borrell17_Metin AktasAnadolu Agency via Getty Images_ukrainerussiawar

Economics

Face à la Russie, notre stratégie fonctionne et nous devons la poursuivre

Sep 14, 2022 Josep Borrell

BRUXELLES – La guerre engagée par la Russie contre l'Ukraine est entrée dans une phase nouvelle. L'armée ukrainienne a réalisé des avancées spectaculaires, libéré de nombreuses villes et villages, et forcé les troupes russes à battre en retraite. On ne sait pas encore jusqu'où ira cette contre-offensive ukrainienne, mais il est d’ores et déjà clair que, sur le terrain, l'équilibre stratégique a changé.

Dans le même temps, l'Union européenne se mobilise face à la crise énergétique. Nous avons rempli nos stocks de gaz à plus de 80 % - avant la date butoir du 1er novembre - et nous avons convenu d'objectifs clairs de réduction de la consommation de gaz cet hiver. Pour aider les consommateurs et les entreprises vulnérables à gérer la flambée des prix, nous proposons notamment qu'une taxe exceptionnelle soit prélevée sur les entreprises du secteur de l'énergie ayant réalisé des bénéfices excessifs.

En outre, avec le G7 et d'autres partenaires qui partagent nos valeurs, nous voulons plafonner le prix des exportations de pétrole russe. Enfin, nous aidons nos partenaires du Sud à faire face aux retombées de l'agression brutale de la Russie et à son usage cynique de l’énergie et de la nourriture comme armes.

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0 Comments on this paragraph, 26 Comments on this article

vic lai Sep 24, 2022

Without using any of her nuclear warheads, Russia seems likely to be firing her hypersonic missiles now stationing in Belarus at Ukraine to fully subdue the country in the coming months, by
(i) striking them at Kiev to try to behead Zelensky, who is now said to be hiding inside a dugout near his President Office in Kiev,
(ii) destroying the soldier-training and weaponry and ammunition provision camps in and near Lviv (which is situated near Ukraine's border with Poland), knowing that lots of NATO army directors are now training Ukraine's soldiers there.
---
Soldiers may also be sent southward from Brest in Belarus to Lviv sometime in the future, to occupy Lviv and the nearby cities, so as to totally cut all the major connections between US-cum-NATO to the West and their supported Ukrainian soldiers to the East.
Ukraine beware.
---
- vic lai Sep 25, 2022
  
  According to the latest satellite photos, Russia seems to be resuming the testing of her Petrel missiles on an island in the Arctic Ocean.
  According to wiki, "the 9M730 Burevestnik is a Russian experimental nuclear-powered, nuclear-armed cruise missile under development for the Russian Armed Forces.
  The missile has an essentially unlimited range."
  ---
  Russia's new nuclear-powered Petrel missiles can keep on flying for days or months high up above the sky anywhere around the world, say over the top of the vast territories of Russia's chosen enemy countries.
  Since they're nuclear-powered, if they're striken down by the enemy countries and therefore disintegrate and drop onto the ground below, the resulting nuclear pollution, with the help of the blowing wind that's always unpredictable, will cause predictably disastrous consequences for the affected enemy countries.
  ---
  My guess is that Russia is going to mainly use her newly-employed 3oo,ooo soldiers to
  (a) help defend her newly annexed 4 regions that were originally belonging to Ukraine, and
  (b) try to maintain law and order there, say to cope with Ukraine's coming possible incessant guerilla warfares near the fighting border regions,
  instead of using those new soldiers as an invading force against Ukraine in the near future, while at the same time Russia is also trying to use her new nuclear threat to maintain a certain Balance of Terror between herself and her enemy countries to the West.
  The nuclear threat is always demanded by Russia herself, since the total border line of her 4 newly acquired regions is too long and so it's very costly for her to effectively defend the 4 regions using conventional non-nuclear weapons alone, or only using her own limited amount of fightable soldiers.
  ---
  Whether the West will
  (i) implicitly agree to maintain a relatively long period of Balance of Terror with Russia as a result of Russia's new nuclear threat, by restricting the coming invading abilities of Ukraine's soldiers near the border regions, so that a temporary ceasefire and detente will be formed in the not too distant future, or
  (ii) keep on encouraging and supporting the Ukrainian soldiers to charge westward and southward, and so horribly risk starting an unimaginable nuclear battle with Russia sometime in the near future,
  remains to be seen.
  The West's coming all-important choice should be a no-brainer and hopefully, neither side of the conflict will ever go to extremes in the near future.
  ---
  - vic lai Sep 27, 2022
    
