I thought that there would be a ceasefire after both sides grew tired of war, but despite the cost, Ukraine seems the opposite of war-tired. It looks like there is now snowballing relationship between their battlefield victories and higher morale.
They've kept surprising us during this conflict, and I wouldn't bet against them doing the same in the future. They seem confident they will, so I'm not sure I see them agreeing to a ceasefire unless they've been bogged down for a long time.
Spot on John. Quite a mess we have collectively gotten the world into. I think the expansion of NATO eastwards post the 1989 end of the cold war was a mistake comparable to the Treaty of Versailles. The later created the conditions for the rise of Hitler while the former created the conditions for the rise of Putin and the nationalistic right in Russia. A little of a decade ago, I had dinner in Moscow with my former World Bank boss Kristalina Georgieva, the current MD at the IMF who had then been appointed as the Bank's Resident Representative in Russia. Kristalina told me that the Bank's and the west's treatment of Russia in the early year's after the fall of the the Berlin Wall would come back to haunt the us - too much market fundamentalism too quickly with too little support for the development of an appropriate regulatory/governance framework (Kristalina's take). This, combined with military/diplomatic isolation and humiliation rather than trying to incorporate Russia into a new European partnership simply created the conditions for emergence of extreme nationalism backed by gangster capitalism (my take). The way forward is really difficult to see but a ceasefire is essential. As you said - the dead are still dead, the crimes committed during the war will not be absolved, the aggressor can rarely be made to pay full reparation... Both sides will be worse off than if the war never happened. Unfortunately, this may also apply to the world as a whole for quite some time.
That seems a bold position to take in Sep 2022. I think this war started in 2014 with Russian attacks inside Donetsk & Luhansk. A major trigger for the 2022 invasion was Ukraine approaching the ability to dstroy the DPR & LPR unless Russia fully committed - Russians concerned Ukraine's Baktryar drones would let Ukraine do the same as Azerbaijan in Nagorno-Karabakh in 2020.
I agree that a Russian withdrawal from the south, back to Crimea, would "liberate tens of thousands of people from a brutal occupation" but I think Ukraine's international supporters should back Ukraine as far as the Ukraine people want to go towards the 2013 borders. It will be hard to maintain sanctions on sale of energy once there is a ceasefire, so Russia I expect Russia to gain more from a ceasefire than Ukraine does.
I agree regarding the sanctions, but there's also the fact that even without them, Russia's current customers are more likely to have made other arrangements and not need Russian energy. The longer the war drags on, the more Russia's customers either sign supply contracts with someone else or generate their own energy (or a mixture of both), and while the supply will be restored, the demand will be greatly reduced, with corresponding effects on the Russian economy.
<i>Russia's current customers are more likely to have made other arrangements and not need Russian energy.</i>
And Russia cannot find other customers?
Russia's current customers probably cam other arrangements in time but it' not likely to be in the next, say 3--5 years. Note, I have no expertise in this, just what I have read.
It looks like natural gas is the real kicker. Europe needs specialized LNG terminals and pipeline which do not exist at the moment plus there is a finite amount of LNG shipping. Both types of infrastructure have some nasty lead times and some pretty hefty capital investment requirements. It is not clear to me if there are exploitable gas fields that can be directly piped to Europe in any practical time. In any case LNG seems to be a lot more expensive.
Also, as I discovered much to my surprise, crude oil is not completely fungible. Apparently refineries are fine-tuned to deal with specific types of oil. It would, again, take time and investment to modify them. In the mean time it has been reported that Saudi Arabia and India are buying discounted Russian oil, processing it and reselling to the USA and the EU.
A refusal to buy Russian oil and gas should be a real boost for the renewables industries which probably has shorter lead times assuming
So far, it looks like sanctions have been an own goal. German industries are shutting down and the UK has energy costs skyrocketing.
Back in March, the Bank of Russia was forecasting a nasty contraction in the economy by the end of the year. We are not seeing it yet. The ruble is a bit stronger now than before the invasion and the reported inflation rate is falling and it looks like the contraction so far has been about 2 or 3 percent though I believe some sectors have taken a real hit. Automotive?
In the longer term, assuming the West can keep them up they may have an effect like the West wants. The last set, back in 2014 seems to have worked well--for Russians. Last year Russia was the world's largest wheat exporter and it looks like they have created a complete new dairy/cheese industry. Russian farmers probably pray daily that the West will maintain them.
I was reading something the other day where Russia is prioritizing the production of commercial aircraft. They have a couple new craft about ready to entire commercial production and will revive/modify an older model as first steps.
Still, sanctions have worked well against Cuba and Iran and Venezuela.
