Wednesday, April 05, 2023

5: Russia



How to win the hot war in Ukraine and the cold war that will follow it After a year of fighting, what comes next?



Everywhere Ventures Bucks Trend by Investing Globally The firm leverages its network of about 500 limited-partner investors to find deals far and wide ......... Jenny Fielding and Scott Hartley, managing partners of Everywhere Ventures, are pursuing a domestic and international investment strategy as U.S. venture capitalists have taken a step back from deals abroad........ The managers of Everywhere Ventures, formerly called The Fund, say they have found an efficient way for a two-person team to invest a small fund in geographically diverse early-stage startups. The firm uses technology to activate hundreds of individual limited partners and connect them with portfolio company founders globally. Its local networks help the managers source and vet deals, while keeping the firm’s operating expenses low.

Putin Should Have Read Evan Gershkovich, Not Imprisoned Him Putin has no independent sources of reliable information. He refuses to read news stories on the internet, fearing it might be used to spy on him. Battlefield information is filtered — and laundered — through layers of military bureaucracy and takes days to reach him. Past military successes in Georgia and Crimea made him overconfident, and the pandemic turned him into a paranoid recluse. On the eve of the invasion, neither his foreign minister nor his domestic-policy chief was aware of the war about to come. .............. And, like despots through the ages, he listens only to people who tell him what he wants to hear. One of them, the oligarch Viktor Medvedchuk, The Journal reported, “assured Mr. Putin that Ukrainians saw themselves as Russian, and would welcome the invading soldiers with flowers.” Putin is godfather to one of Medvedchuk’s daughters. .......... Government statistics are massaged to hide bad news. Every bureaucracy, including the domestic intelligence services, has its own agendas and reality-distorting prisms. ........ By now it should be clear that Putin is living inside a manufactured reality .......... Diplomatic remonstrations won’t puncture his fantasy bubble, but another tranche of Abrams tanks to Ukraine might. ........ Putin has sought to wage a disinformation campaign in the West for decades. Western news organizations can repay his abuses with an information campaign about Russia, in Russian, for Russians. They, too, deserve to have the benefit of facts Putin wants nobody — including even himself — to know.

Putin, Isolated and Distrustful, Leans on Handful of Hard-Line Advisers Russia’s president built a power structure designed to deliver him the information he wants to hear, feeding into his miscalculations on the Ukraine war ......... Russian troops were losing the battle for Lyman, a small city in eastern Ukraine, in late September when a call came in for the commanding officer on the front line, over an encrypted line from Moscow. It was Vladimir Putin, ordering them not to retreat. The president seemed to have limited understanding of the reality of the situation ........ His poorly equipped front-line troops were being encircled by a Ukrainian advance backed by artillery provided by the West. Mr. Putin rebuffed his own generals’ commands and told the troops to hold firm ......... The Ukrainian ambushes continued, and on Oct. 1, Russian soldiers hastily withdrew, leaving behind dozens of dead bodies and supplies of artillery to restock Ukraine’s weapons caches. .......... Mr. Putin expected the war in Ukraine to be swift, popular and triumphant. For months, he struggled to come to terms with what instead became a costly quagmire, and found himself isolated and distrustful at the pinnacle of a power structure designed to reinforce his belligerent worldview and shelter him from discouraging news. ........... Through the summer, delegations of military experts and arms manufacturers emerged from presidential meetings questioning whether Mr. Putin understood the reality on the battleground ........ the president remains surrounded by an administration that caters to his conviction that Russia will succeed, despite the mounting human and economic sacrifices. ....... “The people around Putin protect themselves” ..... “They have this deep belief that they shouldn’t upset the president.” ......... Over time, Mr. Putin, who has never served in the military, has become so wary of his own command structure that he has issued orders directly to the front line. ........ an isolated leader who was unable, or unwilling, to believe that Ukraine would successfully resist. The president, these people said, spent 22 years constructing a system to flatter him by withholding or sugarcoating discouraging data points. ............ The president increasingly speaks of Russia in near-religious terms, as a 1,000-year-old civilization waging a holy struggle that will right historical wrongs and elevate him into a pantheon of conquering czarist leaders such as Peter the Great............. Though contact between the U.S. and Russia occurs almost every day, whether through their embassies, the Pentagon or the CIA, those conversations have become constrained ......... have found some of Mr. Putin’s closest allies to be even more hard-line than the authoritarian leader himself. ........... Putin wakes daily around 7 a.m. to a written briefing on the war, with information carefully calibrated to emphasize successes and play down setbacks ............ He has long refused to use the internet for fear of digital surveillance ........... making him more dependent on briefing documents compiled by ideologically aligned advisers. ......... Battlefield updates can take several days to reach Mr. Putin’s desk, leaving them often out of date ....... Front-line commanders report to the Federal Security Service, or FSB, the successor to the KGB, which edits reports for experts at the Security Council, who pass them to Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev, the arch hawk who helped persuade Mr. Putin to invade Ukraine. He, in turn, passes the reports to Mr. Putin. ............. Mr. Putin, current and former Russian officials and people close to the Kremlin say, remains fully committed to bringing Ukraine to heel and is ready to mobilize Russia’s economy and population for years to succeed. If Western arms shipments and economic support flag, and Ukrainian morale dips, he could still emerge, on balance, as the victor in what is already the largest war in Europe since World War II. ............ After three days of quarantine and three PCR tests, the executives sat at the end of a long wooden table, listening as Mr. Putin described a war effort he considered a success. Ukrainians were only motivated to fight, he told them, because their army was shooting deserters ............ Then Mr. Putin turned to Chief of General Staff for the Russian Armed Forces Valery Gerasimov, who said Russian weapons were successfully hitting their targets and the invasion was going according to plan. The arms makers left the meeting with a sense that Mr. Putin lacked a clear picture of the conflict ............ who supports the war, said in an interview that the president “proceeded from an incomplete understanding of the situation and in some ways not fully correct.” ......... The war planners, he said, “clearly underestimated the strength of the enemy and overestimated their own.” ......... Mr. Putin needed only days to roll through more than a fifth of Georgia in 2008, and weeks to take Ukraine’s peninsula of Crimea in 2014— ...........

