RE:RE:Where are we at?
Hi Marcus, yeah, sorry about the demolition job Boris and Liz had done on Sterling, that will make the energy imports even more dear. It will be a hard winter to be sure. Good to hear from you as well.
You and I probably see eye-to-eye on Putin. The press tries to demonize him as a one man show, but he is fronting a powerful coalition of industrialists, military and security services. I agree the pivot could be towards a more nationalist, right wing, militaristic ... dare we even contemplate a whole new period of Cold War?
The West has to play a balancing act to give the Russians a withdrawal strategy that recognizes their Crimean naval base and land access to the same as crucial to their national security interests.
When Beria tried to manage the political coalition from a secret police platform after Stalin's death in 1953 (and people may forget Beria was a reformer and moderate), it led to conspiracy to have him executed, and ultimately Khrushchev and the hawks, supported by Zhukov, squeezed out the reformers and moderates. I wouldn't want to be in Putin's shoes today. The amped-up propaganda is getting more outrageous and in the modern world the masses in Russia must have better ability to see through the "De-nazification" nonsense. Too many Ukrainians in Russia and vice-versa, too much instant internet and cel phone communication.
I don't know enough about the Budapest Agreement and why the Ukrainian tilt towards the West (can you blame them?) was so threatening. Surely in hindsight there should have been a greater effort to have resolved the new status quo after 2014 that provided Russia with some kind of assurances, even if the Ukrainians wanted greater economic, political and cultural ties to Western Europe. If Putin thought he could reinstate a puppet government in Ukraine what a terrible miscalculation.
Hopefully the futility of war and destruction leads to peace. It is a useless conflict from my point of view, both sides are losing more than they can possibly gain.
It may be wishful thinking on my part hoping for a resolution. There is so little holding back the global economy that can't be fixed otherwise?
cg