I'm not saying they have easy choices. Or good choices. But they do choose. We all do. I'd even say life is all about making small, imperfect choices.
Around 100 have joined non-Russian institutes in order to continue their physics research work with Europe’s particle-physics laboratory.
Not exactly "completely out of your control", I'd say.
In the other hand, if digging good and settling oil to India were enough, they would not need to raid their savings this hard.
So maybe it's not that critical to demotivate India from Russian oil...
My impression is that it's exactly what Ukraine is doing by attacking oil refineries and reserves - make russia decide wether to sell or use themselves for the war.
2.5 years to halve the reserves, the spend cannot be linear and I also don't think they need to get to zero to have a collapse.
> ... The economy is being funded by the cash reserves, which increases inflation, which leads to another round of interest rate hikes to combat inflation, which makes it harder to borrow money, which is necessary for economic growth. Eventually, the cash reserves will run out. It took 2.5 years to deplete half the Russian reserves. Russia withdrew $37 billion to cover deficits in December 2022. It withdrew $20 billion to cover deficits in December 2023. It only has $54 billion left.
I do hope that the industry taking it will just slightly delay devaluation and boom! more inflation.
They also held 293.189 tonnes of unallocated gold, compared with 298.84 tonnes on August 1, 303.579 tonnes on July 1 and 329.795 tonnes on June 1.
So they sold almost 40 tonnes of gold in 4 months? I approve that trend.
It's good that they can just print more rubels to fill the gap! /S
The facts are:
- russia spent a lot of effort trying to ban it
- eventually they "convinced" durov to cooperate to fight terrorism and removed the ban
- in russia fighting terrorism is applied to anything
Yes, I don't have evidence that the messages are accessed, only that the access is given and that all of that is happening in a country with a blatant disregard to law from the government.
I would be surprised if it's not.
russia tried to take control over it for a while, until
On 18 June 2020, the Russian government lifted its ban on Telegram after it agreed to "help with extremism investigations". https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/telegram-russia-ban-lift-messaging-app-encryption-download-a9573181.html
Which means they have access to all messages.
Yes.
On 18 June 2020, the Russian government lifted its ban on Telegram after it agreed to "help with extremism investigations".
Which means KGB has full access to all messages.
They didn't say which exactly human health is not threatened, so all is good and correct as I'm sure there's at least one senile psychopath who's safe from that smoke.
I think the main factor to the collapse as well as to why it was taking this long was the speed of communication. Those vassals had the luxury of 10 messages a year from the boss.
Interestingly, when it comes to (hopefully soon) collapse of russia, there are two parts to it. First are the instant communication channels that are useful to the crash and second is the human hierarchy that pootin uses (and has to) to get information. So he's at the Ottoman speeds of processing information, but at the modern speed of attack.
As a protest, Hungary should sever all relations with the terrible totalitarian EU.
Also I think they should consider moving into russia - there should be enough vacant space.
No, I meant an accessory as in:
An accessory is a person who assists, but does not actually participate, in the commission of a crime.
Of course we cannot. I agree with you that nobody is born evil or a criminal (even psychopaths are not guaranteed to become serial killers).
By all means, if not for propaganda, we would live in a very different world.
But the unfortunate fact is that they did consume enough of that propaganda to do nothing, or worse, follow the orders.
Yes, they are not criminals by nature, but what they do is crime or at least they are an accessory. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessory_(legal_term)
the answer is - it doesn't matter. the biggest learning from the nazi germany was that you don't need the entire population of a country to be homicidal psychopaths. all you need is a small group of those psychopaths, control or media, propaganda and you get a perfectly functioning system where normal everyday folks go to their normal everyday jobs.
just those jobs are in gestapo. or in maintenance of gas chambers. or making food for the equally confused soldiers.
of course, we should avoid civilian casualties as much as we can (but apparently russian army is not required) but the system needs to be stopped.
russia has cancer. chemoterapy is not a pleasant procedure that affects both ill and healthy cells. the alternative is, unfortunately, to allow that cancer to spread to the entire planet.
