Pretty much turning out just like I said.
Puting says "no need for further military action in Ukraine." He also says that he will not be annexing Crimea.
So he's already backing down just as I said. Once again, selling panic proves to be a loser's game.
It's pretty clear who's running Russia--the oligarchs. Once the markets started tanking and there was talk about revoking visas/status/freezing assets, etc, Putin's tough guy talk faded. That's because the oligarchs are telling him to back off. They have too much to lose.
My prediction: that's it for Putin. The Russian bear has been de-clawed. From now on you should aggressively fade whatever he says or does.
18 comments:
Mike - Very crisp analysis!
putin backing down from what position exactly?
seems to me more like some evidence that the neocon fear-mongering has somewhat overstated putin's aggressive intentions?
(disclaimer: i have no idea what is really going on...)
Putin is alpha male to the core. No way he'll allow himself to be perceived as slinking away with tail between legs. Today's short covering rally is a nice reprieve, but a few days price action surely has little bearing in swaying the megalomaniac one way or the other. Rome wasn't built or sacked in a day. Ukraine or Crimea won't be either. He's likely consulting his Machiavellian playbook as I type this.
"putin backing down from what position exactly?"
For starters, a complete annexation of Crimea, followed by whatever else he wanted to do with Ukraine, such as a complete military invasion with all the tough talk.
That didn't happen.
The media is trumpeting the "triumph of the markets," but the media has it right only in the sense that Putin allows the markets to dictate to him. How do you peg your currency to the dollar if you're such a tough guy and hate the West? How do you sell your most precious resource--oil/gas--for foreign exchange? How do you squander your peoples' wealth by speculating in gold when you're already a "natural long" by virtue of the fact that you're the world's biggest producer?
It's ludicrous. He may act tough, but he's dumb.
mike, i didn't see putin staking out a position of "complete annexation of Crimea" or "complete military invasion" of ukraine. as far as i can tell, those so-called putin positions were in fact neocon fabrications.
happy to be corrected if anyone can link to some evidence. thanks.
Agree, selise. The US reporting was heavily slanted toward the neocon position.
Moreover, Obama and Putin had a ninety minute conversation. All that was made public were prepared statements on both sides, with Putin's being very short, as reported in the US press anyway.
They obviously said a lot more than was released, and we can conclude that what was released was largely for domestic political consumptions, where each president is expected to take a hard line. So those statements have to be heavily discounted.
Mike, I see US aid as temporary fix. They need ongoing funding and to TPTB that means loans. Either the Ukraine aligns with the West and goes through the normal channels, which means accepting austerity, or it aligns with Russia.
With an MMT approach they could go it alone, but they aren't savvy enough for that.
In addition, I think they need foreign exchange to meet their energy needs, too. Energy is the big issue for them, and Russia is the obvious solution since it has the capacity and willingness to offer them the best deal, but with strings — no joining NATO.
Like the US, the Ukraine is pretty evenly divided politically between East and West as the US is between red and blue. The president was democratically, but some see it as similar to Bush-Gore, which is why the opposition was so virulent.
Complicating this is that they have a parliamentary system with many factions, none having an absolute majority.
It's a mess that only the neocons want to meddle in so as to advance their desire to encircle Russia militarily.
I think Mike is asking some interesting questions. Are their any viable nations left in the world or just vassal states? If Putin is really going "back to the Tsars" as some commentators have been claiming why does he seem so deferential to "markets?" The problem with MMT is it presupposes the nation state while all the "world leaders" presuppose the "market state" or vassal state as I prefer to call it.
thanks tom.
fwiw, here are a couple ru official links:
press release after obama/putin 90 min phone call
http://eng.kremlin.ru/news/6752
transcript of putin's press conference:
http://eng.kremlin.ru/news/6425
they all are still operating under the same paradigm as Hamilton describes here in Federalist 12:
http://www.constitution.org/fed/federa12.htm
"The prosperity of commerce is now perceived and acknowledged by all enlightened statesmen to be the most useful as well as the most productive source of national wealth, and has accordingly become a primary object of their political cares. By multipying the means of gratification, by promoting the introduction and circulation of the precious metals, those darling objects of human avarice and enterprise, it serves to vivify and invigorate the channels of industry, and to make them flow with greater activity and copiousness. "
They are all still believing we are under gold.... all of these people... there are only about I'd say maybe 1,000 to 2,000 of us globally at this point who know that this is all false today...
rsp,
all still believing we are under gold
That's right.
Here's another instance of this destructive creed:
In Southern Europe the so-called leaders believe their countries are running out of money and must pay their foreign debts with monetary assets obtained through savage budget cuts.