    It's said that Russia has always been an expert in using public poll to help grab foreign geographical territories from the other countries.
    Besides Russia's similar use of public polls to annex Crimea in 2014, many years ago today's Outer Mongolia, which originally belonged to China, was eventually separated politically from China through a similar public poll there, and up until today, Outer Mongolia remains very suspicious of China and there's not much China can do about it.
    ---
    Russia's latest tactic against Ukraine and her allies, which is the new combined package of
    (i) public polls organised in the 4 newly-occupied Ukraine regions,
    (ii) non-bluffing real nuclear threat against the West, if the West dares to invade Russia's newly-occupied own territories,
    (iii) resulting forced bilateral ceasefire in Ukraine, since the total cost of any coming potential mutually-destructive nuclear threats posed to both sides of the conflict will be too high,
    resembles Russia's new ultimate wager in the ongoing poker or showhand gamble game with the West, in which Russia is just forcefully betting that the gamblers on the other side of the table no longer dare to keep the game going on by placing a similar heavy-weighted wager of their own.
    ---
    A similar tactic may be used by China after she is forced by the US to occupy a majority part of Taiwan's territories perhaps one day in the future, even though today's China is aware that the US has already given depleted uranium bombs to Taiwan.
    ---
    - vic lai Sep 27, 2022
      
      With the benefit of hindsight, it can be argued that Russia's new combined package should also include her deliberate and pretended recent military defeat and hence retreat from Kharkiv, which
      (i) seems to most people to have been a major first military victory for Ukraine in recent days, and
      (ii) has also led to Russia-planned ongoing very smooth completion of the Russia-joining polls in the 4 newly-annexed Ukrainian regions, because most of the voting people in those regions, being highly frightened of Ukraine's future possible revenge against them if their regions are re-occupied by Ukraine, will almost all vote for joining Russia.
      ---
      A new reply to this comment has been posted.
    - vic lai Sep 27, 2022
      
      It will take around 20 days for Russia's Duma to pass the law of formally incorporating the 4 newly annexed Ukrainian regions into Russia herself, and so, by around the middle of October this year, we'll no longer see any large-scale military conflicts between Russia and Ukraine near their new border regions.
      Afterall, Russia will then be doing whatever it takes to defend her own territories after mid-October, while the US and the NATO will never further risk starting a mutuallly destructive nuclear conflict with Russia through continuing the war in Ukraine.
      ---
      Future history will probably record the following 2 crucial strategies that had been used by Russia during the 8-month-long Ukrainian military conflict in 2022 :
      (i) Russia's requiring her unfriendly EU countries to use Russia's ruble to buy Russia's own gas for themselves after the start of the military conflict,
      (ii) Russia's new combined package mentioned upstairs was used effectively by Putin to quickly stop the prolonged war in Ukraine once and for all.
      ---
      - vic lai Sep 27, 2022
        