I believe the trick to avoid getting encircled is withdrawing before one gets encircled
Ukraine doesn't need that land. russia cannot afford not defending that land. The moment it gets too "expensive" for Ukraine, they withdraw. But that will only happen after russia invests heavily into actually recovering their territory.
It's like in chess when a knight is attacking two pieces at the same time. The one on defense can only choose a smaller loss.
Which is a win for Ukraine.
HR/VP Blog – Russian authorities regularly claim that the Russian economy would not really suffer from Western sanctions and that time would be on Russia's side in its war of aggression against Ukraine. However, these ideas do not stand up to scrutiny. Our sanctions have already significantly weaken...
On Friday, Russian state media reported that�dictator Vladimir Putin had ordered the size of the Russian military to increase by 170,000 active members. This is the second time in a year that Putin ...
If anything, russia is showing clear signs of sunk-cost fallacy
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escalation_of_commitment
Good morning everybody! Going through a myriad of reports from the frontlines in southern Zaporizhzhya of the last few days, even weeks, and some analysis…. well, at least two thingies are now sure: - 1.) at the pace the super-brains between the Keystone Cops in Moscow are squandering the VDV in the...
Let’s talk about Ukraine’s very good week.
Attritional strategies get a bad rap. When someone mentions a battle of attrition, many people think of the years-long-stalemate of World War I, or the endless and strategically pointless body count battles that characterized the American involvement...
@Tatarigami_UA: Recently, I mentioned the issue of Russian colonists replacing Ukrainians, who either fell victim to violence, was forcibly displaced, or had to flee. Today, I will provide several examples of tactic...…
@P_Kallioniemi: In today's #vatniksoup I'll talk about Russian Nazis and introduce Russian neo-Nazi movements and paramilitary groups like Rusich and PMC Wagner. They're best-known for being funded by the Kremlin an...…
In today's #vatniksoup I'll talk about Russian Nazis and introduce Russian neo-Nazi movements and paramilitary groups like Rusich and PMC Wagner. They're best-known for being funded by the Kremlin and being responsible for the "denazification" in Ukraine.
No one is particularly happy about the pace of events in the Ukraine counteroffensive. President Volodomyr Zelenskyy isn’t happy. Ukraine’s military leadership isn’t happy. Those participating ...
Joseph Stalin supposedly once called artillery “the God of War.” Regardless of the historicity of the comment, it gets at a certain truth about the Russian and Soviet armies since well before the time of Napoleon: Artillery has been, and continues to...
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Russian President Vladimir Putin has frequently expressed admiration for Josef Stalin, very consciously linking his image with that of the late Soviet leader, whom Putin credits with “defeating Nazism” and saving Russia. This linkage—of the old regime...
Ukraine is beginning to advance on multiple fronts, with gains reported on the Tokmak, Velyka Novosilka, Kherson, and Donetsk in recent days, while Ukraine continues to press the flanks around ...
Everyone seems to be disappointed by the rate at which the Ukrainian counteroffensive is liberating territory … only it’s not clear that the Ukrainian military is actually part of that “...
There’s much fretting about Ukraine’s pace in its counteroffensive, having liberated only a handful of small settlements despite two weeks of heavy fighting. One of the reasons is certainly ...
Mark Sumner wrote about the place yesterday, in Zaporizhzhia Oblast, on the road to Melitopol. It’s a tiny nothing kind of place. Its name literally translates to “five huts,” and it’s close to being accurate. Yet after liberating the settlement over...
Last Friday, Russian sources reported that Ukrainian armor had begun moving toward Pyatykhatky. As with so many locations in Ukraine, there are multiple settlements of that name, including a small ...
The earliest impression of Ukraine’s attack on Russia’s defense line was defined by an early Ukrainian disaster—the loss of multiple Leopard 2 tanks and Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicles in a minefield north of Tokmak. In the subsequent weeks, it...
