2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine (Part 1)

13 Likes
11 Likes
15 Likes
17 Likes

“We have been printing anti-propaganda and tor installation instructions to printers all over #Russia for 2 hours, and printed 100,000+ copies so far. 15 people working on this op as we speak,” the tweet read.

“We hacked printers all across Russia and printed this PDF explaining that Putin/Kremlin/Russian media is lying and then we instructed how to install tor and get around their censorship to access real media,” one of the members, who goes by the Twitter handle @DepaixPorteur told IBT.

Anonymous had earlier told IBT that it is working on a data dump that “will blow Russia away.”

14 Likes
9 Likes

Idk maybe, just maybe, global heating goals should be sustainable and not based on fossil fuels. :man_shrugging:

13 Likes

The point is that governments might stop trying to meet the goals.

“Countries could become so consumed by the immediate fossil fuel supply gap that they neglect or knee-cap policies to cut fossil fuel use,” he went on. “This is madness. Addiction to fossil fuels is mutually assured destruction.”

16 Likes

A 96-year-old Holocaust concentration camp survivor was killed in a bomb attack in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, German media is reporting.

Boris Romantschenko died on Friday after his home was hit by a projectile, according to his granddaughter.

Romantschenko was a survivor of the Buchenwald, PeenemĂŒnde, Mittelbau-Dora and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps.

In a statement today, the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation said it was “deeply dismayed” by the news.

Romantschenko had campaigned “intensively” for the memory of the Nazi crimes and was vice president of the International Committee Buchenwald-Dora, the foundation added.

20 Likes

I think that might be a bit of hand wringing.

Multiple countries have already responded with bumped up time lines and proposals for more funding on renewables and the like. Both US producers and OPEC are gold bricking about increasing production from existing wells and capacity.

Plus Russia doesn’t get unsanctioned when the situation is resolved. However long that takes.

I don’t know how much long term dependence you could be building when everything looks like a long term shortage.

There’s going to be a problem. With things like thevery dirty Canadian tar sands suddenly becoming viable again, and any build out of like new wells on all those American leases Oil Companies couldn’t even sell previously. But I don’t know how much long term viability those companies see given American producers are basically making excuses about how they can’t because such and such.

Any “replacement” sources are likely to still be excessively expensive, just based on how much cheap gas and oil the Russians threw out there and how much they colluded with OPEC to dictate pricing.

If replacements can’t offset, and prices remain up. Well then renewables are just more competitive and more attractive. That’s before you get into just how obvious this has made the geo-political risks of importing energy.

8 Likes

The Russians don’t have a professional NCO Corps so they ARE NOT DOING IT NOW.

I think it was @anon87143080 who said this and someone asked for proof? I guess “some guy on the internet” isn’t proof per se, but it adds credence to it.

At any rate, a good insight into army logistics and the seemingly near complete lack of in the Russian Army.

It’s probably a bit of both. Some countries are going to use this as motivation to make themselves further independent from oil and relying on other states which may turn hostile in the future. While in the US, a faction wants to use it as a reason to up domestic production.

Usually what a president does has little to dictate prices, but in the case of the Saudis, Trump pressured them to cut production in 2020 for 2 years so the price of oil wouldn’t tank. He withheld arms sales. They don’t have a lot of reasons to bump up production if they can rake it in while oil goes up in price.

4 Likes

Linked? They are far right extremists!

17 Likes
12 Likes
6 Likes

A faction in the US wants to use it for raw dumbassery.

Domestic production will have to increase. Because we don’t have the infrastructure to replace it, and high fossil fuel prices have a material impact on the economy and the actual ability of regular people to make ends meet.

But also because actually getting other parts of the world to not buy Russian oil probably means the US exporting more needs to be part of the equation. India has actually been increasing it’s purchases of Russian oil recently.

The GOP is screaming drill baby drill, and proposing all their crazy shit about national parks and expanding access. While the Biden administration is (rightly) pointing out that oil companies are already sitting on thousands of sites where they have permission to extract, disused wells and fracking sites. While the actual oil companies are basically saying “nah” cause like the Saudis they’re more than happy to price gouge.

