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The Iron Curtain cut through the heart of Europe, dividing east from west. Curtain 2.0 looks to be forming only around Russia, walling it off from all of Europ
by sandworm101 5y ago
The Iron Curtain cut through the heart of Europe, dividing east from west. Curtain 2.0 looks to be forming only around Russia, walling it off from all of Europe. Things will be so much worse for people on the inside this time. It will be like Soviet Russia without the Warsaw Pact to support it. It is one thing to be without Twitter and Hollywood movies, but can Russia feed itself? Can any country? Modern industrial agriculture just assumes parts and equipment can flow easily across borders. How soon before that too is locked behind sanctions?
- vnchr 5y agoThey’ve got plenty of opportunities with China.
- bojan 5y agoThat is such an unequal relationship. China is not kind to its colonies.
- emteycz 5y agoPlay stupid games, win stupid prizes.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- jorblumesea 5y agoAt the cost of almost everything. China has vassals, not partners.
- sandworm101 5y agoFor now. But we are already seeing a few chinks in that armor. China prizes stability. Countries that start wars over imagined slights do not promote stability. China's largesse is not unlimited nor does it ever come without a price.
- mc32 5y agoMaybe… their relationship with North Korea pints too exceptions to that.
- vnchr 5y agoThey waited to go to war until after the Beijing Olympics, in coordination with China [0]. And China has been cheering them on [1]. Looks like someone made a friend. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/02/us/politics/russia-ukraine-china.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/02/us/politics/russia-ukrain... [1] https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2022/03/10/china/china-russia-disinformation-campaign-ukraine-intl-dst-hnk/index.html https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2022/03/10/china/china-russia-disinf...
- dragonwriter 5y ago> They waited to go to war until after the Beijing Olympics, in coordination with China. And China has been cheering them on. Looks like someone made a friend. Friends don't make friends delay invasions so that they will get bogged down in mud, or egg them on in disastrous courses of action that happen to serve the geopolitical interest of the cheerleader by consuming attention of geopolitical rivals. That's callous exploitation, not friendship.
- sandworm101 5y agoCrimea was invaded days after the 2014 Sochi games. The rest of Ukraine days after the 2022 Beijing games. It's becoming a Russian tradition.
- whatever1 5y agoAnd China will not not notice that it is the sole buyer of Russian products? What Putin did to Ukraine, made Russia smaller and weaker, and there is no going back.
- seanmcdirmid 5y agoChina wants to export a bunch of stuff to Russia as well. They aren't going to ruin that two way relationship just to get a discount on agri imports.
- dragonwriter 5y agoThere have been a number of negative indicators on that front in the last couple days, most recently: https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/russia-says-china-refuses-supply-aircraft-parts-after-sanctions-2022-03-10/ https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/russia-sa...
- jquery 5y agoAll of this stops the day Russia stops attacking Ukraine, it’s not like Russia is a helpless victim here. Edit: I agree there will be reverberating consequences. Criminals have to pay their debt to society. Russia is already deep in a hole. Even if this war stops today, their economy is set back many years. The economic might of the peaceful world is being used to make an example of a warmongering nation. But Russia can choose to stop digging. There is no end-game for Putin in continuing this war.
- TheSpiceIsLife 5y agoPredicting the future is hard. I imagine there'd be much pressure for Putin to resign, or age-out, and a calmer leader to ascend, before significant forward progress is made in healing relations.
- sandworm101 5y agoI'm not sure about that. Even if every Russian tank turned around and went home, the sanctions will still be there for a while. There is already a call for seized Russian assets to be used for rebuilding efforts. Russia's credit rating will not bounce back quickly. And countries from Canada to Germany are looking to ween themselves off of Russian energy products. Damage has been done.
- nickthegreek 5y agoEven if the sanctions stop, I don't know if all the companies that left will come back the next week, month or year. There is restitution that needs to happen.
- TheCoelacanth 5y agoI don't think it's restitution that the companies care about. It's the perceived instability that will keep them from going back in. They had to pull out once at great cost. They're going to expect that they might need to pull out again if they go back in.
- vernie 5y agoNot now that Russia is nationalizing all the businesses that pulled up stakes.
- savant_penguin 5y agoIf that means one less Russian tank in Ukraine so be it
- michaelgrosner2 5y agoLook to how North Korea is doing. They're also a client state of China. They (kinda) survive. Russia will too.
- tguvot 5y ago>but can Russia feed itself I saw some article on this topic, apparently 100% of "material" for inseminating cows is imported. Also like 80% of wheat seeds and majority of potato seeds (or whatever). Something similar with chicks
- tomjen3 5y agoMy grandad was a farm worker back in the old days before artificial insermination. You used to have a guy drive by with a bull, and it would take care of the process for you. Much more damming, for Russia anyway, is that they apparently don’t have a single factory producing ballbarings. That isn’t going to be an issue for a while, and then it is really going to be an issue.
