Russia Invades Ukraine 2022

[Ken]

But also, much of this aid is an accounting fiction. It is surplus military equipment that was paid for long ago. The tanks, armored vehicles, artillery, and other weapons? The US has vast stores of those materials just gathering dust and long ago paid for.

Those things weren't paid for, just added to the national debt. We have been paying interest on them for years, and the principal will still be on the books long after Ukraine has expended them.

Call it what you want. But it isn't NEW spending to package up a bunch of surplus cold war weapons and ship them to Ukraine. Other than the cost of the shipping. Some of the spending is, of course, new. But not all of it. It might actually save a bit of money for them not to have to keep all that old equipment serviceable and in working order.

[temporal1]

2017 / Catholic Group for Nonviolence
viewtopic.php?t=722
OP:

http://www.lastampa.it/2017/08/16/vatic ... agina.html

I thought this was interesting.

"The umbrella group of the leaders of U.S. Catholic men’s religious orders has committed to working to persuade Pope Francis to write a new encyclical letter focused on shifting church teaching away from just war theory towards Gospel nonviolence."

i’m hoping someone might know how to open the link?
wondering if this group is active? if they are responding to Ukraine?

[RZehr]

Seems like the sanctions haven’t amounted to much. A year on, and the Russian economy is not that much different. The ruble is not collapsed. Unemployment isn’t a problem. Goods are available.

Ironically, we have banks collapsing. If the Russian banks were collapsing, much ado would be made.

[Neto]

But also, much of this aid is an accounting fiction. It is surplus military equipment that was paid for long ago. The tanks, armored vehicles, artillery, and other weapons? The US has vast stores of those materials just gathering dust and long ago paid for.

Those things weren't paid for, just added to the national debt. We have been paying interest on them for years, and the principal will still be on the books long after Ukraine has expended them.

Call it what you want. But it isn't NEW spending to package up a bunch of surplus cold war weapons and ship them to Ukraine. Other than the cost of the shipping. Some of the spending is, of course, new. But not all of it. It might actually save a bit of money for them not to have to keep all that old equipment serviceable and in working order.

I may have mentioned this before, but I worked in a munitions factory for several weeks while in college. Just until we found out what "peace time" really meant. That's what we - my roommate & I - were told we'd be producing. Then I found out it was peace time stock piling. Anyway, here's the part that relates to this discussion. The military munitions suppliers are constantly manufacturing new materiel. Periodically a sample is test fired, to see if it has degraded, or if it is still reliable for actual use. When the failure percentage reaches a certain point, it is hauled away and exploded in a controlled manner. So giving it away save the cost of disposal. (My roommate was not from Mennonite background, descended from 'Bloody Mary' and related to George Washington, actually. But we were both pacifists, and anti-war. So we both turned in our notices. Later an employee blew herself and the entire powder storage building to bits - they said she was not using her wrist grounding strap. Never could understand how they could know that.)

[barnhart]

Neto, you have some of the most amazing stories of anyone I know, and that is saying a lot, as I descend from a line of storytellers who would sit around the fire late into the night telling tall tales.

[ken_sylvania]

Neto, I can't tell whether Barnhart believes your stories or not.

[Ken]

Seems like the sanctions haven’t amounted to much. A year on, and the Russian economy is not that much different. The ruble is not collapsed. Unemployment isn’t a problem. Goods are available.

Ironically, we have banks collapsing. If the Russian banks were collapsing, much ado would be made.

From yesterday's Foreign Policy magazine. It seems like they were directly addressing your question. Basically Russia's economy is smaller than that of Canada and if trends continue, will soon be passed by Mexico. And this war will likely set Russia back for a generation and greatly diminish its influence and standing in Europe. Russia is desperately trying to disseminate the notion that 'sanctions don't work' which probably suggests that they are working. If not to change Russian policy (which they aren't) but to throttle the Russian economy.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/03/13/ru ... tatistics/

Don’t Trust Russia’s Numbers
Moscow has made economic statistics a central part of its information war.

