Posted on 02/28/2022 8:10:18 PM PST by Mariner
A Russian military convoy that was outside of Ivankiv, Ukraine, on Sunday has since made it to the outskirts of Kyiv, satellite images show.
On Sunday, the convoy was roughly 40 miles northwest of the Ukrainian capital, according to images provided by Maxar Technologies.
Maxar said that roughly 17 miles of roadway is chocked full of the convoy, which consists of armored vehicles, tanks, towed artillery and other logistical vehicles.
The private US company said the convoy was located on the T-1011 highway at Antonov air base around 11:11 a.m local time.
Antonov is roughly 17 miles from the center of the Ukrainian capital.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
In response to the July 8th attacks on the “Ohmatdyt” Children's Hospital in Kyiv, we take a closer look at other times Russia has violated international humanitarian law by deliberately and indiscriminately targeting hospitals in Ukraine.
A staggering statistic from Physicians for Human Rights shows that Russia has carried out a total of 1442 attacks on health care in Ukraine since the beginning of the full-scale invasion. This has meant that one in 10 hospitals in the country have been directly damaged by Russian attacks.
Lawrence Freedman: Lashing Out - Understanding Russia's attacks on Ukrainian civilians
Natural gas prices in Russia up 34% since Putin’s 2024 invasion.
Since a State-owned company (Gazprom) has a virtual monopoly on the domestic market, that is essentially a tax on the population.
It is a break with the whole Putin era social compact, whereby the Russian people were paid off with rising living standards, in return for their acquiescence to Putin’s undemocratic and corrupt leadership. Now their living standards are being sacrificed in many ways at once.
As Abe Lincoln said, you can fool all the people some of the time, you can fool some of the people all the time, but you can’t fool all the people, all of the time. The Russian people are increasingly the bill payers for Putin’s disastrous warmongering - and they can’t all be fooled about it forever. Putin has sold out their future.
It is also likely that many Russians find it difficult to pay higher prices. Yes, it is a breach of the social contract people had with Putin, in the same way that China’s economic crash leads to Xi’s breach of the Mandate of Heaven.
The Russian government proposed to significantly increase the number of conditions on which the Russian government can designate a person as a terrorist or extremist, likely as part of efforts to censor criticisms about Russia's war in Ukraine. The Russian government submitted a bill to the State Duma on July 15 that would expand the number of articles of the Russian Criminal Code under which the Russian Federal Service for Financial Monitoring (Rosfinmonitoring) could add people to Russia's list of terrorists and extremists.[14] The proposal notably would allow Rosfinmonitoring to add people whom Russian authorities have convicted of spreading “fakes” about the Russian military out of political, ideological, racial, national, or religious hatred to the list. The proposal would also allow Rosfinmonitoring to add people accused of committing unspecified “other crimes” motivated by political, ideological, racial, national, or religious hatred to the list — granting the Russian government significant leeway to designate people who have allegedly committed a wide array of crimes as terrorists and extremists. The Kremlin has repeatedly attempted to portray Russia as a harmonious multinational and multireligious society despite recent increases in xenophobic rhetoric from Russia's ultranationalist community.[15] The Russian government is likely looking to change the mechanisms for adding people to the terrorist and extremist list in order to incentivize Russians to engage in self-censorship by tightening the Kremlin's control over criticism in Russian society, especially about Russia's war in Ukraine, while posturing these changes as part of efforts to ensure political and religious freedom and societal harmony in Russia.
Chechen Republic Head Ramzan Kadyrov is posturing himself and the North Caucasus as key to Russia's outreach to the Arab world. Kadyrov met on July 15 with United Arab Emirates (UAE) Ambassador to Russia Mohammed Akhmed Sultan Essa Al Jaber and Qatari Ambassador to Russia Sheikh Ahmed bin Nasser Al Thani in Grozny, Chechnya at the ongoing Caucasus Investment Forum.[23] Kadyrov emphasized Qatar's and the UAE’s “warm relations” with Russia and Qatar, while also highlighting their individual relationships with Chechnya and the wider Caucasus region. The Kremlin likely seeks to use the Caucasus’ unique geopolitical, religious, and socio-cultural positioning vis-a-vis the Arab world in order to draw investment to the region and increase political and diplomatic ties with major political players such as Qatar and the UAE. Qatar and the UAE, for example, continue to mediate prisoner of war (POW) exchanges and the repatriation of deported Ukrainian children, so it remains in Russia's interest to maintain firm ties with Gulf states.[24]
https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-july-15-2024
Just don’t show it to the Russians.
I managed to get secret footage of a secret NATO biolaboratory in Ukraine and the fighters they train.
https://x.com/DevanaUkraine/status/1812903673405538339
“It is also likely that many Russians find it difficult to pay higher prices.”
