Kaplya [none/use name]

Putin to Lukashenko yesterday:

Putin: In the energy sector, unfortunately, we observed a series of attacks on our energy facilities and were forced to respond. I want to emphasize: even for humanitarian reasons, we did not carry out any strikes in winter, meaning that we did not want to leave social institutions, hospitals, and so on without power supply. But after a series of attacks on our energy facilities, we were forced to respond. But I repeat again: if everything comes back to solving those issues that we talked about initially, and they are related to energy issues, including the solution to one of the tasks that we set for ourselves, and this is demilitarization. First of all, we proceed from the fact that in this way we influence the defense industry of Ukraine, and directly. But if we do move on to some conversations, to resolving all issues in other ways - well, of course, as I have said many times, we are ready for this.

I think that they - the opposite side - to a certain extent painted themselves into a corner when they refused to negotiate in the hope of defeating Russia on the battlefield, inflicting a strategic defeat on it. Now they understand that this is impossible, they refused to negotiate and are now in a rather difficult situation. Our goal is not to put everyone in a difficult position; on the contrary, we are ready to work constructively. But of course, there can be no imposition on us of any position that is not based on reality.

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If the Patriots failed to shoot down Scuds designed in the 1950s, no way in hell they’re ever going to intercept a Kinzhal:

Governments have overstated the effectiveness of missile defenses in the past, including against Scuds. During the first Gulf War, the United States claimed a near-perfect record in shooting down Iraqi variants of the Scud. Subsequent analyses found that nearly all the interceptions had failed.

Intercepting a missile is not the same as an airplane that flies at a much slower speed and a much larger target.

F-16s are not going to help. They need state-of-the-art F-35 stealth multirole fighters if they want to have a chance.

The US has more than 700 F-35s, and the Ukrainians need to have access to as many of them as possible for a coordinated strike to stand a chance against Russia.

How can F-16s engage without getting into Russian air defense range?

Mavericks air to ground has a 20km range. AMRAAM air to air is about 100km.

A Russian S-400 has 400km operational range. At the start of the war, a S-400 in south Belarus turned on its radar for a few minutes and shot down a Ukrainian MiG-29 all the way in Kyiv, which then crashed into an apartment building and the Ukrainians proceeded to blame the Russians for targeting civilian structures.

But Ukraine is only a shit show for the US if you look at it militarily, and the US is certainly no stranger to losing in wars over the past century as a global hegemon.

The destabilization of Europe during the Ukraine war has effectively created a huge international capital flight into the US, mass de-industrialization and soon mass privatization of European assets as Europe pursues an austerity policy, the destruction of euro as a currency rival to the dollar, as well as the strengthening of the dollar as a result, the disruption of energy supply chain that netted huge profit for the American oil and gas sector, military buildups that grant billions of dollars of contracts to the American military industrial complex, and finally, dozens of billion of aid money to Ukraine that are laundered back to the American politicians and their proxies.

I’m not even going to go into the more conspiratorial territory like the eventual mass emigration of mostly white Europeans to the US as Europe inevitably sinks into fascism (which ironically is what the right wing conspiracy nuts feared about “The Great Replacement” except it’s a realistic plan under Biden to create a white supremacist state in America) to replace Chinese immigrants as the US prepares a war with China. All of these are projects underway that could eventually lay the groundwork for the Fourth Reich in America.

The strategy against China is going to be the same. De-stabilize the Asia-Pacific region, the blockade of which is going to block Chinese exports and shut down the global economy. This is why China couldn’t wait to speed up the Belt and Road Initiative and shift their entire transportation chain inland, to prevent the disastrous consequences of an imminent sea route blockade by the US.

However, the Belt and Road Initiative also has a critical flaw in that most (~70%) of its projects were funded in US dollar, which rendered the entire chain susceptible to US interference through financial warfare. This is why I always say that the only way for China (and the rest of the world) to come out on top is to de-dollarize aggressively. The longer they wait, the more vulnerable the entire system is to the threats posed by the global institutions controlled by the US.

