TODAY'S SMH "VINTAGE" CATHY WILCOX REDEEM THE ONE ABOVE...

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GUS LEONISKY — CARTOONING SINCE 1951.

 

 

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GILBERT ACHCAR: And there have been a lot of moves since 2008, very clearly, from Russia, that can be construed as countermoves to block the possible accession to NATO of Georgia and Ukraine, after two waves of accessions to NATO of countries that were previously under Soviet domination or even part of the Soviet Union. The three Baltic states were part of the Soviet Union. They were Soviet republics. And yet they were integrated into NATO.

 

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YES, THEY WERE INTEGRATED IN NATO. BUT DESPITE GILBERT ACHCAR EXPLAINING THAT NATO SHOULD HAVE BEEN DISOLVED AND THAT IT LIED TO RUSSIA, THE POINTS MADE ABOVE ARE DISGENUOUS. THE DONBASS REGION WERE PROTECTED BY THE MINSK AGREEMENTS WHICH THE WEST WAS PLANNING TO DISMISS AS SOON AS KIEV COULD ATTACK THE AUTONOMOUS REGIONS. GERMANY AND FRANCE AND "UKRAINE" LIED TO RUSSIA. THE WEST CANNOT BE TRUSTED.

BEYOND THIS, THE DONBASS AND CRIMEA ONCE WERE RUSSIAN PROVINCES, UNLIKE THE BALTIC STATES.

 

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By Patrick Lawrence / Original to ScheerPost

 

The U.S.–cultivated coup in Kyiv not quite nine years ago, when a small minority of Ukrainians deposed a duly elected president in the name of democracy, was indecent enough. Who would have guessed that the indecencies would go on and on and on to the point the fanatical regime now running the country would go after the very souls of its own people?

The first post-coup act passed in the Rada, Ukraine’s legislature, back in February 2014 was to ban use of the Russian language in official contexts. The regime subsequently shut down opposition newspapers and broadcast media, outlawed opposition parties, and imprisoned opposition leaders and journalists. Periodic arrests, assassinations and constant persecutions at the hands of openly neo–Nazi paramilitaries and death squads became something close to the norm.

Now things take a yet more diabolic turn. When Volodymyr Zelensky announced plans earlier this month to ban the long-established Ukrainian branch of the Russian Orthodox Church, the Ukrainian president signaled that his regime intends to intervene into the religious allegiances and beliefs—the very psyches, indeed—of that considerable portion of the population that looks to the Russian Orthodox Church for spiritual guidance.

This, it turns out, is where the campaign to remake Ukraine as a Western nation—to turn it into something it has never been—was fated from the beginning. I, along with a lot of others, ought to have known.

How shall we understand this indefensible business, this wholesale act of erasure?

Straight off the top, we have a paradox the like of which comes along but rarely. Making Ukraine “Western” requires that a nation with pronounced differences turn itself into a profoundly and comprehensively intolerant society in contradiction of the most basic assumptions of Western liberalism. Europeans, or at least those purporting to lead them, now seem perfectly pleased to welcome into their ranks a regime given to official religious persecution.  

Zelensky announced his intent to draft a law banning the traditional Orthodox church in his nightly national broadcast on December 2. Three weeks later he was greeted as a courageous defender of democracy and freedom with an extravagant standing ovation when he addressed a joint session of Congress. There is no avoiding the conclusion here: The U.S. imperium does not give a tinker’s damn about democracy and freedom in Ukraine, religious or otherwise. It cares about manipulating these totemic notions as it cynically sacrifices Ukraine and Ukrainians to its campaign to subvert, ultimately, the Russian Federation.

I cannot help thinking of all those foolish people waving blue-and-yellow flags off their front porches these past months. They have been had by the contemptuous warmongers who have been selling the war in Ukraine for more than a year now. Given that every fact noted in this commentary is readily available to anyone who looks, theirs must be counted a willed ignorance at this point, a psychological pathology.

Ukraine’s various divisions run deep and are in no way to be regretted. Different languages, religious affiliations, political loyalties, deep family ties, different histories—all these are evident among Ukraine’s 44 million people. This could have been a source of national strength—of creativity, of a unique identity, of national pride.  

I consider nations of this kind, neither altogether Western nor altogether Eastern but some of both, to be in a special category with special responsibilities. Finland is such a case and Germany another, as noted previously in this space. So is Ukraine. Its makeup suggested that it, too, could have served as a bridge between the Western and Eastern traditions.

