London 30 October (20).

In 2014, Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula. That same year, Russian special operation forces captured Donetsk and Luhansk, two of the main cities in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine and created puppet pro-Russian regimes there to further destabilize Ukraine.

Media, academic and general coverage of the War on the Doorsteps of Europe received shock, disbelief and a bizarre debate on the greatness of the Russian Federation. In particularly a German article received my attention which ought to be considered. The Russian Federation is morally bankrupt.

Regardless of the BRICS meetings and the self-flagellation of its political leadership and worlds hope to finally get even with the evil western powers Russia is not seven feet tall, leaps over tall building or other self-proclamation. The Russia that I know has broken lifts, streets with potholes, near third world poverty, alcoholism, brute violence and regardless how we view the Russian Federation a dictatorship.

That is the Russia that I know. In some verbal diarrhea a well written German author compares Russia with Prussia, recalls the history of Czar Kathrine, the vastness and wealth of the Russian Federation. In good old German traditions, he drives on the wealth of the Russian Federation. He speaks of roams of Gold, and Diamonds, and richness beyond anybody imaginations.

Let me educate the public on all these nonsensical narratives. Because they are false. Like the United States who beaten the English, Russia was bankrupt in the 1990s. The states broke away as fast as they could. They wanted nothing from the Russians. The Russian core, so often praised, was stuck in the mining towns of the Soviet Union with no jobs, and a few options available, drunkenness was rampant.

The Russian needed American, English, South African mining technology and engineers. The town was a secret city. Not on any one map. The local Gulag provided workers for a couple of dollars that without doubt went to the pocket of the local police. We had murderers, thieves and the rest of the outcasts of society. Russians laughed about the technology from the west because they could not imagine a bunch of cowboys as we were called, could make gold out of the dust which the Russians thrown away. But we did, and the money went to the private bank accounts of the regime in London. It’s an open secret but it is.

The Russian wealth the German author so euphorically quotes went to the coffers of the regime with accounts in the West. The average Russian saw zero of the wealth.

Fun fact. And since Catherine the Great, which was a German by her Pomeranian origins, Princess Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbst, came to power by overthrowing her husband, Peter III who was born in Kiel, Germany. The increasing demands of the state and of private landowners intensified the exploitation of serf labor which resulted in riots and uprisings. She had him overthrown and a legitimate successor murdered. So much for democracy in Russia.

In the German psyche the cleavages to compare Russia with Prussia is as far fetched as claiming the United States as part of England. The English lost, and like Russia it has little consequence for Russia today.

The fact that Russia was once a superpower has no bearing to the ambitions of today. The geographical relations with Moscow are for history books. And BRICS being a society of like-minded countries, we’ll see.

It is more like a military with competing interests. For example, the South China Sea is in the hinterlands of the Russian Federation and competing interests of China and Russia. Will Malaysia, now proud member of BRICS surrenders its claims since it joined BRICS?

Neither has the claims on the Ukraine. The Russian unison is rather a mysterious animal. The Russian Federation of today is as un-unified as ever can be. The German explanation of not having achieved the war strategy for NATO and the EU is so typically wrapped in some wishful make belief of CNN quick and dirty Gulf war victory. Germany must learn to defend itself and win wars. This is an uncomfortable truth. Defeat of Russia is the only option. Get on with it.

The debate about winning and forecasting wars has entered the academic debate. A Ukrainian academic completed a detailed analysis on the causes of the war and how it will end. Its noteworthy to read, even if you are German.

A substantial percentage of the local population of the Donbas region, predominantly Russian speaking Ukrainians and ethnic Russians, wanted to join Russia, as the government promised them higher pensions. The average monthly pension in Russia in 2013 was about $285 per month, while the average pension in Ukraine was $160.

The Russian government used its bluffing techniques to threaten the West with the use of a nuclear weapon. The West responded to Russian aggression by expressing their numerous concerns and introducing mild sanctions against Russia, Crimea, and occupied Donbas.

The continued influx of money from the West to Russia, approximately $1 billion per day for mostly gas and oil, encouraged the Russian government to start a full-scale war against Ukraine on 24 February 2022. This money flow has to change.

The goal was to occupy Ukraine, exterminate pockets of resistance, and add Ukraine to the Russian-led union like the USSR. The Russian army attacked Ukraine from the north, east, and south, and used the blitzkrieg method of a massive attack. The Russian government was counting on the fast collapse of the Ukrainian army and the rapid capture of the Ukrainian capital. This did not happen. 

