BATIUSHKA—This follows the release of information that the Ukraine has grouped 15,000 soldiers on the border with Belarus, mining roads and blowing up bridges. Something is afoot. Is Russia about to cut off the NATO road and rail supply routes from Poland and stop the supply of the Kiev forces with Western military equipment? Is an invasion about to cut through the West of the Ukraine? This would explain the targeting of Lvov with Russian missiles in the last two days
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MICHAEL HUDSON—The confiscation of Venezuela’s gold reserves in London and its US investments, the confiscation of $300 billion of Russia’s foreign-exchange reserves held in the United States and Europe, and its threat to do the same to China and other countries resisting US foreign policy has made de-dollarization urgent. I have explained the logic in many points, from my Valdai Club article (with Radhika Desai) to my recent book on The Destiny of Civilization, the lecture series that I prepared for Hong Kong and the Global University for Sustainability.
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GILBERT DOCTOROW—In recent articles I have made frequent references to the political talk shows on Russian state television as an invaluable source of information about the thinking of the chattering classes and, in particular of social and political elites close to the Kremlin. Even an acerbic academic from Rhode Island who left a nasty comment on my site about the value of my latest article on the shift from ‘special military operation’ to open war remarked in his closing sentence that he intends to follow more closely the Evening with Vladimir Solovyov program, especially when RT director Simonyan appears as a panelist. So I think I have made my point about television fairly convincingly.
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ERIC ZUESSE—This war against Russia is a U.S.-and-allied war against Russia; and it is mainly a U.S. war against Russia which is being waged by not only America (which profits from it) but by America’s European colonies or vassal-states, America’s “allies,” as they call these nations — which will be losing disastrously from it.
So: that 118-page study is designed to sucker fools (perhaps especially ones in Europe), by burying its implicit basic and false assumption that it is about “world markets” being customers of Russia’s “commodity exports,” instead of about the U.S.-allied European countries being customers of Russia’s gas and oil — and those countries are THE ONES that will NOW be paying VASTLY HIGHER prices for THOSE commodities, than previously, because they will now be buying LNG instead of (far cheaper) pipelined gas, and they will now be buying shipped oils instead of (likewise cheaper) pipelined oils.
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The cost of vassalage to Washington is beginning to cost Europeans dearly. Not only are they depleting their own stocks of weapons to keep Ukraine from collapsing, or as virtue signalling since all these regimes are members of NATO, but now their OWN decision to attack, denigrate and SANCTION Russia in the vilest and most vociferous way, while rejecting their own access to Russian gas, oil, etc., is pushing Europe into an economic and social disaster with probably grave political repercussions.