The post-coup regime in Kyiv, directed by America’s neoconservative cliques, wasted no time before pushing this aside. The project from Day One was to sabotage a naturally occurring identity, if I can put it this way, and replace it with a bottom-up artificial identity. It was never going to work and never will. If Zelensky’s proposed religious persecution law tells us one thing above all others, it is that this vicious regime is intent on permanently eliminating all aspects of  the identity of Eastern-oriented Ukrainians. In effect, Kyiv proposes to destroy the nation in the name of saving it.

American policy cliques have been exploiting social and political divisions in this fashion since the Truman administration’s support of the fascist Greek monarchy in the spring of 1947—Washington’s first post–World War II intervention. Always, these operations are conducted in behalf of one or another variety of right-wing dictatorial regime. In the Ukraine case, it found rich soil in the longtime contempt the Western-tilted half of the nation has entertained toward the Russian-speaking eastern provinces.

The political and ideological aspect of the religious question in Ukraine reads directly out of the extralegal 2014 coup. Under Petro Poroshenko, the highly corrupt, malleable chocolate magnate who assumed the presidency in the spring of that year, Kyiv founded the Orthodox Church of Ukraine as an alternative to the Moscow-aligned Ukraine Orthodox Church in 2018. This has proved the basis of the persecution campaign we now witness.

Things grew heavy going soon after Russia launched its military intervention last February. Within weeks, armed extreme-right militias began disrupting services in Russian Orthodox parishes with Russian-speaking majorities. By all appearances, these attacks have been ad hoc, although appearances often deceive in the Ukraine case.

Recent raids of Russian Orthodox monasteries have been a matter of official policy. Kyiv has justified these interventions with allegations that these monasteries have been serving as hotbeds of Russian collaborators aiding Russian forces with information useful to the Russian military campaign. It is now evident that these raids were a prelude to Zelensky’s December 2 announcement. Are there such collaborators among the monks? Were these dramatic intrusions simply stage-setting displays with no real justification?

Here we must step carefully. It would require a dedicated correspondent with an investigative instinct to answer such questions, and there seems to be no such journalist among the Western correspondents reporting the war from the Ukrainian side. So we must remain agnostic on this issue.

But there is no room for agnosticism when we consider Zelensky’s legislative plans. None. In his announcement he explained his intent as “making it impossible for religious organizations affiliated with centers of influence in the Russian Federation to operate in Ukraine.” No circumstances I can think of justify the suppression in this manner of a long-established church with many millions of followers.

The waffle you read in the major dailies reporting these matters is over-the-top even by their slovenly standards. Of Zelensky’s plans The New York Times reported, “They raise hard questions about… how a ban on the church would square with freedom of religion under the Ukrainian Constitution.”

Preposterous. What questions would they be, one has to wonder.

The incompetent Ukrainian leader’s proposed law is of a piece, it is to be noted, with the larger Western project. Trade sanctions, exploded gas pipelines, disrupted cultural schedules, expulsions, slammed diplomatic doors: All is dedicated to pretending that Russia and its people can somehow be made to “go away.”

As Kyiv prepares to persecute the souls of its own people, it seems we are about to witness just how inhumane this project has been from the outset.

 

 

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By Batiushka for the Saker blog

 

Introduction

All nationalities have contemptuous or humorous words for their neighbours. Often these words come from the differences between them, especially as regards diet or dress. For example, the Americans call Germans ‘krauts’ (because they eat sauerkraut – pickled cabbage) and the British ‘limeys’ (from British sailors who ate limes), the French call the English ‘rosbifs’ (roast beefs) and the English call the French ‘frogs’. However, behind these terms there lie all kinds of unpleasant associations and stereotypes, which define all the worst characteristics of a particular people, but certainly do not apply to the mass or majority of that people. Thus, krauts are also square-headed fools, limeys are the lowest of the lowest criminal class (such were 18th century British sailors), rosbifs are beer-swilling (football) hooligans (the sort who buy, but do not read, British tabloids (1)) and frogs are people who will eat anything without distinction, as they are obsessed by their stomachs.