Food price inflation has been high, as has been energy. Regular people not involved in business across borders, are stuck with interest rates around 20% or higher in the ruble economy, and must pay higher prices for imported goods (very little that is nice in Russia, is made in Russia).
Unemployment has been low, and wages have risen quickly during the war, but that benefits a proportion of working people, whereas inflation hits everyone.
I have not seen good data (and honest data, like honest anything, is hard to come by in Putin’s Russia), on the net effect of higher wages and higher prices. Clearly, wage increases have mitigated the fall in the overall standard of living, with some people feeling better off.
To pay for the war and sanctions costs, the Russian Government has spread it around, reducing some other spending, raising some taxes, cashing out some reserves, taking on some more debt, and printing more rubles pretty aggressively (expanding M2 like 20-25% per year).
They were careful not to pull the financial rug out from under their population suddenly, but they have been doing it incrementally. The cost to the population, in terms of standard of living, is accumulating. Taxes are going up, inflation is going up faster, subsidies (like for gas) are being withdrawn, the currency is weakening (markedly in non-official “street” exchange rate), and interest rates are high. Not only are these bites out of the general standard of living accumulating, but they also face the prospect of accelerating, as limits to some forms of mitigation are reached (like reserves running low), and inflation risks accelerating on its own, as inflationary expectations become cemented.
They have been able to kick the van down the road to a significant degree in the short term, but the bills have accumulated. Russia is significantly more brittle to withstanding future economic shocks than it was in 2021, and the International sanctions regime is now institutionalized to roll out new economic shocks every few months.
The problems are piling up, here is info from the last 24 hours:
Sales of secondary housing have collapsed in Moscow. According to the results of the first half of the year, they fell by 15.5% - Rosreestr data. This is due to high mortgage rates and the lack of preferential programs for secondary housing, experts believe.
Basic seasonal products are becoming more expensive this summer, sharply outpacing inflation. The strongest price growth in annual terms was demonstrated by beets (by almost 53%), eggs (by 42%), tomatoes (by 39.5%), apples (by almost 31%), and potatoes — by 26%. The list also includes cucumbers, with an annual price increase of almost 14%. Such data were provided by specialists from the analytical center of agribusiness “AB-Center”. Among the products that have risen in price the most in annual terms were also bananas — by 48%. https://t.me/bankrollo/29341
The new forecast of the Bank of Russia will provide for the possibility of raising the key rate to 20%, according to analysts at Alfa-Bank. Other experts interviewed by RBC also allow for a scenario with the rate increasing to 20%
Since the beginning of the year, economy class air tickets in Russia have increased in price by 33.46%. The most expensive plane tickets are sold in the last two weeks before departure, and you can save the most by planning your flight four months in advance, writes Parliamentary Newspaper.
The Bank of Russia suspends publication of statistics on the over-the-counter currency market “In order to limit the impact of sanctions, we are suspending the publication of daily information on the volume of trading in the US dollar, euro and yuan against the ruble, calculated on the basis of over-the-counter trading with settlements “tomorrow,” the regulator said in a statement. https://t.me/bbbreaking/186166
“Sales of secondary housing have collapsed in Moscow”
Russia was using some communist Chinese-style real estate bubble pumping, to stoke their economy (GDP numbers) in the short term.
They expanded low cost loans to favored groups, to buy (only) new houses. That funded a lot of construction in the short term, with resulting increases in construction employment and supply chains for materials.
However, it created artificial price disparities between new houses and previously owned houses. Like how the value of a new car drops the moment you drive it off the lot, as it becomes a used car - but more markedly so. It became common that people with those cheap Government mortgages were deep underwater on their mortgages, the moment that they closed on their loans. In some cases, the resale value would drop to half of the value of the loan just signed.
The loans were (are) given to people in qualified groups, regardless of their ability to pay. There are a sizable segment of recipients who are underwater on their mortgage, and whose payments exceed 80% of their income.
For the people outside the favored groups with Government subsidized low interest mortgages, most Russians have to take out prohibitively expensive mortgages (18-20%), so they can afford to pay much less for their (used) houses, for the same monthly payment.
