Axios: US Drafting Secret Plan to End Ukraine War

I was not thinking of any special names for Odessa, I was just commenting on the recent importance of Odessa as the transshipment point for grain and other products coming down the river from Ukraine’s interior. A lot is stored in Odessa warehouses, and then loaded on to ships going to many parts of the world. Perhaps some products are directly loaded from river craft to ocean craft. At any rate Russia cares enough to have bombed some of the warehouses and other locations there. This explanation does not diminish Odessa’s cultural contributions whether Ukrainian or Russian in source.

It is not “fake news” that Trump has come up with something. What makes it fake is his tendency to jump from idea to idea, to change his mind given the next interesting person he talks with, and the complexity of his own thinking when trying to practice The Art of the Deal. Thus it is impossible to give much credit to his statement of the moment. In that sense, much of what he says is fake, so it is much better to try to figure out what he really wants, and who he may be listening to at any given time, in order to come up with a guess that might actually be real.

Actually while there is truth to your item 4, Russian corruption and infrastructure was/is even worse.

I have the impression there was a quality of difference between the focus of the corruption. It seems that the goal of Russian corruption was to achieve great luxury including large yachts, sports teams, and mansions. You had Russians raking off money to not build proper border protections. In the military equipment sector, money was raked off and tanks and other equipment was poorly or not build, and what was built by the Big money boys, was then picked apart by the little guys for small parts and chips so they could buy better food to feed their families.

On the other hand just looking at the Ukraine urban landscape it does seem that a lot of building of housing was going on, good agricultural equipment was being purchased, as well as urban supplies like buses, firetrucks, and ambulances. I’m sure that a lot of deals where made where somebody overpaid for things that actually happened, not for things that were ultimately a total loss as so often has seemed to be the case in Russia.

An analysis of the differences between how and why corruption was practiced in those two countries might yield interesting results. I imagine our leader knows something about corruption since he was dealing in NY real estate. My brother was once doing architectural work for some mob connected people who were laundering money in a big historic restoration project. He would sometimes catch them cheating on construction laws and would try to explain that it was actually easier to accomplish the building goals the legal way. They seemed to have an inbuilt system that made them want to choose the illegal way rather than the easier legal way.

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