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Ukraine – Putin On Why The War Started, Failed Attempts On Snake Island, Other Issues
Updates below (17:15 UTC)
It is Victory Day. As Ernest Hemingway said:
Anyone who loves freedom owes such a debt to the Red Army that it can never be repaid.
The most important part of Vladimir Putin's speech to the Victory Parade on the Red Square is the narrative that explains how the current war in Ukraine began. Putin is correct in seeing this as a NATO proxy war against Russia:
[D]espite all controversies in international relations, Russia has always advocated the establishment of an equal and indivisible security system which is critically needed for the entire international community.
Last December we proposed signing a treaty on security guarantees. Russia urged the West to hold an honest dialogue in search for meaningful and compromising solutions, and to take account of each other’s interests. All in vain. NATO countries did not want to heed us, which means they had totally different plans. And we saw it.
Another punitive operation in Donbass, an invasion of our historic lands, including Crimea, was openly in the making. Kiev declared that it could attain nuclear weapons. The NATO bloc launched an active military build-up on the territories adjacent to us.
Thus, an absolutely unacceptable threat to us was steadily being created right on our borders. There was every indication that a clash with neo-Nazis and Banderites backed by the United States and their minions was unavoidable.
Let me repeat, we saw the military infrastructure being built up, hundreds of foreign advisors starting work, and regular supplies of cutting-edge weaponry being delivered from NATO countries. The threat grew every day.
Russia launched a pre-emptive strike at the aggression. It was a forced, timely and the only correct decision. A decision by a sovereign, strong and independent country.
The use of 'pre-emptive strike' is somewhat misleading. In fact the Ukraine started the war on Wednesday, February 16 2022, when its forces near the Donbas republics began preparatory artillery strikes for an all out ground attack on the Donbas republics.
The February 15 report of the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine recorded some 41 explosions in the ceasefire areas. This increased to 76 explosions on Feb 16, 316 on Feb 17, 654 on Feb 18, 1413 on Feb 19, a total of 2026 of Feb 20 and 21 and 1484 on Feb 22.
The OSCE mission reports showed that the great majority of impact explosions of the artillery were on the separatist side of the ceasefire line.
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On February 19 the Ukrainian President Zelensky announced at the Munich Security Conference that the Ukraine would ditch the Budapest memorandum and all related agreements. The Budapest memorandum is about Ukraine committing to be a non-nuclear state.
Those two issues, an imminent ground attack on Donbas and the Ukraine threatening to strive for nuclear weapons, drove the Russian decision on February 21 to recognize the Donbas republics as independent states. (The legal precedence for doing such is the 'western' recognition of Kosovo as an independent state.)
Common defense agreements between the independent states and the Russian Federation were signed. Three days later, during which the Ukrainian attacks on the Donbas republics continued, Russian troops entered the Ukraine under Article 51 of the UN charter.
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Over the last days there were some interesting developments of the ground.
1. North of Karkov Russian troops are pulling back to shorten their frontline. The city will have to wait until the Donbas has been regained. The Ukraine again declares it is wining as it retakes the towns the Russians have earlier left.
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2. After heavy fighting Russian forces broke through the eastern Donbas front and conquered the heavily defended city of Popasna.
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MilitaryLand.net @Militarylandnet – 8:30 UTC · May 8, 2022
🗺️Ukrainian forces withdrew from Popasna to more favorable and fortified positions in the vicinity, the head of #Luhansk Oblast confirms #UkraineRussiaWar
The city is on a hill about 260 meters above sea level. This is about 100+ meters higher than the areas north, south and west of it. Artillery stationed on the hill will have a very good view and can reach deep into Ukrainian held grounds. It will be able to interdict resupplies on nearby roads to the Ukrainian front troops.
The Ukrainian army process of withdrawing to ever 'more favorable and fortified positions' will probably end in Lviv.
3. The Ukrainian military had launched a commando attack on Snake Island (in the semi circle 30 miles south of Odessa).
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However after previous Ukrainian air attacks Russian troops had already left the island and the Russian airforce had laid an ambush for the attack forces. The Russian Defense Ministry briefings mentioned Ukrainian losses around Snake (Zmeinyi) Island and related operations several times.
07.05.2022 (20:15):
The following have been shot down in the air near Zmeinyi Island: 1 Ukrainian Su-24 bomber, 1 Su-27 fighter jet, 3 Mi-8 helicopters with paratroopers and 2 Bayraktar-TB2 UAV. The Ukrainian amphibious assault boat Stanislav has also been destroyed.
08.05.2022 (10:45):
A Ukrainian naval corvette of project 1241 has also been destroyed near Odessa.
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During the night, Russian air defence means destroyed 2 more Ukrainian Su-24 bombers and 1 Mi-24 helicopter of the Ukrainian Air Force over Snake Island, and also shot down 1 Bayraktar-TB2 unmanned aerial vehicle near Odessa.
