This is one of those times when US foreign policy comes to hound them back, if the US hadn't sanctioned Iran and Venezuela to such a degree, they would be capable enough to make up for Russia's losses. , but now we are in a situation where 3 of the biggest oil producers are out of the game.
Miscellaneous News
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Western delusions crushed again
Anyone who thought that China would throw Russia under the bus were always deluding themselves. Glad this has been cleared up
Posted by Maxim A. Suchkov @m_suchkov on 07 March 2022
Maxim A. Suchkov serves as Director of the MGIMO Institute for International Studies located in Moscow, Russia, an institute that provides policy analysis to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Russia and other agencies since 1976.
The conflict in Ukraine is a collateral damage of a massive United States-Russia crisis that has been brewing for years. Now that the conflict penetrates every political, economic and social level regionally and globally, it’s important to see what comes next.
I’m an academic, not my job to advise governments or companies, but analysis of the most global consultancies gets increasingly biased. Mine is probably too. But I'd present the other side of the picture from what people get from the MSM dominated discourse of things in Ukraine and costs that Russia should bear.
1) So, the new drastic sanctions on Russia were slapped and will hurt, especially in the long run. There are numerous literature on it. Many talks about how the energy markets will be effected, so I’m gonna skip this and say a few things about others, less discussed yet very important domains.
2) Following sanctions on Russia’s airlines, Aeroflot, and airspace, Russia closed off its skies for Europe -- they gotta take a detour. Shares of the most European airlines fell from -6% to -32% due to the increased costs.
Finnair is doing particularly bad but not just that.
Finnair shares plummet as airline is banned from Russia’s airspace - FT 20220306
Moscow introduced like-for-like sanctions in response to bans on its carriers, barring 36 countries from its airspace including all of the EU.
“Bypassing the Russian airspace lengthens flight times to Asia considerably and, thus, the operation of most our passenger and cargo flights to Asia is not economically sustainable or competitive” - Finnair
3) A lot of rejoicing over how Russian planes that were on lease are seized, but there’re a lot of drawbacks on this as well, as I mentioned earlier.
"Western sanctions meant to punish President Putin for invading Ukraine may have also dealt a big blow to Europe or European companies that leased commercial aircraft to Russian airlines."
See how newly imposed sanctions on Russia is backfiring.
European Sanctions Could Strand Leased Planes in Russia - New York Times 20220228
The sanctions give companies leasing the planes until March 28 to terminate existing contracts. European companies that have leased hundreds of planes to Russian airlines must now find a way to fly them out. But getting the planes back won’t be easy. The repatriation of leased planes is normally planned years in advance. Airlines in Russia may not cooperate or may be ordered by Russian government to throw up obstacles. Another challenge is that Europe and Russia have closed their airspaces to each other’s planes.
Normally before a plane is returned, it has to be brought back into shape, it must have a spotless interior, and the paperwork documenting its maintenance history and any problems must be in order. Once contracts are canceled, Russian airlines no longer have to make payments for planes or maintain them. The local airline is absolved of its responsibility.
4) Moscow advises chemical enterprises to suspend export of methanol derivatives to Europe due to logistical issues. Methanol is raw material for pentaerythritol and urotropine. Share of Russian manufacturers in the EU market is 40% (pentaerythritol) and 50% (urotropine).
5) Without going into scientific details -- Europe’s polymer market will down the same pipe as the aviation.
Agriculture -- Russia will suspend the export of fertilizers to Europe until “normal transportation is resumed and deliveries are guaranteed”.
6) Russia's Trade Ministry says that due to the sabotage of deliveries by some foreign logistics companies, farmers both in Europe and in other countries cannot receive the necessary volumes of fertilizer.
What it means is that on the eve of the sowing season, European (and American) farmers are left without the Russian fertilizers. Russia's share in the world market is a little less than a 1/3 of the world production of potash fertilizers, about 10% of nitrogen fertilizers and about 20% of complex fertilizers.
7) How to fill the gap? The issue could have been solved by fertilizers from Belarus but it’s also under sanctions. In Ukraine, the sowing campaign is disrupted. That is, in six months the world food market, in particular wheat, has high chances of collapsing.
8) Russia is the world leader in the wheat market and what US now does, it seeks to cut Russian exports -- this will only aggravate the situation. The logistics is destroyed -- impossible to take Russian wheat to Europe. But it’s easy to take it to China and they need a lot of it.
9) Btw, once the sanctions were slapped, India was smart enough to ensure the business with Russia over fertilizers was done in bilateral currencies. So the East here exposes a smarter approach than the West. Not surprising.
10) Semiconductors and computer chips are also interesting.
