Notices by kravietz 🦇 (kravietz@agora.echelon.pl)

The 2025 #Russia “is not invading” season can be considered to have begun 🥳🥳🥳

21 February 2022: ‘Russia does not intend to invade Ukraine, Lavrov announced’.

13 January 2025: ‘Russian Foreign Ministry: Russia does not intend to invade NATO countries’

“The Baltics should belong to Russia”, according to #Russia MP and deputy head of the Defense Committee of the Duma, Aleksei Zhuravlev.

In particular, he claimed that #Vilnius, the capital of #Lithuania was rightfully Russian, as “it was part of the Russian Empire”. #Alaska was too, by the way, and Smolensk was once Polish, if you want to go this route.

The deputy also noted that the Suwałki gap could be useful for Russia, as it would provide convenient supply routes to the Kaliningrad region. He urged the Lithuanian authorities to “hold their tongues,” adding that the Lithuanian army would not withstand a confrontation with Russia for even a single day.

P.S. Lithuania is a member of #NATO since 2004

Source: Anton Geraschenko

How it started:

Laken P was 17 when he travelled to Ukraine on the promise of work with a humanitarian organization. But the offer, posted on the Telegram app, was bogus and he was met instead by Russian agents who threatened him and his family if he refused to obey them.

How it ended:

In late May, police were called to a disturbance at a Warsaw hotel, where Laken P drunkenly declared he was working for Russian intelligence and wanted to hand himself in and tell the authorities everything.

Thank God for teen drinking (sometimes) 😉

https://tvpworld.com/84455136/canadian-teen-who-spied-for-russia-gets-lenient-sentence-from-warsaw-court

Time is not on #Russia’s side, argues #Finland’s foreign minister

RUSSIA IS FAR from an unstoppable force of nature. The autocrats who run it rely on a war economy that is unsustainable and shows serious cracks. Democracies should take advantage by increasing the economic pressure. It is we who have the momentum.

Contrary to Vladimir Putin’s narrative, and some people’s belief, sanctions do work. Even when they do not prevent certain goods and technologies from entering or—in the case of oil and gas—leaving Russia, they certainly make logistics more cumbersome. That increases costs.

Original: https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2025/01/08/time-is-not-on-russias-side-argues-finlands-foreign-minister

Unpaywalled: https://archive.is/YA0nB

#Russia infamous MS Volgoneft-239 which ran aground in a storm on 15 December 2024 leaking a huge amount of mazut is still on the same spot and continues to pollute - today a new patch of oil has been detected leaking from it.

https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20250110-new-oil-spill-detected-in-black-sea-from-stricken-russian-tanker

Another great post by Polish analyst Daniel Szeligowski, about “Russian security concerns” related to #NATO and #Ukraine. All following text is Daniel’s, written originally in English, with no quote block for readability.

In early 2014, Ukraine was a neutral country, with a pro-Russian president, and with 70% of Ukraine’s population against NATO membership. Yet Russia violated Ukraine’s neutrality and annexed Crimea, then launched a covert invasion of Ukraine in the east.

Petro Poroshenko won the presidential election in 2014 having promised a settlement with Russia, keeping a special status of the Russian language in Ukraine. He was initially sceptical regarding NATO accession, underlined Ukraine must rely on its own strength to provide security.

Zelensky also won the presidential election promising to compromise with Russia - to stop shooting, sit down with Putin and talk. He was even more sceptical regarding NATO accession. Asked about NATO, he once famously said he never pays anyone a visit if he has not been invited.

Zelensky was ready to drop Ukraine’s NATO membership bid in an exchange for the Russian troops withdrawing from Ukraine, and the talks were held already before 2022. And yet Putin launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

In the first weeks of the invasion, Zelensky was yet again ready to drop Ukraine’s NATO bid. But he wanted to obtain international security guarantees. So Putin put forward demands that Russia must be consulted before any aid would be given to Ukraine in the event of aggression.

Both Poroshenko and Zelensky were initially sceptical regarding Ukraine’s accession to NATO. Both wanted to get a deal with Putin. And Putin himself pushed both of them to seek NATO membership out of no other viable alternatives.

Putin has shown no willingness to compromise with Ukraine. His war aims remain maximalist - subjugating Ukraine and changing its regime. He seeks Ukraine’s partition, and will turn what is left of Ukraine into a Russian protectorate. Nothing to do with his “feelings” about NATO.

Regrettably, Russia’s imperial self-conception is that of Russian elites at large, not just Putin. Russian leadership simply cannot reconcile with the existence of a sovereign Ukrainian statehood. So any sustainable Ukrainian-Russian compromise is currently not within reach.

#Russia channels are now posting a fake about infamous “Yakut knife fight” - if you haven’t seen it, don’t. But it made a lot of publicity in the “war porn” groups especially in Russia. In short, Ukrainian soldier encountered a lone Russian soldier in a building and they had a close combat with knives, in which the Ukrainian soldier unfortunately lost. The unusual aspect is that his helmet cam also filmed the whole encounter, and then Ukrainian drone also filmed it from above.

Now Russians are circling a narrative that Ukrainians despise their own soldier “because he lost”. This is of course false. The first photo is of the Ukrainian soldier, Dmytro Maslovsky, his name revealed by the Ukrainian army in tribute to his bravery.

The second photo is one of the versions of the Russian fake - it shows a completely different person and is written in bad Ukrainian. Many other versions have been spotted by Denis Kanansky[^1]

Maslowski’s dramatic final battle, however, has a wider context, which had been quite surprisingly reveal by one Russian channel, little known but respected in their military circles. This is what he wrote[^2] about the Maslovsky video:

If the Ukrainian had not taken an epic video of the last fight on his helmet, and then added a video from the Ukrainian drone - someone in Russia would have learnt that:

A) the Yakut was sent by the commander (to certain death) to a house controlled by Ukrainian drones and, as it turned out, by a Ukrainian fighter, not for reconnaissance, not for sabotage, not for capturing an enemy or equipment - but for displaying the Russian flag so that the commander could report upstairs about another success.

