Napetost v Ukrajini - Krimu

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Uporabnik doctorz pravi:
Moderatorji naj zbrisejo kopiran text in pustijo samo linke tako kot v vseh temah ker tole je obupno nepregledno.

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Russia’s second largest aviation carrier - Transaero - has addressed the state and banks for assistance, saying because of the debts it may stop servicing flights before the New Year, two well-informed sources told TASS on Sunday.

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Belarus and Russia have agreed a possibility to fix the prices of food goods exported to Russia in dollars, Belarusian First Deputy Prime Minister Mikhail Rusy told reporters on Saturday.

“We have come to an agreement that the prices of the goods we are planning to export to Russia will be fixed in dollars pre-paid at the exchange rates of the Central bank of the Russian Federation,” Rusy said following his talks in Moscow.

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I’ve gotten a 100 percent raise. Not as a reward for hard work or long-term loyalty to my employer, but as a gift of timing. This windfall isn’t a one-off like a bonus, nor is it evenly spaced like paychecks after a promotion. I get richer at random. Almost every time I visit the ATM, what I take out is a smaller slice of what I make than it was the time before. I’m paid in dollars, but I live in Russia, where the currency is currently collapsing; as the ruble loses value, I effectively get a raise. This week alone, at the time of this writing, my salary’s worth has increased by 20%. It’d be a gross simplification, but you could say my raise comes courtesy of Vladimir Putin.

As the ruble falls, I think back on a night in late autumn of 2007 when Moscow’s streets were windswept, but not swept clean of ice, and I decided to spring for a taxi.

...

That year, 2007, Moscow had been named the world’s most expensive city for expatriates to live in for the second year running by a cost-of-living survey produced yearly by American consulting firm Mercer, which provides websites like the Huffington Post reliable slideshow fodder.

My driver heard my foreignness in the way I pronounced my address. He inquired, and I told him where I was from. He spoke heatedly, then, about terrorists and democracy and empires and fate. Mainly, though, he laughed. All the way home, he was taken with a scary hilarity, and as he sped along the 10-lane highway that crawls with traffic during the daytime and forms a racecourse around Moscow’s center at night, I wondered if my Americanness would be both our downfalls. Russians’ savings had repeatedly been reduced to nothing by economic calamity during the 1990s; if my driver himself had not been impoverished by capricious shifts in the currency’s value, surely many he loved had. Now that the tables were turned—or shifted—he had every reason to relish the moment.

“Americans, what do they think in America now that it’s 25 rubles to the dollar!” he demanded.

I did not have many thoughts on currency rates, however. No matter, his own belly laugh was the most satisfactory answer of all.

“America! How do you like 25 rubles?!” he laughed, animated by a shameless, revelling schadenfreude. I wouldn’t have dreamed of explaining that Americans gave little thought to the value of the ruble. Driving me home seemed like the best thing that had happened to this guy in a long time.

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But although the city felt, objectively, far from the most desirable place in the world to live, a personal-sized pizza with gluey cheese cost $30, and if I wasn’t careful, I’d find that I had ordered a $14 bottle of water.

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There is a giddy gambler’s thrill to watching your money gain value for reasons beyond your control. The world becomes your Costco; “gotta stock up on house slippers, they’re so cheap and you never know when you’ll have ten people over and they all need to wear house slippers!” As the ruble’s decline accelerated, my dollar-denominated friends and I looked up exchange rates as frequently as sports fans who can’t not check the score on their phones under the table at a nice restaurant. We texted each other the latest numbers, strategized about the timing of ATM visits and large purchases. (One friend who has held off on extending her gym membership until it runs out this month gloats daily as the currency collapses.) Taxis no longer felt like an indulgence and on more than one occasion, I ordered an extra two entrees for dinner to meet the delivery minimum.

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How badly I wanted the ruble to stop falling struck me as I climbed a flight of frost-encrusted cement steps, my hair well hidden by a hat, listening to liberal Russian talk radio on headphones. (...) The guests on the radio discussed how long it would be before the masses became disenchanted with Putin. The consensus was: once everything that makes life comfortable and pleasant had become too expensive to have, no sooner, no later. Some commentators thought this would take two years, others said more quickly. I walked in the cold among these masses and the thought went through my mind repeatedly: “I’m getting richer and richer, they’re getting poorer and poorer.”

That night I gave the woman who walks my dog while I’m at work a 60 percent raise.