Do not for a moment think that the US strategists are stupid. They may make mistakes (for example, they miscalculated and failed in defeating Russia), but they certainly have achieved a lot of their strategic goals (destroying Europe is a far bigger fish to fry than to defeat a weak economy like Russia, that is, a Europe-China alliance is far scarier to the US than a Russia-China alliance), and have a lot of cards left in their sleeves which they will ruthlessly dispense to make life harder for everyone else in the world. They’re not going to go down willingly, and if they had to, they’d rather take the whole world down with them.

Stalin’s Marxism and the National Question (~1913) was probably his best work.

Lenin loved it so much that he proclaimed it to be “the Bolshevik Party’s definitive declaration on the national question”.

Even Trotsky, his arch-nemesis, considered it a great work and had to throw in the jabs “hmm… why has Stalin never published another work of such quality before and after this? very suspicious… don’t you think… was it really written by Stalin himself??” lol.

Stalin’s Marxism and the National Question also became the theoretical foundation of the People’s Republic of China’s classification of its 56 ethnic nationalities, based on the criteria that Stalin had laid out.

Having said that, the Comintern did make a lot of mistakes when it comes to advising anti-colonial struggle in the third world. Mao’s theses were far more applicable to poorly developed colonies in this regard.

The economic growth and societal transformation under Stalin (in particular under his Five Year Plans from 1929-1955) registered the fastest growth in the history of humanity that has never been surpassed.

Not even China with all its achievements came close to what transformed the USSR from a poor feudal backwater of Europe into a space-faring nation within a single generation. And the USSR achieved all this while being isolated and without relying on cheap labor (workers rights were on par with Western European standards) and influx of foreign capital.

If you’re a Western capitalist, you’d be worried too. A country full of illiterate peasants and barely electrified, is now threatening to overtake us because of communism?

Khrushchev reversed much of Stalin’s policies that worked and marked the beginning of an end to the greatest socialist project of the 20th century.

Bloomberg also put out more or less the same thing (https://archive.ph/fAYpB) a week ago if you want a “credible” Western mainstream source.

If you don’t have health insurance in the US, Russia is better if you ever get sick. Not even an argument.

I think this is exactly the plan. Biden needs Europe to be at war to trigger a mass exodus of (mostly) white Europeans fleeing war and poverty to America to make the dream of the Fourth Reich possible. The purging of Chinese students, academics and immigrants cannot possibly be done without them being replaced by another group of immigrants at the same time.

I mean no offense to the people who think that Trump is someone who can turn America into a full-blown white supremacist state, but they’re dead wrong. Without the ruthlessness of Biden, Trump could never get it off the ground in a million years.

Space warfare is much closer to naval warfare on Earth, so naval tactics and strategies are more transferable when applied to space. For example: taking weeks to maneuver, and firing at your opponent 100,000 of kms away.

Air sorties are typically completed within hours, because it is ultimately limited by the fuel they can carry.

It’s from one of Mao’s poems: 《沁园春·雪》.

It’s a bit complicated to describe what the title means, but the first part 沁园春 is a 词牌 (lit. name cards, but more commonly translated to “to the tune of…”), a specific type of poem from the Song dynasty popularized by the famous poet Su Shi (Su Dongpo) that follows a specific set of rules. 沁园春 is characterized by its bitonic 114 characters with flat rhyme. 沁园春 derives its name from the Han Dynasty’s Princess Qinshui’s Garden, which translates to “Qin Garden Spring”. There are dozens of other name cards (which specify a specific style of poem) that have their own explicit set of rules.

Following the name card is the name of the poem, 雪, which literally means “snow”, or “snowscape”.

So, the first part specifies the name card (style?) of the poem (i.e. “To the tune of 沁园春“), followed by the title of the poem. Here, Mao’s poem is titled 雪 “snow”.

Others have translated the title to “ Snowscape - To the tune of Spring Garden Show” (see link below) which is fair I guess.

The poem was mostly about the beautiful scenery of Northern China and the patriotic fervor towards his country.