Why do so many people in the West—who should probably know better by now—trust the data of authoritarian governments conducting an information war?

The latest controversy surrounds the state of the Russian economy and what Western media and others have been reporting to their audiences. Read anything about the war in Ukraine these days, and you’ll probably find a mention that the Russian economy contracted by about 2 percent in 2022—a low decline that suggests little more than a mild recession. That number has entered the policy debate: For some, the low figure is proof that the Russian economy is resilient and sanctions do not work. Others use the same figure to argue that sanctions are starting to bite and Western countries should double down. These opposing arguments have one thing in common: They rely on a largely meaningless number.

Even if Russia’s reported GDP decline were truthful, it is clear that three factors artificially boosted the Russian growth number in 2022. First, the economic growth figure has been fueled by Russia’s turbocharged production of military gear. Producing tanks and missiles does not improve living standards, however, and this part of Russian GDP will quickly be destroyed on the battlefield. Second, Russia’s export earnings jumped in 2022 because of the war-induced spike in energy prices. And third, Western embargos on technology and other goods as well as sinking Russian consumer demand led to a plunge in imports, which dropped by almost 10 percent during 2022, according to Russia’s official data.

Even more important than what Russia’s “growth” really means, however, is the fact that the Kremlin’s figures cannot be trusted. That’s because Russia has made statistics a central part of its information war. Moscow’s goal is clear: to argue that sanctions do not work, thereby undercutting those who think they are a key tool to stop or contain Russia’s aggression against Ukraine (as I have argued in Foreign Policy). This strategy rests on three pillars. The Kremlin communicates heavily using cherry-picked forecasts, presenting them as facts and forgetting to mention that they are massively outside expert consensus. Moscow also delays the release of statistics that don’t fit its narrative. Finally, the figures it does release are of dubious quality—and frequently revised later.

Recent weeks provide a good illustration of how this strategy looks in practice. In January, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) released an estimate of Russia’s 2022 recession as part of its World Economic Outlook. The fund estimated that the Russian economy contracted by only 2.2 percent in 2022. This number surprised many economists, not least because the IMF used to be far more pessimistic about Russia’s economic situation—at the start of the war, it had forecast a recession of 8.5 percent. Among experts, the consensus estimate was that the Russian economy contracted by 3.2 percent—about half again as deep as what the IMF reported. The IMF’s estimate of minus 2.2 percent was thus an outlier, but Russian propagandists presented it as a hard fact. Mainstream Western media picked it up. Seeing the figure everywhere, most people assumed it was true.

The second pillar of Russia’s disinformation involves delaying the publication of poor data. This is precisely what happened a few days after the IMF released its optimistic number, when the Russian Federal State Statistics Service suddenly postponed the release of actual GDP data for December 2022 and the full year. With no Russian number for actual GDP to go by, most Russia watchers mistakenly assumed that the IMF estimate was the official recession number. Since the IMF was far more bullish on the Russian economy than expert consensus, this confusion served the Kremlin’s interests well.

Moscow finally released a single growth number with a two-week delay: a 2.1 GDP decline over all of 2022, just about the same as the optimistic IMF estimate. Yet it is unclear how Russian statisticians even came up with their figure; verification is impossible because they have still not released GDP data for the fourth quarter of 2022. Assembling the pieces of this statistical puzzle paints an intriguing picture: If the full-year recession figure is 2.1 percent, as Russia claims, then doing the math using already reported data for the first three quarters of 2022 results in a GDP drop of around 4 percent in the fourth quarter of 2022 compared to the fourth quarter of 2021.

This is theoretically possible, but available figures on Russia’s economy in the fourth quarter suggest a steeper contraction. In December 2022, Russia’s own official statistics showed that industrial production and retail sales recorded their steepest annual drops in almost three years, suggesting a deep slowdown in activity. The prices for oil massively receded in late 2022, which weighed on exports. Finally, Russia’s imports bounced back in the fourth quarter from the lows reached earlier in the year, further weighing on GDP.