They just don't understand that they could produce the necessary euros out of nothing via their banking systems (banks can freely lend to governments a multiple of their capital base), then pay the foreign debts with said euros (with zero cuts) and in the end - once freed from the external burden - exit the euro and restore economic growth.
Alas, they will instead condemn the populations to eternal poverty.
Dumb, dumb and dumb.
From my LJ Mar. 2nd, 2014 at 8:47 PM
~Two items first...
One: It seems that all the political leaders in Ukraine are kleptocrats of one type or another. And that Yanukovich, the leader who was most willing play ball with Putin, is also the most thuggish of the lot. Now that he has thoroughly screwed the pooch, Putin has to make the best of a pretty bad situation.
Two: Putin may be a son of a bitch, but he is neither stupid nor crazy, so forget all the Hitler analogies. The man is an ex-KGB colonel, meaning he is a ruthless pragmatist.
Okay, now for the 'mind reading'....
As the HQ of The Russian Black Sea Fleet, the Crimea is utterly non-negotiable for Russia. Now that it is back in Russian hands, they are not going to let it go. Hopefully the new leadership in Kyiv understands and is willing to swallow that shit sandwich. I'm not hopeful of that outcome, but one never knows.
Eastern Ukraine is a much dicier proposition. Putin probably hopes that they will except a few extra 'privileges' as ethnic Russians within Ukraine and not try for separation. These are the 'events on the ground' I have spoken of in the past few days.
If the majority Russian eastern provinces go for succession, then Putin is faced with two equally bad choices: A, let them hang out to dry and see how things turn out in a Ukrainian civil war or B, go in and help them, thereby becoming embroiled in said civil war.
The former would very bad for Putin domestically, abandoning fellow Russians to the 'fascist wolves'.
But the latter has the potential to become a suppurating nightmare.
Ethnic Ukrainians hate Hate HATE the Russians and so do the nations of Eastern Europe. Poland, which hates the Russians as much as the Ukrainians, shares a long border with Ukraine. I have little doubt that 'volunteers' and arms of all types would flood over said border if Russia intervened in a Ukrainian civil war. In all likelihood, they'll flow anyway. And there's lots of old Warsaw Pact gear floating around, so who could say where it came from.
I have said that such would be 'Yugoslavia writ large'. Think easily ten times as large, with ethnic cleansing and militia atrocities on a massive scale. I would not be surprised if the death toll reached over a million.
In addition, the gas lines to Europe would definitely be cut, both by accident and on purpose, and the EU's economy is rather shaky at the moment. A Ukrainian civil war would almost certainly cause another global economic meltdown and who knows where that would lead.
I'm fairly certain that Putin understands all of these factors and will do his best to tamp down passions in the eastern provinces. But these are The Bloodlands and history has shown us that in those lands the Worst Case is usually the most likely scenario.
Another Charming Thought: a Ukrainian civil war could destabilize Belarus.
That said, Putin ordering the forces of the Western Military District back to their barracks after the end of their 'exercise' is a clear message to the Ethnic Russians of Eastern Ukraine that they are on their own and that they need to make an accommodation with Kyiv.
As for The Crimea, possession in nine/tenths of the law, so full annexation would be both redundant and provocative.
This has always been about 'damage control' and I'd say Pooty played it quite well.
Agree Nebris. The wildcard is the ethnic, religious, and other tribal hatreds and scores to settle than go back probably hundred and hundreds of years. This is already what we are seeing in many parts of the world and it's also a rising problem in the US, even with our short history as a nation with only one civil war, bloody as it was. Think, "The South shall rise again." Now make that exponential for Eastern Europe.
So you "back" your currency with dollars?? Seriously???? I mean, come on, Vlad.
Lol
And let's not forget that "Vlad" even offered his helping hand to the POTUS when he was caught with his pants down, unable to get Congressional support for a new "kinetic operation" in the Levant.
Apparently, the guy never learned the ancient master's lesson according to which you should "never interrupt your enemy when he's making a mistake".
Even a partitioning of the Ukraine runs the risk of people being displaced due to their ethnicity, resulting in more calls to arms.
Well, Bob, to quote myself, "..these are The Bloodlands and history has shown us that in those lands the Worst Case is usually the most likely scenario."
And I've repeated that quote a few times in the past couple of days.
There is an interesting phone conversation between Catherine Ashton and Esonian FM Urmas Paet. So there are some bloody propaganda games in between Nato and Russia I believe.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXp-SiMXbnU&feature=player_detailpage
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