I am wondering if this automatically means Russia will switch off gas supplies? Understandably, how Europe will pay for Russian gas when SWIFT is switched off, and probably Russia won't be sending gas for free?
Russia has been described as “a gas station run by a mafia masquerading as a country that happens to have nuclear weapons”, which isn’t far from the truth.
From the leaked clips of a high ranking German officer saying "Putin just wants respect" before the war. Now seeing a large shift amongst those I follow on twitter in German who were previous anti-action.
Assuming SWIFT access is cut, and then the Natural Gas supplies are turned off is there another escalation back? Assuming the US/EU can rally their resources how do they mount a quick recovery from the loss of natural gas which will certainly be devastating. Even if the Nuclear plants in process of decommissioning are reversed(if possible) I'm not sure how the EU gets through the next six months without a ton of pain.
Sure. We could sanction their oil and gas industry. Like we've done to Iran. There's also a whole world of plausibly deniable black ops stuff we could do to mess with their infrastructure.
Of course not everyone lives in a small apartment facing the sun but still.
Sure, some saber rattling and destabilization, but outright war?
US intelligence was not always credible, so when they presented facts that conveniently benefited American interests (shale gas export), people were sceptic.
That allowed Putin to prepare an invasion in plain sight.
That said, following Russia demand, the US president went national TV and announced that Russia will likely invade Ukraine and the US will not go in.
"well, this isn't really acceptable in terms of respecting settled borders but the reality is that at least a very substantial percentage of the local population does want to be part of Russia so it isn't the worst thing in the world and probably Putin will move troops into areas he de facto controls or slightly expand borders there".
That doesn't make those things ok but it does put in a long list of other conflicts where the on-the-ground reality is complicated.
Many of us also have mixed feelings of at least partial support about other re-arrangements of sovereignty whether that is ethnic separatism within a country with a quasi-federalist state like Spain (i.e. Basque or Catalan) or other cases like South Sudan or even Kosovo where NATO actively carved out an ethnic statelet by helping an organisation that for all its roots of legitimate popular support was at least... organised-crime adjacent.
The speech that Putin gave though was not about border adjustment but about a denial of any kind of Ukrainian nation identity or nationhood. He wasn't saying, "the Russia / Ukraine border should be 10 or 20 km West of where it is" which might be unacceptable to a hardline territorial integrist or to Ukraine but is within the normal bounds of nation state conflict, he was saying "there is no Ukraine at all, it's not a real nation, they have no right to any kind of state" and that crosses many, many lines that are not crossed by taking territory here or there.
Not trying to make taking "taking a province or two" look like acceptable behaviour but I think that it's important to put previous and current EU/NATO positions in the context of the full horror of what he is now proposing to do which is to permanently destroy a nation state. Even the Ukrainian government didn't really believe this was how it was going to go.
It's also business logic 101 to have alternatives.
NATO's reason to exist is literally because of Russian threat.
The reason people like the US dollar is not just because SWIFT exists.
SWIFT is a messaging system.
The actual transfer of funds is performed with correspondent banks, but they won't perform the transfer if the government says that they cannot have accounts opened by banks from other nations, then that's up to that government, not SWIFT.
SWIFT is being used as "shorthand" to mean that Russian banks will be cut off from the world financial environment. They will have to evade those sanctions via, for example, trading with multiple hops through China, if China allows them to.
I believe it is. Nobody is threatening sanctioning Russia's energy sector à la Iran.
There are numerous workarounds. Most involve Russia submitting to China. Given how unpredictable Putin’s become, that’s preferable to them being a regional power.
This is almost expected. The calculation being that Russia is safer as a Chinese vassal than a regional power. Settling via CIPS is also more burdensome and thus expensive than settling via SWIFT.
At the same time, it would hurt Europe more than Russia in the short-term. (But it might be really worth it in long term)
We underestimate Chinese productivity at our own peril.
While we deal with this Ukraine/Russia thing, it would be unwise to not wargame out some 'humor me' scenarios.
"I know the Chinese could never build that much infrastructure in the short term. But 'humor me', what if they can?"
The Chinese government is despicably authoritarian, but unlike Putin, they are not crazy and they are playing it long-term.
They won't condemn Russian invasion too harshly, but they don't want to break energy supply chains from West to help out a not-exactly-friendly state (just an enemy of an enemy).
Regardless, it seems like a small price to pay for solidarity with the Ukrainian people.
Seems like Putin didn't want to piss off Xi by starting a war before/during Xi's "look at how great we are" Olympic Games.
And it'd seem that Putin favors dates like 22.02.2022 for some strange reason.
Russia launched their full-scale invasion of Georgia on 08.08.2008, too.
I am curious why he didn't wait longer. Maybe he chose now to make the crossing of rivers easier. Also, ISTR that when the snow melts the roads there get so muddy they are almost unusable.
If this goes through and BTC price starts spiking, I’d interpret that as a signal that it is happening, which would be a validation for Bitcoin playing a significant role in avoiding banking restrictions.