A total of 4 Ukrainian aircraft, 4 helicopters, including 3 with paratroopers on board, 3 Bayraktar-TB2 UAV and 1 Ukrainian Navy amphibious assault boat have been destroyed in the area during the day.
08.05.2022 (19:30)
Russian air defence means have shot down 1 Bayraktar-TB2 unmanned aerial vehicles near Zmeinyi Island.
09.05.2022 (12:45)
Oniks high-precision missiles launched by Bastion coastal missile system near Artsiz, Odessa region, have destroyed Ukrainian helicopters at a bounce platform.
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Three Ukrainian unmanned aerial vehicles, including two Bayraktar-TB2, have been hit over Snake Island.
(Bounce platform is a mistranslation for a helicopter supply pad that is not a full airport.
The operation was quite costly for the Ukrainian side. Besides the 60+ paratroopers who were killed during the assault one of the helicopter also had the deputy commander of the Ukrainian navy on board. Today it was announced that Col. Ihor Bedzai was killed in action when his helicopter came under Russian airforce fire.
More than 4 helicopters, 4 jets and 6 Bayraktar drones were lost for zero gain. The U.S. is in the process of giving the Ukraine a total of 16 Mi-17 transport helicopters that were originally supposed to go to Afghanistan. At the current Ukrainian rate of losses such supplies, just like others, will not last for long.
Under the current circumstances Snake Island is of little military value. It seems that the sole point of the Ukrainian operation to retake it was to create a propaganda item for today's Victory Parade. It now is one but for the Russian side.
Update 17:15 UTC:
The last briefing (09.05.2022 (19:15) by the Russian Defense Ministry (published after the above post) again mentions Snake Island:
According to the updated information, 6 Mi-8 and Mi-24 helicopters have been destroyed during the night near Artsiz in Odessa Region near the Chervonoglinskoe military airfield by Onyks high-precision missiles from the Bastion coastal missile system.
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On 7 May, on direct orders from Zelensky, the Ukrainian General Staff, with the direct involvement of advisers from the USA and Britain, planned a major provocation to seize Zmeiny Island.
Over the past two days, the Kiev regime has made several desperate attempts to land air and sea assaults on Zmeiny Island, which is important for controlling the northwestern part of the Black Sea.
The Ukrainian provocation was thwarted as a result of the competent actions of a Russian Armed Forces unit on the island. The enemy suffered heavy losses.
4 Ukrainian airplanes, including 3 Su-24 and 1 Su-27, 3 Mi-8 helicopters with paratroopers on board, and 1 Mi-24 helicopter have been shot down in the air while repelling the attacks near Zmeiny Island.
Within two days, 29 Ukrainian UAVs have been shot down in the air, including 8 Bayraktar TB-2 strike UAVs. Meanwhile, 4 Bayraktar drones have been shot down this afternoon.
Also, 3 armoured Ukrainian amphibious assault boats carrying Ukrainian naval personnel were destroyed during an attempted landing on the night of May 8.
As a result of Zelensky's thoughtless provocation, more than 50 Ukrainian saboteurs have been killed at sea and on the coast during the landing and attempts to consolidate on the island.
24 bodies of dead Ukrainian servicemen were left on the shore of Zmeiny Island.
Whipping old men. How veterans of the Great Patriotic War were bullied in the Ukraine for years (RIA Novosti, May 8, 2022 — in Russian)
First they threw him on the asphalt, then kicked him, broke his ribs. It happened back during the Maidan, in 2014. Pravyy Sektor militants beat 84-year-old veteran Pyotr Filonenko for calling for peace. Later he left for Russia. Other veterans who remember and went through the War are still forced to suffer bullying.
Grandparents and “non-grandchildren”
The struggle against historical memory and the glorification of Nazi idols bore fruit. It has become simply dangerous to publicly honor the heroes of the Great Patriotic War in the Ukraine.
Not a single celebration of the Victory Day in the Ukraine after the Euromaidan has occured without conflicts, clashes between the celebrants and the radicals. And—the most impossible thing to comprehend—without attacks on the elderly and war veterans.
Photo 1 — March of members of Ukrainian Nationalist organization C14 protesting against the Immortal Regiment event in Kiev
In fact, the bullying of war veterans in the Ukraine has started long before the Maidan. Their victory began to be questioned much earlier, and later open devaluation, denial and even condemnation of veterans for their fight against fascism became possible. To the point of retribution. Here are just a few typical incidents that occurred in different years in different cities of the Ukraine.