 

Khokhly

As for the Ukrainians, they call Russians ‘moskali’ (Muscovites) and the Russians call Ukrainians ‘khokhly’. A ‘moskal’ is also a bigoted Great Russian chauvinist with a superiority complex, who despises provincials in the Ukraine who used to have a certain hairstyle called a ‘khokhol’ (literally a forelock, a style revived by some hair-conscious Ukrainian nationalists today). However, as a very good half-Polish, half-Ukrainian friend explained to me years ago: ‘Ukrainians live in the Ukraine, khokhly (plural of khokhol) live anywhere they can’. What he meant by this is that the lowest sort of Ukrainians are not patriots at all, but have no principles and will take advantage of anything they can get, as they do not have any responsibilities or respect for others and do not have to work. In a word, khokhly swim with the tide and will sell you their grandmothers, if they think they can make a bit of money out of it, at the same time despising the buyer as an idiot.

For example, you may have heard of the expression ‘Russian brides’. The term has rightly become a synonym for ‘gold-digger’. Well, most of them are Ukrainians. I remember about ten years ago a man in his 60s coming to me to complain about his gold-digger Ukrainian ex-wife, a so-called ‘Russian bride’. The usual story: she was 30 years younger than him, had flattered his male vanity and then fleeced him (plumer in French, literally, to pluck the feathers off) for everything she could get her greedy, gold-digging hands on. As they say, no fool like an old fool. Of course, I could not help him. His reason for coming to me was that she had told him she was an Orthodox Christian. Of course, she was not at all, neither Orthodox, nor a Christian. I had never seen her in my life. This is a story among thousands of others. She was not a typical Ukrainian, but she was a typical ‘khokhol’.

 

The Sense of Entitlement

Since last March Europe has been flooded by Ukrainian ‘refugees’. And they keep coming, nearly four million of them now, and rising daily. Of course, very, very few of them are actually refugees. Until this October very, very few Ukrainians had been affected by the war which their government (a majority of them had voted for it) began in the Donbass in 2014. Those who were refugees had mainly fled to Russia – in their millions since 2014. There they were made welcome. (I have one such woman in my parish, who got married here last year). In Europe they were told that there was no war in the Donbass and they were illegal immigrants (I have such a family in my parish). The ‘refugees’ are mostly, typical for the lowest layer, ‘khokhly’, who take advantage of Western politicians and the racist naivety and anti-Russian prejudices of ignorant Western people. The khokhly are simply on an extended vacation, with a chance to travel in Western Europe, expenses paid – something they, visa-less, had been dreaming of for years back in the Ukraine.

Khokhly do not want to, or intend to, work, and are heartily despised by the real Ukrainians, who have been here for years, have learned the native language, and do work – very hard. I remember introducing one of the ‘refugees’ to longstanding Ukrainian parishioners. The conversation lasted two minutes. As my parishioner said to me afterwards: ‘As soon as he got out his latest model of Iphone, I walked away. I knew exactly what his game was’. He confirmed what I had thought. Fraudsters. Many of the ‘refugees’ do float around European towns and cities in their UA-registered expensive German cars, much better cars than those of their naïve Western hosts. The sense of entitlement is: ‘I am Ukrainian, you owe me everything’. ‘You are not a Ukrainian, you are a khokhol’, is my answer to them.

The khokhly take free food and clothes, elbowing the local poor people out of the way. They do not make themselves liked – at all. Some register themselves in several Western countries and receive benefit money from several countries. Meanwhile they have rented out their flats in the Ukraine to fellow-Ukrainians, often real refugees. Even more money coming in. Fraud is in their nature. In the Ukraine itself, the khokhly are now stealing gas which Russia sends to the desperately poor Moldovans. What else would you expect from khokhly? The same with Western arms, which (mainly Jewish) Ukrainian arms merchants are selling on the black market to all and sundry, including to Russians. A friend in Switzerland described their antics in church. You can recognise them easily, he said, as their children behave so badly. Why? Because they have never been to church in their lives. Their parents go to church, to meet others, to do business, to plan their next moneymaking moves and see if church people are stupid enough to give them something for free.

How naïve can Western people be? They are taking into their homes complete strangers who speak another language, have another culture and are often very picky with their food, and allowing them everything. It is political hypocrisy – real refugees are not allowed. Europe is awash with genuine refugees, Afghans and Syrians, victims of other NATO wars. But in what is open racism, they get nothing from Western countries, except life behind barbed wire in deportation camps because they are ‘brown’. But khokhly? They are allowed everything. However, after eight months, at least some Western Europeans have seen through them. Ordinary Polish people, and now already 1 in 25 people in not very prosperous and very hard-working Poland is a khokhol, are getting fed up with them. In France and England, many khokhly have been turned out onto the street by disillusioned sponsors. Their behaviour has been so appalling. Some are now turning up in the prison system.