The Russian president came to see the Crimea operation as a personal triumph.

His inner circle gradually shrank down to his most hawkish advisers, who assured Mr. Putin Russian forces would seize Kyiv within days. ............. “He probably forgot that when he was a KGB operative he was lying to his boss,” said Indrek Kannik, a former head of analysis for Estonian foreign intelligence. ......... Diplomats at the mission learned during Mr. Putin’s two-decade rule to feed Moscow the story it wanted to hear ........ Junior officials and senior directors knew that to win plaudits and promotions they should exaggerate good news and play down the bad, for fear of upsetting “papa,” a nickname for Mr. Putin, once used for Russian czars. ............... The seeds of Mr. Putin’s overconfidence against Kyiv were planted in 2014, when his most senior war planners advised him not to seize Crimea. .............. Pro-Western protesters had overwhelmed riot police in central Kyiv, prompting Moscow-friendly Ukrainian President Vyktor Yanukovich to flee. Mr. Putin summoned his security chiefs to the Kremlin for an all-night operation to exfiltrate Mr. Yanukovich to Russia. Shortly before sunrise, Mr. Putin told his staff he had resolved to take Crimea, the predominantly Russian-speaking peninsula, he said in a 2015 documentary. ............. After a swift and nearly bloodless victory, his poll ratings soared above 80%. The Kremlin contrasted the weekslong operation to czarist Russia’s painful defeat in the 19th century’s yearslong Crimean War. .................. In 2018, Mr. Putin, who began to speak of Russia as a military power equal to the U.S., gave his annual state of the union speech in front of a screen showing nuclear weapons striking what appeared to be Florida. “Nobody listened to Russia,” he said. “Well, listen up now.” ................ Mr. Putin was becoming more reclusive and consulted a shrinking roster of old allies. When Sergei Kirienko, Kremlin domestic politics chief, gathered the full presidential team together in 2019, Mr. Putin lectured them for hours on Russian sovereignty and his views. “They left feeling like he was talking to himself” ............. When Covid arrived in 2020, the health-conscious Mr. Putin retreated from his usual residence in the Moscow suburbs to a remote estate near Lake Valdai, 250 miles from the capital, and the presidential summer residence in Sochi on the Black Sea............. There, he spent extended time with his old friend and media mogul Yuri Kovalchuk, who quarantined nearby, and the pair theorized over a shared idea of a restored Great Russia ............. As the circle tightened, Mr. Putin became increasingly paranoid, convinced that the U.S. was stationing nuclear weapons in Ukraine ............ July 2021, Mr. Putin published a 6,917-word historical essay on the Ukrainian nation .......... From inside Ukraine, a Kremlin-connected businessman was telling Mr. Putin what he wanted to hear. Viktor Medvedchuk, a Russia-funded politician, had made Mr. Putin godfather to his daughter Darya. For years, Mr. Medvedchuk had a dedicated line to reach the president—a phone with a Russian number and a secure calling app the Ukrainians called Kremlyovka, in reference to the Kremlin ............ Mr. Medvedchuk assured Mr. Putin that Ukrainians saw themselves as Russian, and would welcome the invading soldiers with flowers ......... Meanwhile, the FSB was tweaking polling data to convince Mr. Putin that Ukrainians would welcome Russian soldiers ......... War planning fell to the FSB more than the military, according to the former Russian intelligence officer and a person close to the defense ministry. The ministry kept normal working hours in the weeks leading up to the invasion, with little sense of the urgency. .............. Mr. Putin’s spokesman, Mr. Peskov; his foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov; chief of staff, Anton Vaino; and Mr. Kirienko, the domestic policy chief, weren’t aware of the plans ......... Fifteen days into the war, after his quick strike on Kyiv failed, Mr. Putin scowled in a gold-embroidered armchair as his defense minister briefed him over a video link in a televised meeting. ....... “Vladimir Vladimirovich, everything is going to plan,” said Mr. Shoigu. “We report this to you every day.”

