for Ukraine, for the West, and for Democracy.

Ukraine needs to work on this with Russia.

Russia has made clear that they want security guarantees themselves, so a universal solution might be viable. The problem being, that Russia doesn't feel threatened by Ukraine, but those backing it.

Should be obvious why it looks like one side is talking seriously and the other is flailing:

Ukraine could just sell the lease for minerals in Russian-held territory. That could all be done in uninteresting ways without Zelenskyy.

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