Several million of them have already returned to the Ukraine. They pumped Western naivety for all it was worth and when they understood there was nothing more to take, they went back home, suitably enriched and with huge contempt for their former hosts. A Russian parishioner told me about her stupid acquaintance, a Russian called Marina who is married to a Frenchman. From the liberal chattering classes of Saint Petersburg, burdened by the guilt of political correctness, she had taken in a ‘poor Ukrainian woman’ (‘how they suffer because of that terrible Putin’). Marina came home early one day and found the naked young Ukrainian woman lying on the bed next to her equally naked French husband. It took her exactly ten minutes to turn the ‘poor Ukrainian woman’ out on to the street. As for her husband, he said he was ‘just having a rest and had no idea that a naked young woman was lying next to him’. As I understand it, this Marina believed him (2). Plus ca change….

 

Dekhokhlification

The fact is that most of the best Ukrainians, the real and honourable Ukrainians, have stayed in the Ukraine. Of all the ‘refugees’ I have met so far (and that must be over 100), I have not yet met one who is authentic. Whether by unintended consequence or by design, the Russian Federation is very successfully ‘dekhohklifying’ the Ukraine. Russia is successfully emptying the Ukraine of the lowest and most unprincipled layer of parasites, the khokhly. The population of the Ukraine is already down to fewer than 30 million – so far. More are leaving every day, streaming into Poland The khokhly go westwards. Let Western Europe take them, the rubbish. The good ones will stay. A few months ago I still thought that Russia would just free the Donbass, as it announced last February and also take the land-bridge of Zaporozhie and Kherson to protect the Crimea from the Nazis, who were turning off the water supply from there. Then I realised that Russia would have to go further, simply because the West was supplying the Kiev regime with shells and missiles that were falling not just on the liberated areas, but even in southern Russia.

Today it seems to me that Russia will have to liberate the whole of the Ukraine, even as far as Lvov and the border with Poland. Why not, if the trouble-making khokhly have gone and are bankrupting Western social security systems with their parasitic sponging? Why should the treacherous Poles get anything out of this? The Poles rejoiced when the UK blew up Nordstream and then tried to start World War III, blaming a murderous Ukrainian missile on Russians. Let them pay for the consequences. If the Nazis are either all dead or living in the EU, there is no reason for Russia to stop in the Donbass, or Kiev, or even Lvov. Liberate right up to the Polish border, freeing freezing Non-NATO Moldova on the way and stopping only there, at the Romanian border. Maybe let the Romanians have back North Bukovina (Chernivtsy) and the nice Hungarians have (the to-be-renamed) Zakarpattia. As for the rest: Winner takes all. Russia may now take all of the Ukraine because all the Nazi khokhly will have left for stupid Western Europe. It will have a nice straight border then. It is not a question of how many Ukrainian ‘refugees’ will go back. It is a question of how many of them Russia will allow back. The answer is very few.

 

Conclusion

On 24 November President Lukashenko stated that the Ukraine is now threatened with total annihilation: https://news.mail.ru/politics/54019554/?frommail=1. That is the result of forbidding your people human rights for eight years, massacring them, and refusing to love your Russian neighbour. As Russia bombards the Ukrainian electricity infrastructure, east, centre and west, from Kharkov to Odessa, from Kiev to Lvov, affecting heating, light and water supply, the stream of khokhly heading for the EU will increase pressure on the West to make the Kiev regime return to the negotiating table, from which the selfsame West forced the selfsame Kiev regime to leave last March. And if Zelensky refuses, he may well find himself eating polonium or novichok. MI6 are experts at that. Meanwhile, Finland is intending to build a wall between itself and Russia. We hope that Poland and others will do the same. This will save Russia the expense of doing it. The old Berlin Wall and watchtowers and mines along the East German border were to prevent people going westwards. The new one will be about preventing depraved LGBT Westerners going eastwards.

25 November 2022

 

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 Posted by b

 

Ukraine SitRep - Counter Artillery War - Financial Disaster

Since the mid of the year it has become clear that the war in Ukraine is one that is mainly fought by artillery.

Ukraine was clearly the underdog in that fight as the Russian forces fired eight times the amount of artillery munitions the Ukraine could make available. The U.S. and some European dependents stepped in. Some 120 M-777 guns and a myriad of modern track mounted artillery systems were given to the Ukrainian army. Hundred of tons of ammunition were moved in. The U.S. and some allies delivered HIMARS systems that could reach beyond the limits of gun artillery.

