Just in time for this special offer:
That’s a good deal. I’d take it before it expires.
He’s trying to re-build the Soviet empire, which is something different than trying to re-build the Soviet Union. And really that’s not too much different from his trying to re-build the Tsarist empire. That’s the goal of this invasion, to put the “the” back in front of Ukraine and reduce it back to a province ruled from the Russian capital.
Putin himself would like nothing better than to be a combination of Tsar and Stalin, without having to deal with pesky things like pretending to care about the Russian people or about trying to exemplify ideological purity.
With how the ruble is doing it would only really cover the cost for a ham sandwich and a coffee.
The Canadian government is matching donations made by Canadians.
(I kept my donation under $10 million, to leave room for others.)
Nice!
Maybe a trolley ticket at best…
ETA: Now I’m left wondering how the ticket inspector is gonna hold all those rubles in their smock pockets.
Whatever it is - he wants to make it great again.
Take it while the ruble still has some minuscule value.
Uh, no. The UK left the EU because of racism and xenophobia. That’s a deficiency of the Tories and UKIP, not the EU.
Did read. Also, that thread lead me into the fascinating world of Hindu nationalists, shilling for Putin and painting Ukraine as prepping up Pakistan while Russia will defend India. While India will be easily able to handle China. Oh, and at the same time there is no danger to civilians in Ukraine, but Ukraine also hinders POC to flee. It’s really like Foxywood.
On the surface, this is a column-filler (archaic term, now!), but there’s an important truth embedded within: Russian elites are more protected from worldwide sanctions than we realize, because they’ve been working at approximating luxury food items for quite a while now.
Here’s a piece in [https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-02-28/russia-s-money-is-gone](https://Matt Levine’s Bloomberg newsletter) about Russia’s finances.
As of Friday Russia had about $630 billion of foreign currency reserves, a large cushion designed to allow it to withstand economic sanctions and prop up the value of the ruble. But “foreign currency reserves” are not an objective fact; they are mostly a series of entries on lists maintained by foreign-currency issuers and intermediaries (central banks, correspondent banks, sovereign bond issuers, brokerages).[1] If those people cross you off the list, or put an asterisk next to your entry freezing your funds, then you can’t use those funds anymore.
And so over the weekend the U.S., the European Union, the U.K., Switzerland, Singapore and other countries announced harsh sanctions against Russia for its unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. There are a lot of these sanctions — banning Russian flights through European airspace, limiting Russian banks’ access to the SWIFT interbank messaging system, etc. — but the most drastic might be U.S., U.K. and EU bans on any transactions with the Russian central bank. The bulk of Russia’s foreign reserves are held in the form of securities, deposits at other central banks and deposits at foreign commercial banks. A ban on transactions with Russia’s central bank means that it can’t sell those securities or access those deposits. Its foreign currency reserves turned out to be mostly useless.
Eat the rich?
Didn’t claim that the stress was justified or rational. It can be argued that Germany had no choice but to let a million refugees in, but the way it did that wasn’t too popular with our neighbors and allies. Because these refugees weren’t white Europeans.
From the article…(my bold)
The feta tasted more like Georgian cheese than anything Greek (Georgian cheese is wonderful, actually, but it’s not the same). The “brie” resembled brie only insofar as it was round. I was too polite to ask how on earth it had all gone so wrong, and arrived privately at two broad conclusions: first, that centuries of knowledge are embedded in something greater than a single cheesemaker, and no one alone can recreate them
The French have a word for this. And they have it and the Russians don’t: terroir
Short of invading France, their cheese will always be Russian.
If it’s not a joke, it seems like a spectacularly bad idea, but a good way to get immolated. Someone out there is piloting an armed drone, and won’t care who’s inside the Russian vehicle.