Something my brother pointed out the other day. Not far from where we grew up there is huge oil storage capacity, the main reserve for one of the biggest gasoline and diesel producers in the US. It’s been pretty much full for years, loaded up with oil purchased when the price was cratering. They only see a tanker or top ups every 4 months or so.

They’re still not using much of that now insanely high margin oil.

So these companies aren’t even ramping up throughput on what they already have, even to the extent that they’d probably be making more money off of it at a lower price.

Which itself was a response to Russia and OPEC’s deliberate over production. They’ve coordinated on production levels for a very long time as a way to control prices internationally. That’s one of the main reasons why US policy in general, not just the President, doesn’t materially impact the price of oil.

It’s something they can do (in part) because it’s much more expensive to get oil out of other major producers in the world. US oil can only be so cheap. Apparently that Canadian shale oil can’t be cheap at all. Other places with easy to access to fossil fuels, don’t have or produce enough to offset Russia or undercut. Or are sanctioned to high fuck.

But that’s where the part that’s not hand wringing sits. If you look what happened with fracking. We green lit it for natural gas as a transitional fuel. And the GOP managed to kill the green energy expansion and economic development programs that went with that. So now we just have a lot more places that are entirely reliant on fossil fuels to pay rent and medical bills.

Whole communities that need that to eat. And have been deprived of other options.

That will linger, and need to be dealt with. Even if fossil fuels stay pricey enough to make them a bad deal vs renewables.

The GOP wants more of that. Because they can convince those people the other options are the source of all their problems.

12 Likes

Keep what they have and grab more now.

Odds are, Putin wouldn’t have invaded if the oil prices had remained low.

6 Likes

Thing is the oil companies aren’t biting on the GOP’s boner for sticking oil wells on the White House lawn. They seem to arguing they don’t need additional access. More complaining that it’s too expensive, and it’ll take too long to ramp up. If they’re not already, they’ll probably be angling for more subsidies.

If you remember there was that auction of oil leases a couple years back, where no one was buying. And Exon and BP have had repeated investor calls and reports detailing that the leases they already have aren’t worth the investment of tapping. None of these companies want to build new wells and oil platforms. They don’t want to buy new leases, a lot of them are trying (and failing) to sell the ones they have.

Fossil fuel demand continues to fall, and right there in their own assessments the oil companies have been saying they don’t see how expansion and new infrastructure can pay off in the long run. If they do it now, they’re probably just shutting all that shit down in 20 years instead of 10. And if this does spur expansion of renewables, 10 instead of 5.

So they just want to maximize margins on their current capacity by restricting supply. And without Russia in the market, they have a lot more ability to do that.

Russia was a major reason prices were low. Down to oil being their entire economy, and a major source of their international influence. Russia really needed to keep their oil and natural gas cheaper than what was coming out of the western natural gas/shale boom.

Germany doesn’t buy two thirds of it’s natural gas from Russia if Russia’s natural gas isn’t the cheapest way to get natural gas into Germany.

OPEC had similar concerns, especially on keeping their crude cheap enough to compete against natural gas and renewables. So most of their recent coordination was actually in stabilizing the price of oil, and keeping it just cheap enough to undercut US, Canadian and Chinese exports. While keeping their own profits reliably high.

They’d periodically crater the price to make things uncompetitive, or spike it up as they did a couple years ago to maximize income.

Supposedly OPEC is the big voice for that stability. Where as Russia usually instigated the huge production shifts. But they’ve mostly been colluding to rigidly fix the price of oil, and to a lesser extent natural gas, for 20ish years.

So I think it goes the other way.

Oil prices would have remained low if Putin didn’t want to invade.

He needed to lay in money to pay for this.

6 Likes

Interesting. This is generally understood to be true. Here are a few articles that refewence either the lack of a professional NCO system, or attempts to rectify that lack.

[I cite Wiki here because one of the 2008 reforms addressed specifically creating a professional NCO corps]

http://www.scielo.org.co/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1900-65862016000100004

[Myth #3]

9 Likes

The FBK obtained a list of the yacht’s crew. Many of them are members of the Federal Protective Service (FSO), which provides Putin’s bodyguards and manages his official residences.

15 Likes

The UK isn’t the only Western country that needs to shut down the mechanisms that enable tyrannical kleptocrats to bank their ill-gotten gains.

14 Likes