Oh it certainly can, but doing so will take time, the number of potential customers is finite (and getting more so as renewables take up an ever larger part of the energy sector) and its infrastructure is set up to service its current customers - who are, not by coincidence, also its closest customers. Sending gas and oil to anywhere else would require new pipes or shipping, both of which have long lead times and the former is both expensive to build and hard to defend.
The interesting question for me is the 'agreed' date that the 'war' began. Who decides this date? Knowing the agreed date allows us to comment on what the situation was 'ante bellum'.
Who is the arbitrator in these matters? The UN where the super powers have right to veto?
‘The Ukrainian government and its international supporters should seek a ceasefire seek a ceasefire in which Russia withdraws its forces to their positions of 23 February …’
Why 23 February? Putin began terrorising Ukraine in 2014. Ante bellum surely means throwing the invaders out of Crimea as well as the Donbass.
And why ‘should’ Ukraine follow your advice? Ukrainians are the ones suffering from Putin’s genocidal terrorism and war crimes. Let them decide how far they repel the enemy and what costs they are prepared to bear to do so.
‘On current indications, it will take a long time before the Ukrainians can recover all the territory currently occupied since the invasion.’ Says you, an environmental economist. Maybe we should all resist playing toy soldiers, and let the Ukrainians decide how long and hard they wish to fight.
‘A country is not justified in seizing territory, unilaterally exacting reparations or imposing a new government on its opponent.’ These are just arbitrary standards. Many people argue that the Ukraine would be entirely justified in taking Russia’s frozen overseas assets for reconstruction.
Does your standard permit Ukraine to attack Russian supply depots, staging points and ammo dumps on Russian territory?
Do you advocate Ukraine’s allies withholding military support at some point to force Kyiv into ceasefire negotiations?
During WWII would you have been advising Winston Churchill to tone it down a bit after he declaimed, ‘We shall fight them on the beaches, landing grounds, in fields, in streets and on the hills. We shall never surrender’?
The question is not so much where where "we" would like Ukraine to stop but more what we're willing to do to make them. If a single soldier from Ukraine sets foot inside Crimea do we frown seriously... withdraw some or all aid... apply sanctions... start bombing Crimea or other parts of Ukraine?
Philosophically I think it's just as reasonable to start the clock in 1991 and say that Ukraine and Russia need to decide which is the legitimate government of both regions... the war criminals or the democratic ones? But being sensible, if I must, 2014 before the occupation of Crimea is far more reasonable than any time since then. Otherwise you're explicitly accepting the shenanigans in Crimea, just as we accept the puppet government that handed Hawai'i to the USA. Oh, wait, bad example... um, just as we fought to stop the re-Indonesiafication of East Timor and West Papua. It's a difficult question on many levels, is what I'm really saying.
Looking back on a long life I have few pretexts for congratulating myself. One of the few is the fact that at no point - not even for a second - did I regard Putin as anything other than a neo-Stalinist thug, or regard Trump as anything other than a neo-Stalinist stooge. I denounced Putin in print as early as 2002.
It didn't require much brainpower to have been able to see through both men's moral posturing from more or less the start. All it required was more brainpower than 90% of American "conservatives" possessed.
(Perhaps I should take the sneer-quotation-marks for granted henceforth. Because as someone sarcastically observed years ago, "nothing says 'conservative' like a bunch of Deist Masonic slave-owners in 1776 rebelling against their lawful king.")
What I didn't predict was that Putin would be so spectacularly stupid. Evil, yes, but stupid.
If you had told me as late as last year that Putin would defend invading Ukraine because its Jewish president was some kind of neo-Nazi, I not only would have refused to believe you. I would have interrogated you without mercy as to who was supplying your psychedelic weed.
I believe that there is a small but real possibility that Putin is playing a long game aimed at destabilizing the west. Knowing that the gas and oil revenue of his "Petro state with nukes" may be threatened by the gradual decarbonisation of the global economy he may be willing to spend lives military hardware and even some of his domestic popularity to gain at least tacit if not official international acceptance (as with Crimea) of Russian control over the Luhansk and Donetsk regions in exchange for withdrawal from the Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, and Mykolaiv regions. In other words, this may the last chance for Russia to make any territorial gains or assert itself. The referendums and talk of nuclear escalation may be bluffs to improve his bargaining position. Under this scenario, Putin would know that he had lost the chance to hold back NATO from supporting Ukraine and all the fighting in the east and occupation of Crimea are about holding the line. There are more factors against that in favour of this scenario but it is still possible that Putin is in just the position he wants to be in. For the record I am anti Putin, but I don't think he should be underestimated.