Western military experts have grossly overestimated the quality of the Russian army. They predicted the collapse of Ukraine in seventy-two hours, repeating the Russian propaganda mantra that Kyiv will be taken in three days. The Western experts and leadership were wrong again, in part due to their limited understanding of the Ukrainian culture with deep-rooted military history, ingenuity, and passionate desire to end centuries-long Russian oppression and genocide of the Ukrainian people. The death of the experts. The Russian army is as broken as it was in 1991. Poor barracks, old kit, non-existing combat casualty treatment centers, abusive command, drunkenness, corruption and abuse.

This could be explained by the large number of ethnic Russians and saboteurs among the local governments of southern Ukraine. In contrast, predominantly Ukrainian speaking people of the Kherson region started mass protests within the first days of the Russian invasion. The map shows otherwise.

The Russian government is using its resources to soften, fracture, and destabilize Ukraine. The Russian army attacked Ukrainian energy infrastructure to cut off electricity, heat, and water, and increase the scale of the humanitarian disaster in Ukraine during the winter. The Russian ‘Blitz’ will come with long teeth. Killing kids, attacks against hospitals, and the elderly will not be forgotten. It hardened the Ukrainian resolve.

The Russian government is expecting that the Ukrainian people will not want to suffer any longer and will demand the Ukrainian government to enter peace negotiations. This is the same tactic with the same verbiage used by Nazi Germany in 1940, trying to force Great Britain to surrender.

Rapid defeat of the Russian forces could reduce the number of Ukrainian casualties, especially among the Ukrainian civilians, as well as the overall damage to the Ukrainian infrastructure and the total costs of the war to Ukraine and NATO partners. The decision makers in NATO and the EU need to recognize this. Experts err.

Ukraine wants to join NATO or another powerful military block, to make sure that in the future, Russia will be afraid to attack Ukraine again. This is the war for the survival of the Ukrainian people who remember the twentieth century as the century of the systematic Ukrainian genocide by Soviet Russia, including three famines and forced labor and death in the Russian concentration camps.

However, the West underestimated the ability of the Russian Federation to survive economic hardship. As of today, there are no significant instabilities in the Russian Federation. The Russian government was able to stabilize its internal processes. Most likely, the West is uncomfortable with the unknown outcomes of possible collapse of the Russian Federation.

Based on my observations, Ukrainian people desire the collapse of the Russian Federation as soon as possible. There is a reasonable and rather predictable time window for their collapse.

In a simplified war duration model, the time window for the war end can be estimated from the duration of the first successful for the adversary phase, that is, the time interval between the start of the war and the time when the adversary became exhausted.

The End of Russia (as we know it)

Regional separations and collapse of the Russian Federation should occur between 10 June 2024 and 4 February 2025. According to the model accounting for possible delays due to the weapon supplies, bad weather, peace talks, etc., the collapse of the Russian Federation will likely occur on or around 28 May 2026.

I believe that the collapse of the USSR in 1991 was incomplete, because it did not split its main member— the Russian Federation into several states. The same flat plate model with the same coefficients was used to estimate the earliest date for the collapse of the USSR.

Subsequent recovery peaks of different amplitude should occur every four to eight years.

One can reasonably expect that Russia’s recovery peaks should lead to new territorial expansion wars initiated by Russia every four to eight years. According to the simplified models with no damping (no delaying factors), the largest peaks for the Russian aggression should develop in December 2002, July 2013, and January 2021.

The flat plate model with moderate damping predicted the collapse of the USSR around 17 June 2001, and periodic attempts of the Moscow government to rebuild the USSR, with its peak efforts around July 2013, August 2025, and September 2043.

The plate model with relatively strong damping representing stronger effort of the West to stabilize the collapsing USSR, produced rather soft collapse of the USSR around 1 July 2007, with subsequent recovery and attempts to rebuild the USSR.

However, in the case of strong damping (meaning strong Western efforts to support the collapsing USSR), the USSR should experience a relatively soft collapse, after which Moscow would start its rather successful restoration of the Soviet Union.

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As recently as the early 1980s, central bankers around the world could be heard moaning and groaning about having to hold physical gold reserves to back up their currencies. The trouble, expense and potential loss of picturesque cast metal in a world of infinite fiat money and digital bytes reflecting off satellites. It’s a trend: citizens would be amazed to learn that only around 8% of the money working as the lifeblood of economies around the world is in the form of coins and banknotes. Folding money is considered old-fashioned.