        During the Ukraine War, the US up until today has basically been hiding at the back of the global geopolitical stage, but it's said that Russia's coming non-bluffing nuke threats against both Ukraine and the NATO will eventually force the US to come out to the open stage, since the stake then will be too high, and do something about it, say to help arrange a certain ceasefire in Europe.
        Another potential good news for the world's asset market investors is that, even the US Fed, despite her latest increasingly hawkish stance, may not be able to keep the US's interest-rate-hiking cycle for too long a period of time any more.
        ---
        The simple reason is that the US's interest cost accrued to her quickly rising total outstanding treasuries that has been net-issued by the US federal government will soon increase to such a level that's
        (i) not only even larger than the yearly total military expense of the country,
        (ii) but also larger than the year-to-year rise in the total amount of GDP of the country say if not in this year then probably in the year 2023 or 2024 (which means the Ponzi-financed-like US corporation is already a failing company).
        ---
        If ever more new treasuries are, as before, net-issued by the US Treasury Department to try to help finance those quickly rising interest expenses and principal repayments in the near future, the US's total amount of owed treasuries, together with the accompanying interest costs, will keep on rising more quickly than before.
        Quite contrary to the highly-optimistic claims of those MMT advocators, given the refuse-to-abate runaway inflation in today's US, the newly net-issued treasuries of the US federal government, together with the accrued interest costs, can and should no longer be simply financed by the Fed's new rounds of money-printing QEs, to avoid feeding further the inflation monster.
        ---
        Which means, the US's always-played easy positive-sum game (using MMT-like new-money-printing QEs to help finance both the new net-issuance of treasuries and the paying of interests thereof) will be forced by the country's simple lack of money to be turned into a new zero-sum game (requiring the federal government to reduce expenditures on other sectors of the country to save more money to pay for the country's newly-issued or maturing government debts and interests), which obviously is election-vote-destroying for the incumbent ruling party in the US.
        ---
        Which also means, the "independent" Fed will soon be forced by politics to stop her ongoing very-expensive rate-hiking cycle, or to even reverse course some time in the near future.
        If so, the US dollar will start to drop, perhaps like a falling ball, in the global FX market as well, and the US could no longer export her high inflation to the rest of the world any more.
        ---
        
        vic lai Sep 28, 2022
        
        Since the higher and higher interest costs incurred by today's keep-on-borrowing-and-spending vote-begging Biden administration is more and more a matter of great concern for both the US herself and the rest of the world, the US Fed should now seriously consider enlarging and accelerating her Quantitative Tightening cycle, rather than further pursuing her rate-hiking cycle, to help put US's runaway inflation genie more quickly back into the bottle.
        Today, if most of the EU's economic sanctions imposed on Russia have proved to have failed to quickly end Russia's war in Ukraine, then the US Fed's current rate-hiking cycle has similarly failed to suppress quickly enough the domestic inflation monster in the US.
        ---
        I've written numerous comments here in the PS comment columns that the US Fed should mainly use her new QT cycle to fight US's runaway inflation, instead of (or in addition to) using the ratcheting-up interest rate cycle to do the same, since the rate-hiking cycle will have the possible adverse side effects of
        (i) much increasing the total interest costs of the US federal government, that can and should no longer be financed by the Fed's simple money-printing during the ongoing environment of runaway inflation,
        (ii) much increasing the interest revenues of the rich people and corporations which have already put lots of their excess savings into the US Fed's O/N RRR savings account, the resulting effect of which is actually promoting rather than dampening domestic CPI inflation,
        (iii) failing to quickly suppress the inflation monster in the US,
        (iv) bidding up the US dollar's exchange rate relative to most other foreign currencies, and so much increasing the debt burdens of many already-highly-indebted EM countries, the debts of which are mostly denominated in the US dollar,
        (v) likely popping very precariously both the everything asset bubble in the US and many other asset bubbles in the rest of the world, thereby plunging the overheating US domestic economy and other foreign economies into a new lasting cycle of economic recessions or stagflations.
        ---
        As always, almost all of those comments have fallen into deaf ears.
        But this time is really different.
        Note that today's US is no longer the same as the US in the 1970s.
        In the previous period, according to a Chinese economist, the transmssion mechanisms of the US's interest-rate monetary policies had been more fluent than that in today's highly-financially-innovative and still-quite-globalized US, while the federal government's total debt level as a proportion of GDP in the 1970s, and the accompanying total interest costs, were not as high as that in today's US also.
        ---
        
        A new reply to this comment has been posted.
        