I thought that there would be a ceasefire after both sides grew tired of war, but despite the cost, Ukraine seems the opposite of war-tired. It looks like there is now snowballing relationship between their battlefield victories and higher morale.
They've kept surprising us during this conflict, and I wouldn't bet against them doing the same in the future. They seem confident they will, so I'm not sure I see them agreeing to a ceasefire unless they've been bogged down for a long time.
Spot on John. Quite a mess we have collectively gotten the world into. I think the expansion of NATO eastwards post the 1989 end of the cold war was a mistake comparable to the Treaty of Versailles. The later created the conditions for the rise of Hitler while the former created the conditions for the rise of Putin and the nationalistic right in Russia. A little of a decade ago, I had dinner in Moscow with my former World Bank boss Kristalina Georgieva, the current MD at the IMF who had then been appointed as the Bank's Resident Representative in Russia. Kristalina told me that the Bank's and the west's treatment of Russia in the early year's after the fall of the the Berlin Wall would come back to haunt the us - too much market fundamentalism too quickly with too little support for the development of an appropriate regulatory/governance framework (Kristalina's take). This, combined with military/diplomatic isolation and humiliation rather than trying to incorporate Russia into a new European partnership simply created the conditions for emergence of extreme nationalism backed by gangster capitalism (my take). The way forward is really difficult to see but a ceasefire is essential. As you said - the dead are still dead, the crimes committed during the war will not be absolved, the aggressor can rarely be made to pay full reparation... Both sides will be worse off than if the war never happened. Unfortunately, this may also apply to the world as a whole for quite some time.
That seems a bold position to take in Sep 2022. I think this war started in 2014 with Russian attacks inside Donetsk & Luhansk. A major trigger for the 2022 invasion was Ukraine approaching the ability to dstroy the DPR & LPR unless Russia fully committed - Russians concerned Ukraine's Baktryar drones would let Ukraine do the same as Azerbaijan in Nagorno-Karabakh in 2020.
I agree that a Russian withdrawal from the south, back to Crimea, would "liberate tens of thousands of people from a brutal occupation" but I think Ukraine's international supporters should back Ukraine as far as the Ukraine people want to go towards the 2013 borders. It will be hard to maintain sanctions on sale of energy once there is a ceasefire, so Russia I expect Russia to gain more from a ceasefire than Ukraine does.
I agree regarding the sanctions, but there's also the fact that even without them, Russia's current customers are more likely to have made other arrangements and not need Russian energy. The longer the war drags on, the more Russia's customers either sign supply contracts with someone else or generate their own energy (or a mixture of both), and while the supply will be restored, the demand will be greatly reduced, with corresponding effects on the Russian economy.
<i>Russia's current customers are more likely to have made other arrangements and not need Russian energy.</i>
And Russia cannot find other customers?
Russia's current customers probably cam other arrangements in time but it' not likely to be in the next, say 3--5 years. Note, I have no expertise in this, just what I have read.
It looks like natural gas is the real kicker. Europe needs specialized LNG terminals and pipeline which do not exist at the moment plus there is a finite amount of LNG shipping. Both types of infrastructure have some nasty lead times and some pretty hefty capital investment requirements. It is not clear to me if there are exploitable gas fields that can be directly piped to Europe in any practical time. In any case LNG seems to be a lot more expensive.
Also, as I discovered much to my surprise, crude oil is not completely fungible. Apparently refineries are fine-tuned to deal with specific types of oil. It would, again, take time and investment to modify them. In the mean time it has been reported that Saudi Arabia and India are buying discounted Russian oil, processing it and reselling to the USA and the EU.
A refusal to buy Russian oil and gas should be a real boost for the renewables industries which probably has shorter lead times assuming
So far, it looks like sanctions have been an own goal. German industries are shutting down and the UK has energy costs skyrocketing.
Back in March, the Bank of Russia was forecasting a nasty contraction in the economy by the end of the year. We are not seeing it yet. The ruble is a bit stronger now than before the invasion and the reported inflation rate is falling and it looks like the contraction so far has been about 2 or 3 percent though I believe some sectors have taken a real hit. Automotive?
In the longer term, assuming the West can keep them up they may have an effect like the West wants. The last set, back in 2014 seems to have worked well--for Russians. Last year Russia was the world's largest wheat exporter and it looks like they have created a complete new dairy/cheese industry. Russian farmers probably pray daily that the West will maintain them.
I was reading something the other day where Russia is prioritizing the production of commercial aircraft. They have a couple new craft about ready to entire commercial production and will revive/modify an older model as first steps.
Still, sanctions have worked well against Cuba and Iran and Venezuela.