Today, Russia accounts for 80 per cent of the market for sapphire substrates -- thin plates made of artificial stone, which are used in optoelectronics and microelectronics to build up layers of various materials, such as silicon.
They are used in every processor in the world -- AMD and Intel are no exception. Russia's position is even stronger in special chip etching chemistry using the ultra-clean components. Russia accounts for almost 100% of the world's supply of some rare earth elements used for these purposes.
11) A ban on finished products for Russia will result in a retaliatory ban on the supply of production components and will cause an acute shortage of processors for the whole world.
For more on that see below article (in Russian language):
Nanometer sanctions: an impossible war for microprocessors between Russia and the West - Journal of “Russia in Global Affairs” 20220305
12) Other echoes:
Gas prices going up, just as Moscow expected them to:
Diesel is getting expensive:
Energy bills in Europe are rising:
Explainer: Why Europe faces climbing energy bills - Reuters 20220203
Benchmark European gas prices at the Dutch TTF hub rose by 330% last year, while benchmark German and French power contracts have more than doubled.
Norway, Europe's second largest supplier, is delivering natural gas at maximum capacity and cannot replace any missing supplies from Russia, its prime minister has said. Qatar, one of the world's top natural gas exporters, has said it will not be able to unilaterally replace Europe's energy needs in case of a shortage due to the Russia/Ukraine crisis.
I don't rejoice any of this -- people will lose jobs, have to live harder lives. Neither do I underestimate the gravity of the situation for Russia’s own economy. This is to say that next time you hear people say "Russia is a gas station with nukes" -judge yourself!
13) Europe will lose in any case. China is mixed bag.
US is likely a winner from this crisis -- it’s role as a Western leader gets stronger, it benefits economically from Europe’s militarization and sanctions on Russia. The United States, it profits from the conflict like it did from both WWI and WWII.
But the departure from the US dominant world will be faster, so is the de-dollarization. US domestic integrity is also weak and this will be exploited. Regardless of how Ukraine be settled, United States - Russia standoff will continue and take dramatic forms -- hopefully non-military. /End
Maxim A. Suchkov serves as Director of the MGIMO Institute for International Studies located in Moscow, Russia, an institute that provides policy analysis to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Russia and other agencies since 1976.
The conflict in Ukraine is a collateral damage of a massive United States-Russia crisis that has been brewing for years. Now that the conflict penetrates every political, economic and social level regionally and globally, it’s important to see what comes next.
I’m an academic, not my job to advise governments or companies, but analysis of the most global consultancies gets increasingly biased. Mine is probably too. But I'd present the other side of the picture from what people get from the MSM dominated discourse of things in Ukraine and costs that Russia should bear.
1) So, the new drastic sanctions on Russia were slapped and will hurt, especially in the long run. There are numerous literature on it. Many talks about how the energy markets will be effected, so I’m gonna skip this and say a few things about others, less discussed yet very important domains.
2) Following sanctions on Russia’s airlines, Aeroflot, and airspace, Russia closed off its skies for Europe -- they gotta take a detour. Shares of the most European airlines fell from -6% to -32% due to the increased costs.
Finnair is doing particularly bad but not just that.
Finnair shares plummet as airline is banned from Russia’s airspace - FT 20220306
Moscow introduced like-for-like sanctions in response to bans on its carriers, barring 36 countries from its airspace including all of the EU.
“Bypassing the Russian airspace lengthens flight times to Asia considerably and, thus, the operation of most our passenger and cargo flights to Asia is not economically sustainable or competitive” - Finnair
3) A lot of rejoicing over how Russian planes that were on lease are seized, but there’re a lot of drawbacks on this as well, as I mentioned earlier.
"Western sanctions meant to punish President Putin for invading Ukraine may have also dealt a big blow to Europe or European companies that leased commercial aircraft to Russian airlines."
See how newly imposed sanctions on Russia is backfiring.
European Sanctions Could Strand Leased Planes in Russia - New York Times 20220228
The sanctions give companies leasing the planes until March 28 to terminate existing contracts. European companies that have leased hundreds of planes to Russian airlines must now find a way to fly them out. But getting the planes back won’t be easy. The repatriation of leased planes is normally planned years in advance. Airlines in Russia may not cooperate or may be ordered by Russian government to throw up obstacles. Another challenge is that Europe and Russia have closed their airspaces to each other’s planes.
Normally before a plane is returned, it has to be brought back into shape, it must have a spotless interior, and the paperwork documenting its maintenance history and any problems must be in order. Once contracts are canceled, Russian airlines no longer have to make payments for planes or maintain them. The local airline is absolved of its responsibility.
4) Moscow advises chemical enterprises to suspend export of methanol derivatives to Europe due to logistical issues. Methanol is raw material for pentaerythritol and urotropine. Share of Russian manufacturers in the EU market is 40% (pentaerythritol) and 50% (urotropine).