Supposedly written in 1936 when Mao led the Red Army arriving at Shaanxi to fight against the Japanese, and published in 1945 in Chongqing when Mao was negotiating with Chiang Kai-shek, and during his stay, the democrat activists he spent time with asked him to publish the poem in a local Chongqing newspaper.

Here is a translation that is quite decent: https://www.backchina.com/blog/257064/article-222619.html

What is quickly ending the war going to do for Russia, except for risking higher casualties and giving Europe the room to breathe, as the latter is already going into austerity mode due to their increased military spending?

Russia’s only win condition in this war is economic in nature.

Remember, this is an industrial war - Russia can keep doing this forever while the EU is constrained by its monetary system and fiscal rules. The eurozone will not survive this if they truly want to defeat Russia in military terms. Europe ultimately has to make a choice, and all options available are worse for them.

Russia has no interest in destroying the Ukrainian forces, because the latter is already a spent force.

For them, the only means of destroying NATO is when Europe increases their defense budget spending and leading to the crumbling of their own economy. This is already happening, and ending the war now gives room for Europe to breathe and rebuild their economy.

As you might have noticed, the militarization of European NATO states will paradoxically lead to the demilitarization of NATO instead.

I have said it before: this conflict ends with the demilitarization and denazification of NATO. Ukraine is irrelevant at this point. It has’t been for a while.

The 2014 sanctions after Crimea and MH17 hit Russia hard. It took 44 months (almost 4 years) before Russia’s GDP growth went back to pre-2014 level. Then, just when Russia was recovering, Covid hit in 2020 and that’s another 12 months of economic hardship.

In comparison, the 2022 sanctions, even though they are far larger in scale, were almost unremarkable (it took only 6 months to recover to 2021 level) and certainly have backfired on the sanctioning countries instead.

No offense, but this kind of criticism is kind of tone deaf.

First of all, it is the World Bank that explicitly forbids the developing world from achieving food self-sufficiency and forces them to plant export crops, in exchange for the dollars needed to import essential consumables such as fuel and food.

Second, much of the agricultural technologies and machineries are Western made, and Russia cannot simply just give away what little they have. Yes, Belarus is ramping up tractor production, for example, but it’s going to take years.

Third, re-implementing agricultural policy takes years if not decades to bear fruits, and that’s taking into account the economic structure of the country (how much to export to earn dollar to repay their debt?) and the specific climate of the region (yield can be highly variable).

Fourth, and a very important point, the DPRK did try to implement a food self-sufficiency policy starting in the 1970s, and the result was unfortunately a failure (even though it saw a good deal of success for the first 20 years). The harsh climate conditions as well as the lack of arable land in the Korean peninsular simply did not allow large scale agricultural success in the long term. The famines caused by devastating weather in 1994-1995 - freeze, floods and drought all happening in the same decade - directly contributed to the famine in the DPRK (The March of Suffering) in the 1990s, together with the loss of fuel import and export market from the collapse of the USSR.

The DPRK took decades and spent 20% of their GDP on agriculture, and it proved to be a very difficult task to achieve, however courageous it was. South Korea, on the other hand, simply cheated by importing their food and spend only 2% of their GDP on agriculture. The point being that not every country has the condition to achieve high level of agricultural production, and in a socialist union you will have some countries that have the advantage to supply large quantity of food to the other countries.

And now, as these poor African countries are experiencing from severe energy and food crisis, directly caused by Western imperialism, having immediate relief, even if it’s temporary, is a much needed measure and while there is certainly political motivation behind it. It’s absurd to think that the poorest countries should just deny such aid for dignity reasons.

All the money being lost for nothing

I can assure you that the money spent isn’t “lost” at all. They all ended up “somewhere”. There is a reason why Biden is so keen on pushing the $60 bil funding to Ukraine even though everyone knows there is no way Ukraine can win. But yes, agree with the rest of what you said.

It’s not posturing. It’s a commitment to increase defense spending which will then be used as excuse to impose austerity and budget cuts this year (“it’s the Russians, not your own capitalists who are doing this to you”), and preparing the countries for shock therapy in the very near future. Everything is going exactly as planned.