<i>And Russia cannot find other customers?</i>
Oh it certainly can, but doing so will take time, the number of potential customers is finite (and getting more so as renewables take up an ever larger part of the energy sector) and its infrastructure is set up to service its current customers - who are, not by coincidence, also its closest customers. Sending gas and oil to anywhere else would require new pipes or shipping, both of which have long lead times and the former is both expensive to build and hard to defend.
The interesting question for me is the 'agreed' date that the 'war' began. Who decides this date? Knowing the agreed date allows us to comment on what the situation was 'ante bellum'.
Who is the arbitrator in these matters? The UN where the super powers have right to veto?
‘The Ukrainian government and its international supporters should seek a ceasefire seek a ceasefire in which Russia withdraws its forces to their positions of 23 February …’
Why 23 February? Putin began terrorising Ukraine in 2014. Ante bellum surely means throwing the invaders out of Crimea as well as the Donbass.
And why ‘should’ Ukraine follow your advice? Ukrainians are the ones suffering from Putin’s genocidal terrorism and war crimes. Let them decide how far they repel the enemy and what costs they are prepared to bear to do so.
‘On current indications, it will take a long time before the Ukrainians can recover all the territory currently occupied since the invasion.’ Says you, an environmental economist. Maybe we should all resist playing toy soldiers, and let the Ukrainians decide how long and hard they wish to fight.
‘A country is not justified in seizing territory, unilaterally exacting reparations or imposing a new government on its opponent.’ These are just arbitrary standards. Many people argue that the Ukraine would be entirely justified in taking Russia’s frozen overseas assets for reconstruction.
Does your standard permit Ukraine to attack Russian supply depots, staging points and ammo dumps on Russian territory?
Do you advocate Ukraine’s allies withholding military support at some point to force Kyiv into ceasefire negotiations?
During WWII would you have been advising Winston Churchill to tone it down a bit after he declaimed, ‘We shall fight them on the beaches, landing grounds, in fields, in streets and on the hills. We shall never surrender’?
The question is not so much where where "we" would like Ukraine to stop but more what we're willing to do to make them. If a single soldier from Ukraine sets foot inside Crimea do we frown seriously... withdraw some or all aid... apply sanctions... start bombing Crimea or other parts of Ukraine?
Philosophically I think it's just as reasonable to start the clock in 1991 and say that Ukraine and Russia need to decide which is the legitimate government of both regions... the war criminals or the democratic ones? But being sensible, if I must, 2014 before the occupation of Crimea is far more reasonable than any time since then. Otherwise you're explicitly accepting the shenanigans in Crimea, just as we accept the puppet government that handed Hawai'i to the USA. Oh, wait, bad example... um, just as we fought to stop the re-Indonesiafication of East Timor and West Papua. It's a difficult question on many levels, is what I'm really saying.
Looking back on a long life I have few pretexts for congratulating myself. One of the few is the fact that at no point - not even for a second - did I regard Putin as anything other than a neo-Stalinist thug, or regard Trump as anything other than a neo-Stalinist stooge. I denounced Putin in print as early as 2002.
It didn't require much brainpower to have been able to see through both men's moral posturing from more or less the start. All it required was more brainpower than 90% of American "conservatives" possessed.
(Perhaps I should take the sneer-quotation-marks for granted henceforth. Because as someone sarcastically observed years ago, "nothing says 'conservative' like a bunch of Deist Masonic slave-owners in 1776 rebelling against their lawful king.")
What I didn't predict was that Putin would be so spectacularly stupid. Evil, yes, but stupid.
If you had told me as late as last year that Putin would defend invading Ukraine because its Jewish president was some kind of neo-Nazi, I not only would have refused to believe you. I would have interrogated you without mercy as to who was supplying your psychedelic weed.
I believe that there is a small but real possibility that Putin is playing a long game aimed at destabilizing the west. Knowing that the gas and oil revenue of his "Petro state with nukes" may be threatened by the gradual decarbonisation of the global economy he may be willing to spend lives military hardware and even some of his domestic popularity to gain at least tacit if not official international acceptance (as with Crimea) of Russian control over the Luhansk and Donetsk regions in exchange for withdrawal from the Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, and Mykolaiv regions. In other words, this may the last chance for Russia to make any territorial gains or assert itself. The referendums and talk of nuclear escalation may be bluffs to improve his bargaining position. Under this scenario, Putin would know that he had lost the chance to hold back NATO from supporting Ukraine and all the fighting in the east and occupation of Crimea are about holding the line. There are more factors against that in favour of this scenario but it is still possible that Putin is in just the position he wants to be in. For the record I am anti Putin, but I don't think he should be underestimated.