- Ourgon 5y ago> Much more damming, for Russia anyway, is that they apparently don’t have a single factory producing ballbarings They'll just get them from Ukraine which has plenty of such factories.
- dalbasal 5y agoThey can probably feed themselves. Growing calories is something we're good at, especially Russia. The hard part is dealing with a scenario where there is plenty of wheat, but people have no money to buy it. Ireland, in the 1840s suffered a horrific famine. Grain was being exported the while time. Food existed. People couldn't afford it. During the US' great depression, people were hungry while agricultural products piled up, rotted in or burned to defend a price floor. I don't think Russia will starve, but economics is hard. There are a lot of ways this can get really bad.
- pg_1234 5y agoWell, the wheat will be affordable because Russia won't be able to export it.
- outworlder 5y agoBut then that only means it's not attractive for the farmers either.
- empressplay 5y agoThey're going to manipulate their currency the same way China does.
- bryanlarsen 5y agoKeynes said: "Anything we can actually do, we can afford". Money is just a way of divvying up the productive capacity of a country, so not being able to afford a country's own production is either a preference for foreign trade or a distribution problem. Not that is much comfort to Russian's -- Russia has a massively unequal distribution of wealth.
- erichocean 5y ago> Russia has a massively unequal distribution of wealth. The Netherlands has the highest wealth inequality in the world.[0] No one considers that some backwater country, or its people starving or somehow impoverished. There's more that's going in Russia than "a massively unequal distribution of wealth." [0] https://uweb.berkeley.edu/2021/04/11/the-duality-of-the-dutch-economy/ https://uweb.berkeley.edu/2021/04/11/the-duality-of-the-dutc... It's also the oldest country to implement capitalism. Maybe capitalism plays a role in producing wealth inequality? It's certainly been increasing in the US since the 1980s, when "greed" was embraced as good and we started shipping jobs overseas.
- farseer 5y agoWith the amount of land and oil they have, food would never be an issue. Even an isolated Russia can conjure up basic lorries and tractors. The real question is would ordinary Russians be content in life without most modern amenities? Sure they can barter their natural resources in exchange for goodies from China but at what price?
- T-A 5y ago> Curtain 2.0 looks to be forming only around Russia And Belarus.
- sandworm101 5y agoDifferent countries today, but the etymology of the name remains telling. Belarus = Byelorussia = Belaya Rus = White Russia.
- CRConrad 5y agoWell, if you're going to go by what the Russians themselves call stuff in Russian, then Ukraine (or at least a big chunk of it) is called "Little Russia", so... Maybe better not go by that, eh? I mean, if we were to go by what people call places as a valid indicator for which people the places belong to, then everything from the Atlantic as far east as all of Poland and much of Belarus, Ukraine and Russia used to be called Grossdeutschland ("Greater Germany") as late as in my grandparents' youth... So better not.
- dragonwriter 5y agoAnd a bunch of pro-Russian puppet states Putin is building by conquest of all (if he succeeds completely in Ukraine) or part (South Ossetia, Abkhazia, Transnistria, and, with only partial success in Ukraine, Donbas and Luhansk) of some former-Soviet European states. But, still, limited to a subset of ex-Soviet territory, not the broad expand of Eastern Europe right up through part of Germany that the old Iron Curtain contained.
- georgecmu 5y agoRussia is a leading producer and exporter of wheat, corn, and fertilizer [1][2]. The question you may want to ask is whether the rest of the world be able to feed itself if Russia loses access to its markets [3]? [1] https://www.rbth.com/business/332948-russia-leading-wheat-exporter https://www.rbth.com/business/332948-russia-leading-wheat-ex... [2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-03-04/russia-calls-on-domestic-fertilizer-producers-to-halt-exports https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-03-04/russia-ca... [3] https://www.rte.ie/news/business/2022/0309/1285347-world-food-crisis/ https://www.rte.ie/news/business/2022/0309/1285347-world-foo...
- seanmcdirmid 5y agoRussia's top agriculture export markets are Kazakhstan, Belarus, China, Ukraine and Turkey. Out of those, Ukraine and Turkey probably can't be count on to remain open with sanctions. But the "rest of the world" seems open if we just assume that China is Russia's main agri importer.
- NicoJuicy 5y agoYeah, with Czech tractors - https://twitter.com/kamilkazani/status/1501369950463836164 https://twitter.com/kamilkazani/status/1501369950463836164