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Monday, April 03, 2023

Heat Waves In India

Petteri Orpo defeats Sanna Marin in Finland election. Now what? Center-right leader faces tricky path to build governing coalition. ....... The National Coalition Party (NCP) secured 48 of 200 parliamentary seats versus 43 for the Social Democrats, with the anti-immigration Finns Party securing second place with 46 seats. ........ For the European left, waking up to the loss of Marin was a blow. As a high-profile Social Democrat, she earned widespread praise over the past four years for her handling of the pandemic and adept response to the Ukraine crisis, including Finland’s dramatic pivot toward NATO. .......... But her ultimate failure to sell left-leaning economic policies to the Finnish electorate — for example, seeking growth through investment rather than cuts — will be noted in Europe. Swedish Social Democrat Magdalena Andersson failed to secure a second term in elections last fall, while Denmark’s Mette Frederiksen only won reelection in November after a series of sharp-right policy turns. ........... Even before the election was settled, some colleagues in Finland were suggesting she could seek a new challenge at the European Commission, possibly even as the Left group’s candidate for president. ....... a Finnish convention that offers the winning party the first chance to form a coalition — even if that lead consists of only two seats. .

Global warming is killing Indians and Pakistanis Annual heatwaves on the poor and crowded Indo-Gangetic Plain are a horrific consequence of climate change ............ In the opening scenes of “The Ministry for the Future”, the novelist Kim Stanley Robinson imagines what happens to a small Indian town hit by a heatwave. Streets empty as normal activity becomes impossible. Air-conditioned rooms fill with silent fugitives from the heat. Rooftops are littered with the corpses of people sleeping outside in search of a non-existent breath of wind. The electricity grid, then law and order, break down. Like a medieval vision of hell, the local lake fills with half-poached bodies. Across north India, 20m die in a week............. The Indo-Gangetic Plain, which extends from the spine of Pakistan through northern India to the deltas of Bangladesh, is home to 700m people and exceptionally vulnerable to the heat pulses that climate change is making more frequent. It is one of the hottest, poorest and most populous places on earth .......... Between 2000 and 2019, South Asia saw over 110,000 excess deaths a year due to rising temperatures .......... Last year’s hot season, which runs from March until the arrival of the monsoon in late May or early June, was one of the most extreme and economically disruptive on record. This year’s could rival it. ......... above-average temperatures and heatwaves until the end of May. ......... Despite a relatively cool March, the coming weeks could be perilously hot. ........ Scientists record heat stress as a combination of temperature and humidity, known as a “wet-bulb” measurement. As this combined level approaches body temperature, 37°C, it becomes increasing hard for mammals to shed heat through perspiration. At a wet-bulb temperature of around 31°C, dangerously little sweat can evaporate into the soup-like air. Brain damage and heart and kidney failure become increasingly likely. Sustained exposure to a temperature of 35°C, the level Mr Robinson imagines in his book, is considered fatal. ........... India could become one of the first places where wet-bulb temperatures routinely exceed the 35°C survivability threshold. ......... The magnifying effect of the built urban environment, which can be 2°C hotter than nearby rural areas, is often especially pronounced in India’s concrete jungles. Those living in slum housing, which offer little air circulation and often use heat-sucking materials such as tin, suffer the worst of it. ........... “vast regions of South Asia are projected to experience [wet-bulb temperature] episodes exceeding 31°C, which is considered extremely dangerous for most humans” ........

India loses 101bn man hours per year to extreme heat, and Pakistan 13bn

......... In 2017, heat-exposed work accounted for 50% of India’s gdp and employed 75% of the labour force, or some 380m. ......... warn people of extreme temperatures, advise them to stay indoors and drink lots of water, and put emergency services on high alert. .



The Indian Premier League is taking over global cricket India’s lucrative domestic contest is strangling international contests .

We are living through a trillion-dollar rebalancing Beneath a veil of silence, a hugely dramatic and powerful episode of financial repression is ongoing ...... There is nothing more inevitable than death, taxes and bank failures. But what about the bailouts? ........ we have entered a new era, one in which thoroughgoing liquidation of financial bubbles is politically unthinkable and so moral hazard and zombie balance sheets pile up. ....... Put them together and you have a vision of ever larger balance sheets, inevitable crisis and no less inevitable bailout, opening the path to even greater leverage and risk. ......... mega-quantitative easing in response to the truly unprecedented shock of the Covid-19 lockdowns. ............ We would not be here but for the pandemic. ..........

the trillion-dollar balance sheet shift from bond investor to bond issuers triggered by the post-Covid pile-up of inflation and interest rate rises.

......... We need public investment so as to escape the reactive cycle we are locked in and to begin anticipating the challenges of the polycrisis, whether in public health, climate change or destabilising geopolitics......... Those in the bottom half of income and wealth distribution are bystanders in the great balance-sheet reshuffle. They hold few, if any, financial assets and pay relatively little tax. They have lived the drama of Covid and its aftermath as a shock to jobs and a cost of living crisis. Unlike bondholders or investors, their interests are not represented by lobbyists. Their households are not too big to fail. .

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