The Russian military reacted to it. It dispersed its depots and command centers thereby limiting the number of targets for HIMARS systems. It also intensified its use of electronic warfare which took down the drones the Ukrainian artillery used to find its targets:

The electronic suppression of Ukraine’s unmanned aerial vehicles blunted one of Kyiv’s biggest advantages in the early months of the war. The Ukrainians counted on superior intelligence—largely provided by UAVs—to make their smaller artillery arsenal more precise than Russia’s own, larger arsenal of big guns and rocket-launchers.

But the Russians’ electronic warfare prevented those drones from navigating and communicating—and deprived the Ukrainians of the precision they were counting on. “The defeat of precision was critical to unit survival” for the Russians, analysts Mykhaylo Zabrodskyi, Jack Watling, Oleksandr Danylyuk and Nick Reynolds explained in a study for the Royal United Services Institute in London.
...
“The average life-expectancy of a quadcopter remained around three flights,” Zabrodskyi, Watling, Danylyuk and Reynolds wrote. “The average life-expectancy of a fixed-wing UAV was around six flights” and, “in aggregate, only around a third of UAV missions can be said to have been successful.”

Lacking real fighting capabilities the Ukrainian artillery switched towards easier fixed targets. In late November it again started to intensely bombard Donetsk city with artillery and missiles. As there are few military installations or even barracks within the city this clearly was a war against its civilian population.

Russian language papers wrote about the civilian casualties caused by the carnage. The political leadership of the Donetsk Republic requested an urgent operation against the threat.

As the heavily fortified frontline makes it impossible to quickly break through and hunt the artillery behind that line, the Russian military moved to other measures. A special cell was created to wage the fight against Ukrainian artillery around Donetsk. More counter artillery radars were moved in. More satellite picture interpreters began to look for firing positions. Longer range counter battery guns also appeared.

Over the last ten days the campaign began to show significant results. Many of the recent daily reports from the Russian Ministry of Defense noted the results of this anti-artillery campaign. Here is yesterday's one:

Within the counterbattery warfare, one U.S.-manufactured M-777 artillery system has been detected and destroyed near Netaylovo along with its crew that had shelled residential areas in Donetsk. Another M-777 artillery system has been destroyed near Preobrazhenka (Zaporozhye region).

One Uragan and two Grad multiple-launch rocket systems (MLRS) have been destroyed near Nevskoye (Lugansk People's Republic) and Seversk (Donetsk People's Republic).

Two Ukrainian 2S1 Gvozdika self-propelled artillery systems have been destroyed at their firing positions near Krasnogorovka and Prechistovka (Donetsk People's Republic).

Four Msta-B and two D-20 howitzers have been destroyed near Kupyansk (Kharkov region), Velikaya Novosyolka (Donetsk People's Republic) and Novogrigorovka (Kherson region).

Air defence facilities have shot down three Ukrainian unmanned aerial vehicles near Olginka, Guselskoye (Donetsk People's Republic) and Peremozhnoye (Zaporozhye region).

In addition, two Uragan MLRS have been intercepted near Kostogryzovo (Kherson region), and three U.S.-manufactured HARM anti-radiation missiles near Debaltsevo (Donetsk People's Republic).

And this one from today:

Within the counterbattery warfare, two U.S.-manufactured M-777 artillery systems, and one German-manufactured FH-70 howitzer, that were used for shelling residential areas of Donetsk, have been destroyed at their firing positions near Krasnogorovka (Donetsk People's Republic).

Three Ukrainian fighting vehicles for Grad multiple-launch rocket systems have been destroyed near Seversk.

Three Ukrainian Msta-B howitzers have been destroyed near Petropavlovka (Kharkov region), Berestovoye (Donetsk People's Republic), and Chernobayevka (Kherson region).

Ukrainian D-20 and D-30 howitzers have been destroyed near Georgiyevka and Maryinka (Donetsk People's Republic).

Another reports says that the reaction time between detecting and submitting target coordinates to active counter fire is down to two minutes. The setup and displacement time for a M-777 howitzer are each at least three minutes with a fully manned and well trained crew. When radar detects a firing Ukrainian M-777 the Russian response now comes in before the gun could be moved out.

