Russia and Ukraine

[Leonardo17]

Probably, right?  

For context.  Gazprom lost 7 billion usd last year, the first net loss in 20 years, while amounting to approx 10% of war funding.  Gazprom does not expect to turn a profit this year either, and moscow has already announced that they will be leaning more heavily on gazprom this year (and everyone else, really).  The underlying issue is simple.  Russia is a gas station with nukes being taken advantage of by it's allies...of which there are few.  They're extracting and shipping more product for less money to fewer purchasers...and the only way to turn the graph right side up would be to invest in infrastructure which the russian gas sector has long relied on western entities to build and operate.  

In that situation, it's easy to see why you might want an economist running the show, as opposed to a cement baron.  Will he be effective, who knows.  I'd like to believe that they can't all be completely incompetent.  I do think that anyone clever enough to find a way out of this bind is not likely to view the invasion of ukraine as a good place to put those realized gains, though.

    Russia is moving into an economy of war. The economy in Ukraine is still running and business owners are asking Vladimir Zelensky not to recruit everyone in order to keep the economy running. In WWI France’s population was 40 million and 4 million soldiers were mobilized at the front. Today’s population of Ukraine is also 40 million and about 900,000 soldiers are on active duty (with 2,5 million being on reserve). Russia has 1,350,000 active troops (and 2 million on reserve). So this is a different type of war. I think Putin is about to ruin whatever is left of the Russian economy and put even more resources into this war. I don’t know about Poland and the Baltic states. I think he want Belarus + Ukraine + the Caucasus + Central Asia back into the orbit of Russia. He is not going to get Ukraine, that’s for sure. But it seems like history might repeat itself in Georgia if the West doesn’t do anything to support them (if anything can be done to support them of course)  
 
Mr. Blinken is really good with the guitar. I cannot say the same for his singing: