Earlier last week there were concerns that Abramovich was poisoned with polonium even for making an outrcy against the Ukraine war. Those concerns fizzled away into “he had a slight discomfort from the environment”, but the message was still there I’d imagine for the other oligarchs. Polonium tea is how Putin handles his detractors.
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Ending it is for sure a tall order, but Putin hasn’t needed to crack down on media and protestors and pull armed forces back from a number of Ukrainian cities because things are going great for him.
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I’m definitely not opposed to the sanctions, especially those targeted at the oligarchy. Anything that keeps money out of their war machine is good and necessary.
But they’re not likely to remove Putin from power. Russia’s government knows how to suppress dissent – they’ve been brutally doing it successfully for centuries. And Russians are certainly not strangers to suffering under incompetent, medieval governments. They’ll bear this on their backs just like their parents did under Soviet rule.
I just don’t see “general” sanctions or ad hoc actions against all of Russia (such as the pull outs of Western companies like McDonalds, etc.) as having a positive effect at ending the war. All they’re doing is convincing ordinary Russians that the West still hates Russia, just like we did in the 1970s.
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I never said that they alone would do that.
They’ll be a factor in degrading his ability to prosecute more invasions- which is a useful end by itself. They’re already a factor in doing so in Ukraine.
No country is what it was in the Middle Ages. Russia was dominated by the Vikings and then by the Mongol Horde then. They were utterly defeated and broken into principalities. Moscow was an insignificant town.
The average person might just think - “Regimes fall every day. I tend not to weep over that, I’m Russian”
There’s no way to be in any conflict with anyone - to degrade their standard of living - and think they’re going to like you because of it. That’s a ridiculous objective and standard to judge success by.
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Putin kind of confuses me. No big deal so does most of life but still… He has to realize he’s shit in his own well since the water is getting lumpy but he just keeps on keeping on. Has he got a end game? Or did he really fuck up on such a grand scale that he has no reasonable plan B? What’s his ultimate win in this cluster fuck? Has he perhaps caught a terminal case of trumpitis? Is the horse medicine failing him. You’re a sad lad Vlad and possibly a fucking dumbass to boot.
Only the security council has the legal authority to impose sanctions. And because Russia can veto any action of the security council, any sanctions imposed on Russia are, by definition, illegal.
I don’t think they believe that, and I’m not sure they even want Putin gone, if the alternative is a dozen lesser Putins fighting each other. That’s why Western governments picked him in the first place.
The most charitable reading of Western policy is the simplest one: by exposing Putin to costs for his actions, they reduce the net value of whatever he’s hoping to get out of it, and bring him closer to the point where a U-turn is more attractive. Which is perfectly valid, even if not decisive on its own.
It also happens to be emotionally satisfying for voters to see the bad guy punished, especially if the news is otherwise that there’s nothing our governments can / should / will do. But that’s why I harp on about the need to attach goals to the sanctions. Lifting sanctions will feel very un-satisfying, so unless politicians are pinned down, they won’t ever want to do it. But if Putin could be bribed to leave Ukraine by giving his cheesy yacht back, then fuck my feelings – gve him the boat.
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I don’t think that’s right. UNSC can issue sanctions that all UN member states are obligated to enforce, but it doesn’t have the sole authority to issue sanctions between nations (which are really just trade policies).
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It’s mildly annoying that Russia does not back up its talking points with real evidence.
I have found two lines of attack against sanctions.
The first is that
Economic sanctions – and in particular comprehensive economic sanctions – are a form of collective punishment that is in total contradiction to the basic principles of justice and human rights. The right to life, the right to adequate nourishment and health care are inalienable rights that form part of the jus cogens of general international law. Those rights are the basis of international legality and of the legitimacy of the United Nations Charter as well.
http://www.i-p-o.org/sanct.htm
The second is that when the US imposes economic sanctions against a country, it does so extra territorially, and this imposition of sanctions against third parties who continue to trade with that country violates international law.
None if this should be interpreted as a defense of Russia, merely a curiosity as to what flavor of bullshit Russia is currently slinging.
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Sure, and I don’t mean to assert that the current sanctions are or are not legal, only that there are more roads to economic sanctions than the UNSC.
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Now that’s just horsey talk. The international reserve currency was decided to be the US dollar by the Bretton Woods Agreement which 44 countries signed on to in 1944. That’s not going anywhere short of the total collapse of the US economy. A reserve currency is the only thing holding international trade together and hundreds of countries’ economies depend on it. This is not something a few cranky countries can just decide to opt out of. You can’t do business without participating in the reserve currency. It was a monumental human effort to get everyone to agree on one, and it only happened when it did because all of Europe was devastated and the need was desperate. You’d never get that kind of international agreement today to change it to something else.
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Or maybe the worlds’ experts in geopolitics and diplomacy know more about the situation than you do.
Sanctioned Russian oligarchs break down in tears over their inability to book private jets, reports say
“I have had to endure hearing them in tears because they can’t get on board a private jet or book a holiday or even get an Uber anymore,"
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Considering that Russia almost sent the ISS spinning out of control with one of their cargo modules a while ago, maybe it would be better to not have them involved anymore.
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This. After the near-disasters during shuttle-Mir cooperation, you’d think we’d have learned something. The organizational factors that led to the multiple accidents are the same ones determined by the CAIB to have resulted in the destruction of Columbia, but we still plowed ahead in cooperation with the Russians on ISS without actually addressing any of them. We’re very, very lucky not to have lost astronauts because of lax Russian safety culture.
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Wait a minute… Getting rid of Texas is an option? I’m all for it!
The Bretton Woods system was based on gold – participants agreed to back their currencies with US dollars, but only because dollar at that time was a direct, fungible proxy for gold. That system collapsed when Nixon removed the gold backing from the dollar.
Modern foreign exchange is just market voodoo like everything else. So the US dollar is only a “reserve currency” now in the loose sense that it’s the preferred way to measure value internationally, and it behooves central banks to control their currencies’ dollar value by buying and selling US securities. They could instead focus on their exchange rates with renminbi or bitcoin. It’d hurt the parts of their economies that buy and sell stuff in USD; but if those parts of their economies have an American laser dot on their foreheads anyway, does it matter?
Granted, I pull the specifics out of my bum, but one way or another it seems inevitable that if you weaponise your position as a referee, it will encourage people to find a different game.
It was pegged to gold only as a proxy for the US dollar and everyone knew it. Everyone already knew the gold standard was going away, which is why they agreed to a reserve currency at all.
This is not a ship that can turn on a dime at this point. Every major country has huge stockpiles of US currency specifically because it is the reserve currency. You can’t stop using it for trade unless everyone else does too, and everyone else is in the same boat. It’s not going anywhere.
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