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Last week, I wrote an article reviewing the events of the past year in Ukraine and laying out what we can expect in the future. As luck would have it, on Monday, the ruble crashed, prompting Russia’s central bank to hike interest rates up to 17%.

The proximate cause seems to have been a sweetheart deal that issued 625 billion rubles in bonds to oil giant Rosneft, run by Vladimir Putin’s close confidant, Igor Sechin. Yet as I explained back in April, Obama’s sanctions made a crash inevitable. Russia has more than $600 billion in debt, far exceeding its reserves. Without the ability to refinance, an economic collapse has always been in the cards.

Nevertheless, the exceedingly fast drop in energy prices (Russia now sells its oil at about $60 a barrel, while its budget assumes $100 a barrell) has accelerated events. Now, Russia’s banking system may very well be insolvent and a full-scale economic meltdown appears imminent.

So a follow-up seems in order. Just to review, in my previous article, I laid out three key points that I believe are key to understanding the crisis:

1. Putin will not be deterred: Despite what many hard liners believe, there’s nothing we can really do to make Putin back down.
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For him, it’s an existential struggle and giving in is not an option. Moreover, as Masha Gessen points out, there really is no power in Russia but Putin, so an overthrow by a mythical oligarchy doesn’t appear to be in the cards either.

So forget about getting Putin to back down. We can affect his calculus, but not his intent.

2. Everyday old Soviets die and new Ukrainians are born: While Putin and Russia may be stuck in Soviet times, Ukraine is moving on. They see their neighbors to the west, such as Poland, prospering and that’s the direction they want to head.

At the same time, no one under 35 in Ukraine has any memory of the Soviet Union and few have any nostalgia for it. Ironically, Putin’s incursions into Crimea and Eastern Ukraine have only exacerbated that trend.

Today’s young Ukrainians are more likely to be working for a multinational, freelancing on Elance or building a startup to market Ukraine’s ingenuity to the world than harkening back to Soviet glory. They want to be a “normal country,” with the rule of law, strong human and property rights and a government that works for them, not against them.

3. Energy prices are likely to stay down: Nobody saw the price of oil crashing the way it did, but it’s been clear that prices would fall for a while now. Moreover, the shale boom in the US has meant that Russia’s stranglehold over European gas supplies is in its death throes as well.

Although oil may rebound somewhat in the coming months—it really depends on what the Saudi’s decide to do—it is unlikely that we will see $100 oil for quite some time, if ever. Back in March, Barron’s predicted $75 dollar oil and that’s probably a reasonable expectation. A year from now, US will be exporting gas in large quantities, so that will be a drag on Russia’s economy as well.

Here’s what I think Putin does now.

1. De-escalate: While Putin will not back down, it makes sense for him to de-escalate the crisis. This won’t be hard to do, especially since he’s the one who’s been escalating it in the first place. Moreover, Petro Poroshenko, the Ukrainian President, has his own set of problems and would also like to the fighting to stop.
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2. Shift Blame: Scapegoating has long been a time-honored Russian ritual. Putin, throughout the crisis, has been vocal about nefarious American designs and “fifth columnists.” We can expect him to continue in this line, blaming “external factors” for his troubles.

However, there is a problem with this tactic. It implies that Putin is too weak to keep the wolves at bay. He has taken great pains to humiliate US President Barack Obama, to portray him now as some kind of all-powerful mastermind has its dangers. The Russian public may tolerate corruption and incompetence from their leaders, but not weakness.

So Putin is likely to find others to blame as well. Former US Ambassador Michael McFaul thinks that Putin will reshuffle his government and might even sack his Prime Minister, Dmitry Medvedev. Like scapegoating, palace intrigues have long been a time-honored Russian tradition.

3. Wait For An Opportunity: While many in the west think that Putin is a master strategist, most people with inside knowledge of the Kremlin believe otherwise. At best, he appears to be a talented tactician, seizing opportunities where he finds them, but operating without a concrete long term plan.

Evidence would seem to bear this out. Like a drunk poker player, at each stage Putin has consistently doubled down on his bets while facing a decreasing expected return. When the crisis began, his aim was to create a Eurasian Economic Union to rival the EU. Today, he’ll be lucky to avoid a complete collapse of the Russian economy, if not his own government as well.

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Uporabnik Steve pravi:
kaj hoces povedat?? da lokalni airsoftovci se rusom kradejo...ups pardon...plenijo????

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