        vic lai Sep 27, 2022
        
        If the Ukraine War still drags on and on in the coming winter, despite Russia's latest placing of her ultimate poker wager, then it can partly be explained also by Germany's continued pro-US attitude to sustain the war there.
        It's said that Germany's so-pro-US attitude, despite all the ongoing damages inflicted on the country herself and their people, is due to her new ruling politicians' ambition to join, together with Japan, the Security Council of the United Nations to serve as one of the seven standing members there, so that in the future, Germany's leading role can fully override that of France inside both the NATO and the EU, and become the only most powerful leader there.
        Germany's such ambition will also be assisted by her coming attempt to further develop her military land force in Europe.
        ---
        Germany's coming entering into the Security Council obviously needs the consent of the US, but the US's such promise to Germany, like Britain's coming free trade agreement with the US after her costly Brexit, may remain only a bad check or empty promise for a long time to come.
        ---
        Being a new member of the UN's Security Council which has always been controlled by the US, Europe solely led by Germany still can't fully liberate her continent from the influence of the US.
        Germany-cum-France should instead ambitiously form a new European power which is fully militarily and monetarily independent from the US, before Europe could really serve as one stable leg of the future global geopolitical tripod, together with the US and China.
        ---
        
        vic lai Sep 28, 2022
        
        The latest bombing and hence destroying of some parts of Russia's Nord Stream I and II natural gas pipelines near Denmark, which was possibly done by the US, means that the EU led by Germany will have to keep buying expensive LNG gas and oil from the US and elsewhere in the future, so that the German and other EU residents can keep on cooking their meals and heating their houses.
        ---
        This surprising act has actually been a natural consequence of the diametric change of the economic role of the US in western Europe since the end of WWII ------ from the US's being a net provider of money and industrial capacities to western Europe through the US's Marshall Plan enacted after WWII, to the US's currently becoming a net "importer" of capital and industrial factories from Germany and other western European advanced countries.
        Instead of the US's transfusing her own blood to the European patients as in the good old days, today's ailing US has to get back transfused blood from her equally sick or sicker European patients.
        ---
        It's now a well-known overt plot made by today's US, to
        (i) grab the most advanced and sophisticated semiconductor and chips industries from Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan, and relocate them in the US's own territories in the coming years,
        (ii) start offshoring Europe's highly-globally-competitive heavy-chemical and machinery-manufacturing industries to the US, with the help of the persistent EU-weakening Ukraine War,
        both of which with the aim of helping and supporting declining US's coming strive of deglobalization-reshoring and domestic re-industrialization.
        ---
        But this time the US will have to compete fiercely with China in getting the majority of the off-shoring industries of Germany and other EU countries in the coming years, knowing full well that Russia will also be forced to export most of her excess natural gas and other energies mostly to China in the coming decades also.
        ---
        
        vic lai Sep 28, 2022
        
        Today's China, thanks to her traditional strictly enforced capital control, has still been able to continue her own interest-rate-lowering cycle, to help support her own worsening domestic economy.
        The rest of the non-American world should also consider quickly enacting similar capital control, to
        (i) get back relatively independent domestic monetary policies of their own, and so avoid having to raise their own domestic interest rates to a rather high level commensurate with that prevailing in today's US,
        (ii) maintain a relatively stable exchange rate of their own currencies in the global foreign exchange markets, and so avoid their own currencies' massive depreciation vis-a-vis the US dollar.
        ---
        Such capital controls should long have been imposed in the EU countries (and in Britain) immediately after the start of the Ukraine War in Europe early this year, to help
        (a) prevent the financial capital in their own countries from massively escaping and flowing out to the US and other peaceful countries,
        (b) prevent their currencies' exchange rates from falling quickly and precipitously relative to the quickly appreciating US dollar,
        (c) deter their heavy-energy-consuming manufacturing industries from being forced to offshore to other cheap-energy countries in the coming years, because those off-shored industries will seldom come back to Europe once they are well settled in the suitable foreign countries there.
        ---
        
        vic lai Sep 28, 2022
        
        If the latest bombing of the gas-pipelines was not done by Russia herself but by a country in the West, then Russia can take revenge by seriously considering cutting off the crucial optic-fibre undersea cables for global internet transmissions somewhere near the responsible country (or countries) in the West.
        The subsequent disruptions of international communications of all kinds as a result of such an act may be horrible and powerful enough for Russia to force her enemy countries in the West to quickly stop the war in Ukraine, and will also be more effective than Russia's possible explosion of a small-scale nuke weapon in her chosen enemy country, in which the seriously affected area will only be a relatively small local region with a diameter of say only 10 km, while the rest of the world is not hurt at all.
        ---
        
