Russian customs subcommittee decided
to ban the export of sugar and grains from Russia to the EU countries until August 31
(At which point its subject to another review)
Serbia just banned export of grain and some other food until mid-April, because someone outside tried to buy 200.000 metric tons of grain.
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John Helmer is the longest serving foreign correspondent in Russia.
The Dance With Bears is the leading investigative source on Russian business, politics, war strategy.
Dances With Bears » CHAOS, KAPUT OR CAPITULATION – WHO IS TAKING CONTROL OF RUSSIAN COUNTER-SANCTIONS? (2022-03-09)
The first Moscow casualties of the US and European plan
targeting President Vladimir Putin and triggering Kremlin regime change have been revealed in the release over the past ten days of three presidential decrees and a half-dozen implementing orders from the Russian prime ministry.
...
There has been active public criticism of Elvira Nabiullina’s decision to raise the Central Bank lending rate to 20%, and her apparent unpreparedness to combat the US sanctions,
which have frozen more than $450 billion in Central Bank currency reserves, and cut Russia’s leading banks from the SWIFT transaction system.
Leading the attack on Nabiullina has been
Sergei Glazyev, the former Kremlin economic adviser and
now the minister in charge of macroeconomic policy at the Eurasian Economic Commission. Glazyev has been joined by Mikhail Delyagin, an economist and State Duma deputy. They have accused Nabiullina of “aiding the enemy”.
What can be detected in the series of Putin decrees and orders by
Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin is that a group of officials led by Mishustin,
Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu and
Federal Security Service Director (FSB) Mikhail Bortnikov, have taken charge of the new scheme
to restrict Russian debt repayments to creditors in countries listed as hostile. This group is known as the
Commission for Control of Foreign Investments (CCFI). According to Mishustin’s order No. 431-r of March 6, 2022, Nabiullina is not a member.
This decree also banned Russian residents from making foreign currency loans to non-residents offshore. These have been
one of the favourite forms of capital outflow used by Russian bankers to strip domestic assets, defraud their banks, and launder the proceeds through chains of companies they control in havens abroad. The biggest Russian fraudsters abroad – Sergei Pugachev, Boris Mints, and Vadim Belyaev – have all used these schemes; they have been granted asylum by the governments of France, the UK, and the US.
In short, hostile state creditors are to be repaid in these rouble bank accounts from which the creditors must collect their money – if they can. Putin told Mishustin he had two days in which to gazette the list of hostile states. The list was issued the same day as order No. 430-r.
The
hostile states include all the well-known offshore cash hideouts – New Zealand for Pugachev, the UK for Mints, the US for Belyaev, as well as Cyprus, the British Channel Islands, British Gibraltar, British Virgin Islands, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, Switzerland, and the Netherlands.
The Russian government official who created and ran this system of domestic capital destruction has been
Alexei Kudrin. He was also a Kremlin official under
Anatoly Chubais when the oligarch system was created by Chubais, then chief of staff for President Boris Yeltsin in 1996, in order to save Yeltsin and steal the election of 1996. Under Putin since 2000, Kudrin, a Latvian by origin, was finance minister until 2011; he is
currently head of the state auditor, the Accounting Chamber. Chubais, who is Jewish through his mother, has directed the privatization of the state electricity system under Putin, and then Rusnano, the state high-technology investment holding. He is currently Putin’s representative for international climate negotiations.
The two of them have been favoured by the US Government to take over the Kremlin; they still are.
Elvira Nabiullina’s career has been promoted by the two of them, and by their common ally,
German Gref, currently head of Sberbank.
In Russian political shorthand, this group are the liberal reformers of the Yeltsin period; the
pro-American and anti-military faction of the Putin period.
They are among the most distrusted political figures in the country, according to the polls, which have ranked them together and close behind Alexei Navalny.
They are unelectable.
As Kremlin appointees, however, they have dominated economic advice to Putin,
protected the offshore capital exports of the oligarchs, and
argued to cut the defence and security budgets. In effect, this group of officials
has fought to prevent the accession of Crimea in 2014;
to sabotage the rebuilding of Russia’s strategic and tactical deterrents to US and NATO attack; and
for fear of the financial consequences from Washington and Brussels, to stop the Ukrainian military operation. About this, so far they have said nothing in public.
A search of the Russian individual sanctions list at the US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control has found
“no result” for Anatoly Chubais, Alexei Kudrin, Elvira Nabiullina, and German Gref.
By contrast, Shoigu, Bortnikov, Glazyev and Delyagin have all been sanctioned by the US.
In the war between the Moscow committees, there are already casualties from the friendly fire of the hostile states.
(...)