The likeliest scenario is that Russia’s GDP figures for 2022 will be quietly revised to a figure closer to 3 percent or even 4 percent—closer to expert consensus and much higher than last month’s IMF and Kremlin figures. To be sure, data revisions are not uncommon around the world, including in developed economies; GDP figures are sometimes corrected several times before they can be seen as accurate. Yet Russia has made such revisions the norm since the start of the war, with corrections far bigger than other countries typically make.

Even after the data are eventually revised, this saga will remain a win for Russia. Who will care to check whether the initial figure has been revised—and write a new report or media article? Who, beyond a tiny group of experts, has seriously considered whether these figures even mean anything? The problem is systemic and goes beyond Russia’s dubious economic figures; China is another skilled player in the statistical disinformation game. (The official GDP numbers are so distorted that China watchers use proxy data, such as electricity consumption, rail cargo, and bank lending, to gauge economic growth.) For the Kremlin, quietly changing the recession number would have another benefit: If Russia eventually amends its figures to reflect a bigger drop in GDP in 2022, then this will artificially boost the growth number in 2023. GDP growth after a recession is like bungee jumping: The lower you drop, the higher you rebound.

Assessing the effectiveness of sanctions has always been tricky. The Kremlin has classified entire data sets since the start of the war, including those on external trade—which would provide information about the state of the Russian energy sector. Russian President Vladimir Putin hopes that turning Russia into a black box will help support his claims that sanctions do not work, confusing Western policymakers, journalists, and citizens. Given Putin’s belief that he is waging an existential war against the West, this is fair game. The real problem is in Western countries: Experts and media quoting Russia’s recession figure should probably take the time to question their data instead of amplifying the Kremlin’s talking points.

[RZehr]

That’s the counter case? Saying that Russia is lying about their GDP numbers? I’m sure they aren’t the only one.
There seems to be widespread consensus on the specific issues that I raised, namely, availability of goods, low unemployment, a ruble is decent shape.
Any of their large banks failing? Are people still buying their oil?

If sanctions are working, it sure doesn’t seem like much is impacting the basic population much yet. All the goods are just going through other countries first. Prices aren’t much different than a year ago either.

[Neto]

Neto, I can't tell whether Barnhart believes your stories or not.

Poor college student working himself through school = taking all sorts of jobs. It was actually a great deal. Close to the school, and not difficult work. Production expectations were also pretty low, as our supervisor really didn't want us to surpass day-shift production levels by very much (and they were very low). We did by-pass some safety standards, which greatly increased production speed. Mainly this was that the machine that pressed the powder into the shell casings was designed so that you had to have both hands on safety paddles outside the "danger area" in order to bring it down. We used our knees to activate the safety paddles. That way we could much more quickly refill the powder funnel between each shell casing. Never any close calls, even though we were working nights and attending classes in the daytime. Maybe mostly the grace of God.

[temporal1]

Neto, I can't tell whether Barnhart believes your stories or not.

Poor college student working himself through school = taking all sorts of jobs. It was actually a great deal. Close to the school, and not difficult work. Production expectations were also pretty low, as our supervisor really didn't want us to surpass day-shift production levels by very much (and they were very low). We did by-pass some safety standards, which greatly increased production speed. Mainly this was that the machine that pressed the powder into the shell casings was designed so that you had to have both hands on safety paddles outside the "danger area" in order to bring it down. We used our knees to activate the safety paddles. That way we could much more quickly refill the powder funnel between each shell casing. Never any close calls, even though we were working nights and attending classes in the daytime. Maybe mostly the grace of God.

Years ago, i stopped referring to scriptures as “stories,” replacing the word with “accounts.” “Stories” aren’t always fiction, i prefer to remove doubt when possible.

i, also, enjoy your personal life accounts. thank you.