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Madurai Padmanabhan Sep 20, 2022

So how does victory for the West, fought with Ukrainian blood and tears look like?
Democracy, reduced fossil fuel use and strong Euro driving growth in the continent or a scramble to grab the spoils of a long drawn war.
Why is that not a reckoning of experts while commenting on this war for the future of the people?
A new reply to this comment has been posted.
Leo Arouet Sep 19, 2022

It's a good job that make European Union, but chief country like Germany is not make enough
A new reply to this comment has been posted.
vic lai Sep 15, 2022

Whether the Kremlin is really fighting a losing battle remains to be seen.
This conclusion can only be made when snow starts to melt next year, after the coming Winter has mostly passed.
According to a Taiwan commentator, the Ukraine War is basically a regional war and so can only be resolved through the channels of war or diplomacy, not through world-disturbing economic sanctions of one sort or another.
Economic sanctions, even when going to extremes, have now shown to be
(i) ineffective in stopping the regional war, and
(ii) easily backfiring on the countries which initiated all those sanctions which were almost bound to create many unintended adverse consequences.
Which means, even if the US-initiated Taiwan Relations Act leads to the eventual invasion of Taiwan by China in the near future, this new regional war in Asia can never be resolved by similar economic sanctions imposed by the West on China, and can only be stopped using military conflicts, or diplomacy, or both.
---
Note that China is no Russia.
China has been the biggest trading partner of 121 other countries under the sun, and the US's
(a) similar ban of China's use of the SWIFT communication system will tremendously disturb most parts of the existing global trade, thereby worsening the ongoing runaway inflations in many countries,
(b) similar freezing or overt confiscation of China's FX reserves will further harm the ongoing global credibility of the US treasuries and hence the US dollar, and so will encourage China to further internationalize her yuan to try to challenge the declining global dominance of the US dollar.
---
Furthermore, even many of US's traditional ally countries may this time refuse to jump on the US's China-sanctioning bandwagon, because they simply don't want to deteriorate further their existing trade and other relationships with China.
Afterall, those other countries only care about their own interests, and only the US herself finds it most urgent and crucial to quickly subdue the number 2 geopolitically and economically most powerful country in the world which has always been trying to dethrone her sometime in the far future.
---
US's coming Taiwan Relations Act is obviously a bait to lure China to invade Taiwan, so that another much less expensive US agency war can be created in Asia, which will be
(i) as bloody and property-destroying as that in today's Ukraine,
(ii) weakening China to a large extent so that this number 2 country will pose much less threats to the global dominace of the number 1 country in the future,
(iii) turning the whole of Asia into today's Middle East, and so enabling the powerful US defence contractors (together with the US energy and food exporters) to keep making great fortunes in the coming years.
---
Again, whether China will swallow this US bait remains to be seen.
The constant eastern expansion of both NATO and the EU in the past years can also be seen as a US bait which has been given to the ambitious and over-confident EU countries led by Germany-cum-France.
---
- vic lai Sep 16, 2022
  