The counter battery campaign can now be called a full success. The last Ukrainian artillery impact in Donetsk city was reported on December 23. The campaign will have to continue until the Ukraine runs out of guns. Up to now the Ukrainians fire still more ammunition thanthe 'west' can produce:

“Ukrainian artillery use, conservatively, is probably around maybe 90,000 rounds per month,” Michael Kofman, the director of Russian studies at C.N.A., a Virginia research institute, said last week on the “War on the Rocks” podcast. “That’s a lot more than anybody makes in the West right now. So all of this has been coming out of stocks, which is like going through your saving accounts.”

With less guns available on the Ukrainian side the need for new ammunition will decrease.

That is bad news for those Ukrainians who man the frontline trenches. The heavy artillery fire they are under will only intensify and increase their already very high losses. In some time and some places the lines will break and leave space for the Russian military to move through.

The current fighting is concentrated around Bakhmut/Artyomovsk. The Ukrainian command has thrown in reserves to hold the city.

 

Under permanent Russia artillery fire the sixteen brigades currently deployed in and behind Bakhmut will be decimated one by one. It is a slow fight where the lines move only little by little in favor of the Russian side. But it is very effective battle in a war designed to demilitarize Ukraine. Due to very uneven artillery fight the Ukrainian losses will be many times higher than the Russian ones.

On the economic side the Ukraine has already lost the war. It is living off loans from 'western' governments it will surely default on:

The Ukrainian government has struggled to raise money on bond markets during the war and is paying investors more than it is collecting, according to a Central Bank statement that points to the country’s deepening dependence on foreign aid. 
...
The economy has been projected to shrink about 40 percent this year, drying up tax revenue and indefinitely delaying previously planned spending that would have spurred growth.

The Central Bank statement, published on Monday, pointed to a less visible side of Ukraine’s financing shortfalls caused by the war: an inability to raise money on the market. Since Russia invaded on Feb. 24, Ukraine has not been able to roll over debt accumulated before the war. The country paid investors about $2.2 billion more than it collected in bond sales in that time, the Central Bank said.

All of that has left Ukrainian public finance, which has been wobbly at the best of times in the post-independence period, deeply reliant on assistance from the United States, the European Union, European countries that donate individually and other donors.

Even the U.S. controlled IMF is unwilling to throw more money into that black hole:

The budget passed by Ukraine’s Parliament for next year includes a deficit of about $36 billion. About half of the planned expenditures are for the army, the police and other military outlays. The deficit this year has run even higher, at about $5 billion a month.

The International Monetary Fund, which bailed out Ukraine through a long run of post-independence financial crises, has not continued large-scale lending during the war.

“They are worried about debt sustainability,” said Tymofiy Mylovanov, a former economy minister who is a professor at the Kyiv School of Economics. “If the I.M.F. is worried about debt sustainability and ability to finance, imagine what private investors are thinking.”

In contrast international trade with Russia has been booming this year and its financial numbers, recently mentioned by its president Putin, look better than those in the 'west':

First, the predicted economic collapse did not happen. True, we have posted a decline, and I will repeat the figures. There have been promises – or predictions or hopes maybe – that Russia’s economy will contract. Some said its GDP would drop by 20 percent or more, by 20–25 percent. True, there is a decline in GDP, but not 20–25 percent; it is in fact 2.5 percent. That is the first thing.

Second. Inflation, as I said, will be a little more than 12 percent this year – it is one of the most important indicators, too. This, I think, is much better than in many other countries, including the G20 countries. Inflation is not good of course, but it being smaller than in other countries is good.

Next year – we have mentioned this, too – we will strive for the 4–5 percent target, based on the economy's performance in the first quarter – at least, we hope so. And this is a very good trend, unlike in some other G20 countries, where inflation is on the rise.

Unemployment is at a historic low of 3.8 percent. We are running a budget deficit, this is true, but it is only 2 percent this year, next year too, then it is projected at one percent, and less than one percent in 2025: we are expecting about 0.8 percent. I would like to point out that other countries – both large developing economies and the so-called developed market economies – are running a much greater deficit. In the United States, I think, it is 5.7 percent, and in China, it is over 7 percent. All major economies are running deficits above 5 percent. We are not.

This is a good foundation for moving confidently into 2023.

When the war ends the Ukraine will have an incredible amount of debt that it will not be able to pay for in generations. It will have no more land to sell off to foreigners and no industry left that will be of any value.

The people who had thought up, designed and implemented the 'western' sanction war against Russia have done more damage to Ukraine and the 'west' that anyone had imagined. But they utterly failed to hurt Russia. They should all be fired for their demonstrated incompetence.

Posted by b on December 28, 2022 at 16:15 UTC | Permalink

 

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