B) the commander sent (to certain death) attention - a father of five children! Not a convict, not a junkie, not a mercenary. But a father of five children, of whom the eldest is 18 years old.

C) if it wasn’t for Ukrainians - nobody in Russia would have learnt that after the battle with the enemy Yakut sat in that house alone for a week (!!!!), fought off the shelling, didn’t eat or drink (and where to get it?) got shrapnel wounds and came back alive and brought his last cigarette to the guys.

[^1]: https://t.me/kazansky2017/15102

[^2]: https://t.me/darkside_ofthesun/1374

These two stories are notable as they’re separated by 12 years but show the same pattern.

The first one is from 2024 - a woman from #Russia occupied Severodonetsk complains that the authorities used 14-15 years old students for construction, with no work contract or salaries and no work safety equipment.

The second screenshot is from 2012 from Russia’s Kabardino-Balkar Republic where I was in person when it happened. It describes a traffic accident in which three children aged 13, 14 and 17 were seriously wounded by a drunk driver while they painted trees on a highway (their adult driver was killed too).

What was the most shocking for me at that time was that nobody was asking the main question - what were these kids doing on a highway, “painting trees”, with no protection, no barriers, blocked lanes etc?

Nobody asked it because it was obvious for everyone - of course, Russian highway maintenance has its adult, paid workers and its budget for such jobs. But if you can replace it by unpaid work of school children, the budget can be spent on your personal enrichment…

There’s some evidence indicating that the Azerbaijan Airlines Flight 8243 #J28243 that crashed in #Kazakhstan today was actually shot down - specifically the shrapnel holes in its tail part.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azerbaijan_Airlines_Flight_8243

@happyinmotion

100% agreed on the latter. The latter is true for any public utilities - water, healthcare etc. It’s only the US-derived fixation on private funding that makes things expensive that otherwise would be quite cheap. In the UK even water & sewage networks are private and they’re now getting bankrupt (e.g. Thames Water) in spite of the natural monopoly.

I’m all for public investments in wind and solar, especially that they have to be balanced at the grid level. And this cost (LFSOE - levelized full system cost of electricity) cannot be ignored. Otherwise you end up with PV/wind generation curtailing when it’s excessive, or massively redundant generation capacity when they don’t work.

When the balancing cost is accounted for, you end up with numbers that are not only not higher than nuclear, but actually much higher. Note that this model assumes LFSCOE calculated for the exclusive use of given source, so e.g. calculation for wind assumes 100% wind, storage and nothing else. A hybrid system where renewables are coupled with nuclear are both low-carbon and much cheaper than either of these sources alone.

Not that nuclear alone is very expensive - it has the large initial capital cost, but LCOE is actually quite low due to long lifetime and high electricity output. That crazy $160/MWh number that everyone uses comes from Lazard study which openly admits it comes from a single (!) project in the US (!), so it’s extremely biased.

@cstross

@bjn

As a reminder, Russian gas was also “damn cheap” for a while, and then it got very expensive. That’s the cost of relying on a single supplier and in case of China they now control 80% of the whole supply chain (!) - that is, even if you open PV factory in EU you still depend on China for the resources to make them. China achieved this very low cost by a number of factors - slave labour, low environmental protection, cheap electricity from coal and state subsidies, which declaratively seem to be at odds with EU values, yet nobody has a problem with that and nobody wonders how come they’re so cheap.

@cstross

@w7voa

I think the answer is a bit more complex. AfD is an interesting phenomenon in the modern politics that unifies populism with political diversity (!), attracting people whose views are not represented by the mainstream parties. The same thing is seen in “Konfederacja” in Poland, and possibly other similar parties in Europe. Most importantly, the political program of these parties is an amalgam of various rather vague proposals and criticisms, thus allowing the rejects to find “their” favourite piece there while they don’t care for the other parts (openly pro-Russian or neo-Nazi ones). In case of Germany, I don’t think there’s any other party than AfD in Germany that would openly say Energiewende is counterproductive and economic disaster - so the popularity of AfD is also a direct consequence of their denial of reality, which they call “political consensus”. Naturally, if both parties gain significant political momentum, they definitely will crystalise their programs and that’s when their former supporters may get shocked, but for now they’re welcoming everyone disappointed in the mainstream.

@ErikJonker

Energiewende is just part of the puzzle - look at Merkel’s immigration policy, employment policy, financial discipline, customs policy, Green Deal and other topics used by AfD as their vehicle.

And the execution of policies is the not some kind of minor aspect here - it’s the most important part. Everyone may recognise that things may need change, but how Energiewende was implemented, it made things actually worse not better. I think this was one of the factors that actually pushed many people into climate denialism even if they were initially neutral or supportive. Just remember what people pushing Energiewende were saying in 2010 - there were promises of clean, cheap electricity within a decade (!). Instead you got very expensive electricity made out of coal and gas when renewables don’t work.

As for German car industry or EU industry in general, you can’t really “transform” to compete with cheap imports from China, where industry runs on cheap coal electricity and slave labour. That’s physically impossible.

You either protect your environmentally-friendly industry with customs tariffs, like Switzerland does, or you just openly tell everyone “okay, we’re shutting down industry here and switching to cheap imports because we don’t give a shit about CO2 emitted in China and slave labour”.

But you can’t say “oh we care very much about environment so we shut down our clean industry and import everything from China”, this just doesn’t make sense. That kind of policy is exactly what drives people towards AfD.

@w7voa