  The US's widespread use of double standard has become so natural, and has also gone to such extreme, that not only the US's rival countries but even her closest Atlantic ally, the EU countries, have also become its latest victim.
  This is simply shown by the fact that while the G7 is going to impose a price cap on Russia's crude oil exports near the end of this year, no similar price cap will be imposed on the coming sale of highly expensive US LNG to the EU countries.
  It's reported that today a single US LNG-liner sent from the US to the EU can yield a handsome profit of around US$150 million.
  Too-clever US's concentration on short-term gains, at the expense of the long-term benefit of uniting all her allies against their common enemy that is becoming stronger and stronger, will ultimately backfire on the US herself one day in the future.
  ---
  Similar recent "short-termism" has also hurt the US in the long run in the following areas :
  (i) the well-intended MMT-like monetization of the US federal government deficits in the aftermath of the breaking-out of the pandemic in the US has led to runaway inflation in the country that has shown no sign of quickly abating up until today, together with
  (ii) the freezing or overt confiscation of Russia's US-dollar-denominated FX reserves (like the US treasuries originally owned by Russia),
  have both weakened the traditional credibility of the US treasuries (and hence the US dollar per se) as the world's safest of the safe financial assets that are both always insufficient and always highly craved for by the rest of the world.
  ---
  In the good old unipolar world dominated by a single superpower, the US could do whatever she wanted to do, but doing so will become more and more costly for the US in the coming non-unipolar world.
  ---
  - vic lai Sep 18, 2022
    
    Ramzan Kadyrov, Putin's favorite general and head of the Chechen Republic, recently complained, quite correctly, that Russia has been too lenient in the Ukraine War in the past 6 months, since Russia has avoided destroying Ukraine's vital infrastructure facilities like her electricity power plants and water dams, let alone her schools, hospitals, and resident houses in which lots of Ukrainian soldiers have been hiding themselves and their weapons and ammunitions from their Russian enemies.
    If it's always been business as usual for the common Ukraine residents in the streets, the War there could easily go on and on for quite some time in the future.
    ---
    According to a Chinese proverb, those who are lenient should not lead an invading army, and those who are moral should not do business with other people.
    The latest re-occupation of some cities by Ukraine seems to have prompted Putin to quickly adjust his original lenient fighting style, and so the coming counter-offensive from Ukraine, spread over longer and longer borders, will meet harsher and harsher resistance from the Russian armies.
    ---
    Which means, if China is eventually lured by the US into invading Taiwan one day in the future, the invading Chinese military generals shouldn't be too lenient in Taiwan either.
    ---
    - vic lai Sep 20, 2022
      
      Well, today, it's even more correct (for the US) to say "The Strategy Against the NATO or EU countries Is Working and Must Continue."
      Almost everyone on this planet is now aware that, after French President Emmanuel Macron's description of the Nato as "brain dead" in 2019, the US, in order to keep stationing her military troops in the NATO countries, had, especially with the obedient cooperations of the new Chancellor of Germany and the new President of the European Commission, successfully lured Russia into invading Ukraine early this year, thereby leading to the current serious energy crises in many of the affected EU countries.
      ---
      Instead of fighting for their own best interests, say by discarding the NATO outright and then organizing their own military defence system in western Europe, those leaders of the adversely-affected EU nations still keep relying on the US military troops, weapons, ammunitions, and intelligence both to defend their own continent and to over-ambitiously expand eastward, and so have kept suffering from the overt EU-weakening plot set by the US.
      To help save energy, some of those EU leaders even asked their nations' family members to not only each wash just 4 parts of their bodies, but to bathe together !
      I couldn't believe my ears and eyes.
      ---
      It's said that the best EU political talents have mostly gone to work in Brussels, because working there is tax-free.
      But I think incompetence is perhaps not the suitable explanation for the present strange performance of those EU political leaders.
      What's really been at stake may be good old human nature.
      History books are full of historical records of new succeeding political leaders changing completely their former leaders' original set policies, even though those former policies had been in the best interests of their nations, and instead the new leaders switched 180 degrees to enact almost the opposite policies ------ even though they were fully aware that the new policies would prove suicidal for their nations as a whole.
      Human nature is human nature, it's the only constant under the Milky Way.
      ---
      If my claim here is not too far from the truth, then the ongoing EU energy crises has actually been a human nature problem.
      ---
      - vic lai Sep 21, 2022
        