5) Without going into scientific details -- Europe’s polymer market will down the same pipe as the aviation.
Agriculture -- Russia will suspend the export of fertilizers to Europe until “normal transportation is resumed and deliveries are guaranteed”.
6) Russia's Trade Ministry says that due to the sabotage of deliveries by some foreign logistics companies, farmers both in Europe and in other countries cannot receive the necessary volumes of fertilizer.
What it means is that on the eve of the sowing season, European (and American) farmers are left without the Russian fertilizers. Russia's share in the world market is a little less than a 1/3 of the world production of potash fertilizers, about 10% of nitrogen fertilizers and about 20% of complex fertilizers.
7) How to fill the gap? The issue could have been solved by fertilizers from Belarus but it’s also under sanctions. In Ukraine, the sowing campaign is disrupted. That is, in six months the world food market, in particular wheat, has high chances of collapsing.
8) Russia is the world leader in the wheat market and what US now does, it seeks to cut Russian exports -- this will only aggravate the situation. The logistics is destroyed -- impossible to take Russian wheat to Europe. But it’s easy to take it to China and they need a lot of it.
9) Btw, once the sanctions were slapped, India was smart enough to ensure the business with Russia over fertilizers was done in bilateral currencies. So the East here exposes a smarter approach than the West. Not surprising.
10) Semiconductors and computer chips are also interesting.
Today, Russia accounts for 80 per cent of the market for sapphire substrates -- thin plates made of artificial stone, which are used in optoelectronics and microelectronics to build up layers of various materials, such as silicon.
They are used in every processor in the world -- AMD and Intel are no exception. Russia's position is even stronger in special chip etching chemistry using the ultra-clean components. Russia accounts for almost 100% of the world's supply of some rare earth elements used for these purposes.
11) A ban on finished products for Russia will result in a retaliatory ban on the supply of production components and will cause an acute shortage of processors for the whole world.
For more on that see below article (in Russian language):
Nanometer sanctions: an impossible war for microprocessors between Russia and the West - Journal of “Russia in Global Affairs” 20220305
12) Other echoes:
Gas prices going up, just as Moscow expected them to:
Diesel is getting expensive:
Energy bills in Europe are rising:
Explainer: Why Europe faces climbing energy bills - Reuters 20220203
Benchmark European gas prices at the Dutch TTF hub rose by 330% last year, while benchmark German and French power contracts have more than doubled.
Norway, Europe's second largest supplier, is delivering natural gas at maximum capacity and cannot replace any missing supplies from Russia, its prime minister has said. Qatar, one of the world's top natural gas exporters, has said it will not be able to unilaterally replace Europe's energy needs in case of a shortage due to the Russia/Ukraine crisis.
I don't rejoice any of this -- people will lose jobs, have to live harder lives. Neither do I underestimate the gravity of the situation for Russia’s own economy. This is to say that next time you hear people say "Russia is a gas station with nukes" -judge yourself!
13) Europe will lose in any case. China is mixed bag.
US is likely a winner from this crisis -- it’s role as a Western leader gets stronger, it benefits economically from Europe’s militarization and sanctions on Russia. The United States, it profits from the conflict like it did from both WWI and WWII.
But the departure from the US dominant world will be faster, so is the de-dollarization. US domestic integrity is also weak and this will be exploited. Regardless of how Ukraine be settled, United States - Russia standoff will continue and take dramatic forms -- hopefully non-military. /End
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It seems every nation that Anglos don't like all look the same. Now all Russians look the same just like the Chinese!
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plawolf
Lieutenant General
Racist Incels watches way too much porn to the point of rotting their already smaller than average brains, colour me surprised!
US tried an 'Asian NATO', it was called SEATO and it failed after US abandoned South Vietnam.
SK and JPN will never sign a MDT because of historical mistrust, and SK prioritizes reunification which means getting China's approval, so signing an 'Asian NATO' can only guarantee SK is frontline irradiated guinea pig in any conflict.
ASEAN's largest trading partner is China, and US/West cannot replace China market so goodluck convincing SEAsia to shoot themselves in the foot to uphold US hegemony.
India's neutral stance on Russian invasion pretty much breaks any QUAD attempt on China. China can basically get India to be neutral if it doesn't start invading other countries willy-nilly (Taiwan is exception, it's not a country, domestic affairs) and keeps the border dispute at low-level.
So US dreams of lackey vassals upholding their hegemony by volunteering to be frontline guineapigs is just a fantasy and dream. If anything, history shows that Chinese hegemony in region is characterized for peace and trade, whereas European hegemony lead to instability, poverty, and deprivation of basic rights.