A banker might roll his eyes and joke to a colleague: “Imagine, we are continuing to pay out good money to pile up these shiny precious metal ingots in a vault, with armed guards. What is this, the Roman Empire?”

You do not hear that in the new Millennium. Disparagement of gold bullion has quieted, in an age of terrifying global debt overhang and failing trust in eqforeign counterparts and fiat currencies. As the world’s economies glide past an estimated one quadrillion dollars in debt instruments, and inflation eats away at everyone’s assets (but not those of the gold bugs and their holdings, notably, as gold, as recently as the 1970s going for US$ 32/oz., zips past US$ 2,000) the usefulness and credibility of the so-called “petrodollar” look increasingly unappetizing.

This would have been unthinkable had it not been for the foundation of the BRICS Group of nations. Its most unlikely beginning was with avaricious Goldman Sachs – of all people – who proposed a grouping of China, India and Russia, in mutual economic interest, pointedly excluding the USA, the “center of everything” since the end of World War II in 1945.

Hu Jintao, Manmohan Singh and Vladimir Putin got together on the sidelines of the 2008 Group of 8 (G8) meeting in St. Petersburg. Russia, now blackballed because of its “Special Military Operation” in Ukraine, was a G8 member, while India and China attended the gathering as part of a purported G8 “outreach” to emerging economies.

In 2009, the first summit of “BRICs” countries (excluding South Africa) took place in Russia. In 2010, at a foreign ministers’ meeting, the initial four agreed to invite South Africa, a formidable economic power on the continent.

By 2011, now a five-country organization—with the “S” now standing for South Africa— formed up, mostly in aversion to the increasingly inconvenient burden of dealing in dollars. Joining together with a BRIC Currency could alleviate the heavy burden incurred by US dollar-denominated debt, in a zero-sum game, always favoring the wealthy western economies: interest rates soared, as the US Fed struggled against inflation.

About this time, certain countries quietly started selling their USD reserves and stowing away tons of shiny gold bars. Note that it was not simply the “mavericks” who did not care for the damage inflicted on their economies by the Fed: the Finance Minister of Norway, never thought of as “anti-American” nation, publicly belly-ached about having to sell his country’s precious hydrocarbon reserves in dollars.

The other alarming factor was the lethal weaponization of the dollar. With the ignominious ouster of the Shah of Iran and the subsequent hostage crisis, billions of dollars of Iranian assets were “frozen” in the USA. When the Federal Republic of Germany went to reclaim their gold bullion from the Bank of New York they were first brushed off and later found many bars had been melted down and recast.

Around the planet, Uncle Sam began to be perceived as an unreliable, if not unscrupulous relative, who would turn on you and pocket your valuables if you did not behave his way. Whatever happened to Khaddafi’s tons of gold, spirited off by NATO pirates?

The buzzword was “dedollarization”. Appealing though the notion might be to those whose billions are locked away by Washington, it is worthwhile to pause and consider how much time went by and effort was expended in setting up the Euro. The EU, certified in 1957 by the “Luxemburg Treaty”, took a full forty-two years of hard work, before Maastricht was hammered out, in 1999.

The most recent BRICS Summit, hosted by President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa in August of this year, received endorsement from outliers like Algeria, Argentina, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran and Saudi Arabia.

Member countries might be active in their economics, trade, and finance relationships, including payment protocol, but it is an unbalanced interdependence, pitting a behemoth like the PRC against, say, Argentina. An advanced economy cannot create a common currency with a primitive one, as one is too dependent on the other: interdependence implies balance. Politics alone won’t do the job.

Bear in mind that with all the grunting and shoving toward de-dollarization, currency trading in USD still constitutes 88 per cent of the total. Global reserves sit at 60 per cent in USD, 20 per cent in Euros and only 2 per cent in Renminbi. National debts are mostly in USD. It was amusing to watch Argentina hurriedly swap their Renminbi, disbursed after a recent large purchase from the PRC, for billions of dollars.

ASEAN gave it a shot, looking to set up the “Asian Currency Unit” (ACU); that yielded nothing, except for a convenient swap facility, eventually known as “Local Currency Settlements” (LCS), still functioning as of this writing.