        One important reason the Ukrainian army has been successful in resisting Russia's offensives in the past months, and in organizing an effective counteroffensive in recent days, is the effective collection of vital Russian military information and intelligence using mobile-phone wiretapping.
        But the latest introduction of China's state-of-the-art quantum mobile phones assisted by her Beidou satellite navigation system, if also used by Russia, will effectively prevent Russia's future military communications from being tapped by US-assisted Ukranians, since the encrypted quantum information can't be deciphered, even though Russia and China would be forbidden to use the US's Starlink satellite internet constellation in the foreseeable future.
        It also means that the same mobile-phone tapping techniques can no longer be used by the Amercians in the future Taiwan War (if any) against China.
        ---
        
        vic lai Sep 21, 2022
        
        In the Kosovo war of 1998-99, "Nato's use of graphite bombs to put out of action most of Serbia's electricity supplies is a reminder that the conflict in Yugoslavia is not just being fought with precision-guided weapons.
        When graphite bombs detonate, they produce clouds of carbon fibres that cover a substantial area and short-circuit power systems."
        ---
        Russia's latest bombardments of Ukraine's electricity power plants has failed to use similar graphite bombs, which are even cheaper than Russia's own precision bombs, and so Ukraine's destroyed power supply could quickly be recovered in just a few hours in many blackout regions by the Ukranians simply by re-installing the damaged devices.
        ---
        Without those effective graphite bombs to create more long-lasting damages, Russia could instead try to buy them from her friendly Asian countries.
        China can also learn from this Russian experience.
        ---
        
        vic lai Sep 23, 2022
        
        In the short term, in order to improve the performance of the Russian soldiers in Ukraine, at least two things have to be noticed by Russia.
        ---
        (i) It's well known that many Ukraine soldiers have been cleverly hiding themselves in Ukraine's civilian areas, using the innocent Ukrainian citizens as human-shields against Russia's potential attacks, and I think this Ukrainian tactic has already been condemned even by the United Nations.
        So, the Russian troops could keep on using strategic Kharkiv-like retreats to lure the Ukrainian soldiers to come out to occupy their forsaken territories, and then annihilate them accordingly.
        If the amount of fightable Ukrainian soldiers keep on declining rapidly, the war there can no longer last for too long a period of time.
        (ii) Russia should quickly equip herself with HIMARS-like bazookas with a striking range of more than 300 kilometers, so that most fixed or mobile military targets of Ukraine are within the striking distance of the Russian soldiers, considering the East-West length of Ukraine of around 1,000 km and North-South width of 500 km.
        Russia could buy those bazookas indirectly from China through the help of other friendly countries like North Korea and Iran.
        ---
        
        vic lai Sep 23, 2022
        
        Today, Russia's true adversary is not Ukraine but both the US and NATO.
        To be able to win the Ukraine War, Russia needs an ample supply of military drones and multiple rocket launchers from China, so as to fully control the battlefields there, by being able to strike precisely at all kinds of fixed military targets and infrastructure facilities of Ukraine, and to destroy the foreign-aid passageways and warehouses.
        By destroying both Ukraine's own blood-creating function and US-NATO-aided blood-transfusion vessels, so that Ukraine loses most of her militarily productive capabilities, Russia will be able to win decisively the ongoing war in Ukraine.
        ---
        While the US obviously wants to lure Russia into fighting a prolonged and expensive war in Ukraine, it's now even more in the interest of Russia to prolong the war there, since Russia's true target isn't to defeat Ukraine, but to help eliminate the US's hegemony in Europe once and for all, through the help of Ukraine.
        If so, Russia's coming prolonged war in Ukraine will be able to help liberate
        (i) the EU countries from the US, through the future discarding of NATO outright, and
        (ii) the Euro from the current global hegemony of the US dollar.
        ---
        For the above to be realized, the EU countries led by Germany-cum-France will need to boldly and ambitiously go through a paradigm shift, or to create a 21st-century Renaissance, so that
        (a) the EU countries can in the future form their own army troops, develop their own weaponries, and collect their own intelligence, thereby empowering the Euro to truly challenge the global dominance of the US dollar in the coming decades,
        (b) Europe can further improve the coming relationships with her eastern big neighbors, by actively joining Russia and China in the OBOR Initiative to further develop the Eurasian Continent, so that the coming Eurasian Continent as a whole will be a geniune global Land Power that will no longer be harrassed by the global Sea Power led by the US.
        ---
        