The Russian 235th Garrison Military Court released former 58th Combined Arms Army (CAA) Major General Ivan Popov from pre-detention on July 15 and placed him under house arrest until October 11.[18] The 235th Garrison Military Court previously refused a request to transfer Popov to house arrest in May 2024 due to opposition from the Russian Prosecutor's Office.[19] Russian authorities arrested Popov on fraud charges on May 17, but ISW assessed that the real reason behind Popov’s arrest is likely tied to his leaked audio message in which he revealed that former Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu dismissed him for expressing persistent grievances about problems in western Zaporizhia Oblast during the Ukrainian Summer 2023 counteroffensive.[20] Russian political bloggers speculated that First Deputy Chief of Staff of the Russian Presidential Administration Sergey Kiriyenko may have influenced the court's decision to transfer Popov to house arrest and that this transfer occurred during Russian Chief of General Staff Army General Valery Gerasimov’s leave.[21] One political blogger claimed that Gerasimov considers Popov a ”personal enemy,” which may explain why Kiriyenko made the decision during Gerasimov’s absence.[22] The Russian MoD, however, published footage on July 16 of Gerasimov visiting a command post of the Russian Eastern Grouping of Forces (GoF), where he reportedly heard reports from Eastern GoF Commander Lieutenant General Alexander Sanchik and lauded the claimed Russian seizure of Urozhaine (a settlement on the Donetsk-Zaporizhia Oblast border).[23] ISW observed that the Kremlin recently publicly confirmed that Sanchik replaced Colonel General Sergei Kuzmenko as acting Eastern Military District (EMD) commander.[24]
An investigation by Russian opposition outlet The Bell found that approximately 650,000 people left Russia following the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine and have not returned.[29] The Bell stated that official Russian estimates on how many people have permanently left the country since 2022 are deliberately misrepresentative of the actual scale and instead analyzed immigration statistics of the countries to which Russian citizens fled. The Bell found that the majority of these Russian citizens went to countries that have visa-free regime agreements with Russia, including Armenia (which took 110,000 Russians), Kazakhstan (which took 80,000 Russians), and Georgia (which took 74,000 Russians). Israel and the US took 80,000 and 48,000 Russian citizens, respectively. The actual number of Russian citizens who left Russia is likely greater than 700,000 given that The Bell reported that countries such as Thailand, Indonesia, Azerbaijan, Greece, and Cyprus did not provide Russian immigration data and that some countries such as Portugal lack updated Russian immigration statistics beyond 2022. Forbes notably reported in October 2022, citing sources in the Russian Presidential Administration, that about 700,000 people fled Russia in the first two weeks following the September 21, 2022, start of partial mobilization in Russia.[30] Russian officials previously engaged in a concerted effort to claim that a majority of those who fled since February 2022 began returning to Russia in 2023, but The Bell investigation undermines those Russian claims.[31] The Bell noted that the number of people it confirmed to have permanently left Russia accounts for only 0.5 percent of the whole Russian population, but that this percentage still represents the largest mass Russian emigration in the last two decades (since the period between 1992-2004, when 1.6 million people left Russia in the aftermath of the dissolution of the Soviet Union). The permanent loss of this population will continue to impact Russia's economy—ISW previously reported that mass emigration on such a scale caused mass skilled labor shortages and “brain-drain” amongst more educated and skilled parts of the labor force, who are more likely to be able to afford to permanently move abroad.[32]
https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-july-16-2024
Kiriyenko suggested Putin to fire Medvedev
Against the backdrop of Dmitry Medvedev’s serious illness, the political establishment began to talk about his possible removal from the Security Council. According to our information, Sergei Kiriyenko suggested giving Medvedev the opportunity to improve his health and rest. Vladimir Vladimirovich promised to talk to Medvedev personally, but also asked to provide candidates for his place.
“Many do not understand what Dmitry Anatolyevich does at all. I do not think that his departure will fundamentally change anything,” said a source familiar with the work of the Security Council. According to him, Nikolai Patrushev had previously turned this body into a very efficient mechanism, and such people as Medvedev do not contribute to its development. By the way, the interlocutor refused to evaluate Shoigu’s work
The court imposes a sentence of imprisonment for a period of 8 years…the sentence is to be served in… a colony…with deprivation of the right to engage in activities related to managing websites… for 4 years”, the Moscow-based Basmanny court press service statement says in its official Telegram channel.
Earlier in December 2023 Gessen was put on a wanted list by Russian authorities. The case against her was opened after Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. In September 2022 in an interview with a Russian journalist, Gessen commented on her three-week work trip to war-torn Ukraine:
“I was there to make a report about war crimes… I'm a war correspondent with quite a big experience covering the actions of the Russian army. I was not surprised by what happened in Bucha. Yes, maybe I couldn't sleep at night afterward, but I was not surprised. Because all the similar things I had seen during the two Chechen wars.”, Masha Gessen said in a video interview.
Although Masha Gessen is based in the United States, such a criminal case still brings some inconvenience into her life. For example, when booking plane tickets - Gessen must avoid any travel or even transfer via countries that have extradition treaties with Russia.
https://thebarentsobserver.com/en/2024/07/russian-american-journalist-sentenced-8-years-absentia
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