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CNN — Once upon a time, Russian President Vladimir Putin was the man to see: In the weeks preceding Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, world leaders took turns shuttling to Moscow to urge the Kremlin leader to step back from the brink and call off any plans for an attack.

Those efforts failed. But the man who set a catastrophic war in motion now finds his travel options extremely limited.

That may seem a trifling matter for a man who rules a country that spans eleven time zones. After all, Putin has an open door to Beijing, and Kremlin-friendly leaders in Central Asia and Iran have rolled out the welcome mat since the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

And of course, he’ll always have Minsk: Belarusian strongman Alexander Lukashenko, who provided Russia a launching pad for the invasion, has also played host to Putin.

But Putin will be notably absent from a key global forum this week, the BRICS summit in Johannesburg. His no-show speaks volumes about Russia’s isolation – and Putin’s shrinking horizons.

The leaders of the other members of the BRICS economic bloc – South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, China’s leader Xi Jinping, Brazil’s President Luiz Lula da Silva and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi – are all expected to be there.

But last month, Ramaphosa’s office said Putin would not attend “by mutual agreement.” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov is standing in for him, although Russian state media have said that Putin will appear via video link.

Does it really matter if Putin phones this one in? Taking part in an international talking shop may be a convenient way to act like a player on the global stage, but Putin is missing more than another group photo.

Putin is a staunch proponent of what he calls a “multipolar world order,” promoting structures such as the BRICS as a counterweight to US- and Western-led institutions that have harshly condemned Russia for its war on Ukraine.

And while Russia’s actions may have brought broad condemnation from the West, it remains locked in a campaign for international influence and support, particularly across the global south.

Bolstering such support against the background of the war on Ukraine was a key aim of Putin’s recent Russia-Africa summit in St. Petersburg. The turnout by African leaders may have disappointed the Kremlin – less than half of the heads of state who attended a similar 2019 conference showed up for last month’s event – but Russian foreign policy is still banking on diplomatic and political support from countries across Africa, Latin America and Asia.

So why would Putin miss out on another opportunity to promote his vision? Well, for starters, there’s the not-insignificant issue of a warrant from the International Criminal Court.

In March, the ICC issued a warrant for Putin and another Russian official for an alleged scheme to deport Ukrainian children to Russia. The ICC warrant put South Africa in a bind: As a signatory to the treaty governing the Hague court, South Africa is obliged to arrest individuals indicted by the ICC.

It’s magical thinking to assume that Putin might have been arrested on the tarmac in Johannesburg. After all, then-Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir – who was and remains under indictment for war crimes and crimes against humanity linked to the genocide in Darfur – managed to dodge such a fate during a 2015 visit to South Africa, exiting the country while a court considered a request from the ICC to arrest him.

The Kremlin, of course, bristles at any implication that Putin is ducking out of the BRICS summit because of an ICC warrant.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov denied claims made by Ramaphosa in a confidential affidavit that Russia would view the arrest of Putin as a “declaration of war.”

And Putin himself told journalists on July 29 that he didn’t think his presence at BRICS was “more important than my presence in Russia now,” according to state news agency TASS.

Regardless of motive, the optics of a no-show by Putin at the summit are not good for Moscow. But Russia is pressing ahead with a PR campaign that casts Russia as a staunchly anti-colonial power that supports a more just and equitable world order.

In a newly published interview, Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov laid out the main talking points.

“I certainly agree that the concept of Western domination promoted by the United States and its subordinate countries does not provide for the harmonious development of all of humanity,” he said.

“On the contrary, we must deal (with) the Western minority’s never-ending striving for military, political, financial and economic expansion. Their slogans change: they promote globalization, then Westernization, Americanization, universalization, liberalization, etc. But the essence remains the same – they strive to subordinate every independent player and force them to play by the rules that are beneficial to the West.”

The US and its allies, Lavrov continued, “are trying to slow down the natural evolution of international relations and the formation of a multipolar system, or even reverse the process. They are not averse to using inappropriate and illegal methods, including the use of force or unilateral sanctions (not approved by the UN Security Council), information and psychological warfare, etc, in order to bend the world to suit their needs.”

The irony here is pretty rich. Russia, after all, is waging a war on Ukraine that Putin has justified in starkly imperial terms.

And the end of the unipolar world, in Putin’s view, seems to mean that Russia can go about the bloody business of occupying Ukraine unfettered by international norms, under the false banner of liberation.

Source: Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

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