        vic lai Sep 23, 2022
        
        Putin should have been quite angry recently at NATO's persistent military and economic aids delivered to Ukraine in the past half-year, and may now want to sustain the ongoing war in Ukraine to wait and see whether the unfreindly EU countries could peacefully pass the coming freezing Winter in an unscathed manner.
        But doing so will only prolong the expensive war in Europe, thereby greatly benefiting the US as a result.
        ---
        In the latest SCO meeting in Samarkand, China's President Xi and India's Prime Minister Modi should have reminded Russia's President Putin that, the continued lingering of the war in Ukraine would only benefit the US the most, to the detriment of not only Ukraine and Russia but also Europe in particular (so far, Europe has transfused US$ 4 trillion worth of blood ((outflowing capital)) to the US patient, and has had to keep buying US's expensive weapons), which has always been China's second-biggest buyer in the world, and also one of the world economy's important economic participants, the persistent economic recession in which, as a result of the lingering Ukraine War, will further plunge the global economy into a prolonged recession as well.
        ---
        So, it may now be in the best interest of both Russia and Europe to end the Ukraine War anytime soon, through utilizing the fact that, after the completion of the independence poll of the 4 Ukrianian regions now being occupied by Russia, Russia's new announcement that any further western attacks on any part of those 4 regions means an attack on Russia's own territories, and Russia will turn to using her own nuclear weapons to strike back.
        ---
        This new nuclear threat can cleverly be used by the NATO countries as the excuse to
        (a) force Ukraine to arrange a temporary ceasefire agreement with Russia, so that there will be no more military conflicts in Ukraine before the arrival of the coming freezing Winter,
        (b) create an opportunity for the EU countries to renegotiate with Russia so that part of Russia's transmission of gas and other energies to the EU can be temporarily recovered during the Winter season.
        ---
        
        vic lai Sep 23, 2022
        
        Note that Russia's new nuclear threat against her western neighbors can never be taken lightly by the West, since Russia is now owning more than 6,000 nuclear warheads, of which at least 1,000 are small-scale nuclear warheads, and this country will very probably use them to protect her own territories.
        This argument is also supported by the fact that in the following 8 years after Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014, no foregin countries dared invade Crimea, even though they refused to accept the legitimacy of Russia's rule there.
        ---
        So, Putin's possible acceptance of the advice from Xi and Modi should have effectively changed lately the original war-prolonging military tactic of Putin, who therefore is now mobilizing 300,000 soldiers in Russia to
        (i) help defend the 4 newly acquired regions in Ukraine, and to help maintain law and order there, and
        (ii) stop further Ukrainian assassinations of pro-Russia Ukranians in those 4 regions.
        ---
        And so, contrary to widespread perception, Putin's latest mobilization of Russian soldiers means that the ongoing Ukraine War may soon stop (on September 27 this year, when the results of the Russia-joining polls come out) as suddenly as it started early this year.
        ---
        
        vic lai Sep 23, 2022
        
        If, as some people expect, the Ukraine War suddenly stops near the end of this month,
        (i) the West's sanctions of all kinds on Russia won't be lifted immediately, and they will still be imposed by the West on Russia for some time in the future,
        (ii) but the most serious military threat posed to the western EU countries will have been removed, and so those EU countries will no longer fully side with the US in every aspect,
        (iii) the US can no longer gain handsomely from the war, say their defence contractors will no longer be as profitable as before,
        (iv) the energy-starving EU countries led by Germany may quickly start to negotiate with Russia to resume the operations of Nord Stream 1 and other gas pipelines, and the Europeans will also buy less and less expensive LNG from the US,
        (v) Ukraine led by Zelensky, without the NATO's continued deliveries of weapons, mercenaries, and military intelligence to her, will be forced to accept the ceasefire in the coming Winter.
        ---
        
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