May 9, 2011. Lvov. Several dozen nationalists drove up to the Hill of Glory. They tried to disrupt the celebration by clashing with police officers, throwing plastic bottles at the police and attacking Great Patriotic War veterans, rocking and trying to overturn buses with veterans. Neo-Nazis spit in the faces of veterans, throwing stones, bottles and smoke grenades at them and the police, and defiantly burned copies of the Victory Banner.¹
And here’s a fragment of the interrogation of the Ukrainian Nazi Aleksandr Pugach, a member of the Azov group who was captured during the Special Military Operation in the Ukraine in 2022:
“In 2016, on the Victory Day, we were in Melitopol. We tore ribbons off veterans in the park. We walked around and looked at who had it and who didn’t… There were six of us. We tore ribbons off veterans, forced them to shout ‘Glory to the Ukraine!’ ”
Photo 2 — Neo-Nazi Aleksandr Pugach, member of the Azov group. A screenshot from a video posted on the Telegram channel Операция Z: Военкоры Русской Весны [Operation Z: War correspondents of the Russian Spring]
May 9, 2016. Dnepropetrovsk. The nationalists lined up in a human chain and did not allow people to go to the place of celebrations, and then attacked veterans and pensioners and began to beat them.
2017. Odessa. That year, the Ukraine has officially stopped celebrating the Defender of the Fatherland Day, but the veterans have organized the laying of flowers at the monument to the Unknown Sailor. The radicals tried to disrupt the ceremony. When the veterans arrived at the monument, the police received information that the territory was mined. Law enforcement officers arrived at the scene. They were followed by Pravyy Sektor fighters who began to threaten the old people and beat them. After some time, people in small groups were nevertheless allowed to pass to the memorial.
Photo 3 — Participant of Immortal Regiment event in Kiev
May 9, 2018. Kiev. In the center of the capital, where “No one is forgotten, nothing is forgotten” event (analogous to Immortal Regiment events) took place, people appeared with portraits of heroes of the computer game World of Warcraft instead of the heroes of the Great Patriotic War.² Earlier, the nationalists entered the gathering place of the procession participants and staged a brawl, one of the participants had his nose broken.
Photo 4 — Flashmob participants hold portraits of heroes of the computer game World of Warcraft in Kiev, where Immortal Regiment event took place, 2018
No one has ever been punished for these and dozens of other similar crimes against veterans—heroes, fewer of whom remain with every passing year.
War against granite
Official Kiev does not prevent Nazi criminals from being elevated to the rank of true national heroes. Not just replacing the feat of their compatriots who fought world fascism during the Second World War with the glorification of the Nazis, but destroying symbols and any traces of memory. The war against the heroic common past is not just a mockery of veterans and their descendants on May 9. It is also a well thought-out and regular war against monuments.
The victims of this war are the monuments to the soldiers-liberators, the streets named after them. Monuments are destroyed, desecrated, dismantled. The streets are being renamed. The official authorities do not call the destroyers vandals and do not punish them, often indirectly and directly encouraging them.
So it was in February 2018, when neo-Nazis from Pravyy Sektor and other far-right radical organizations smashed the slabs and the inscription “To the Victors over Nazism” on the Monument of Glory in Stryyskiy Park in Lvov.
They painted over a new inscription: “a monument to the occupier”. Over the next few years, it was destroyed piece by piece with the support of local officials, who made a decision to destroy the “occupation monument”. And eventually destroyed it.
Photo 5 — A nationalist paints an inscription “a monument to the occupier” on the Monument of Glory in Lvov
At one point in time in Kiev, they were seriously discussing dismantling the world-famous Motherland Monument. The ideologist of decommunization and the head of the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance Volodymyr Vyatrovich said in 2018 that they would not dismantle the monument, but the Soviet coat of arms on the shield “should be removed from public space—either by cutting it off or covering it”.
Photo 6 — Illumination of the Motherland Monument in Kiev on the Constitution Day
Just by looking at events of 2018, one can see how massive and insane this war against stone and memory has become. In April, for example, Nationalist radicals desecrated the memorial complex to those who died during the Second World War in Odessa.
In Kiev, neo-Nazis from the C14 organization desecrated a monument over the grave of Soviet General Nikolay Vatutin, who died in 1944 in a battle with the UPA. The fight against the late General Vatutin became a matter of principle for Ukrainian neo-Nazis. The avenue named after him in Kiev was defiantly renamed Shukhevych Avenue.
Photo 7 — Monument to General Nikolay Vatutin in Kiev, covered in red paint by members of Nationalist organization C14
In Poltava, on April 22, vandals desecrated the monument to the victims of Nazism and the monument to the Grieving Mother, painted Nazi greetings and anti-Semitic slogans on monuments.
In May, a memorial plaque to Marshal Georgiy Zhukov was smashed in Kharkov. In Dnepropetrovsk, a monument to Soviet soldiers was painted over and damaged.
In Lvov in June, Ukrainian Nationalists desecrated the grave of the Hero of the USSR, the legendary intelligence officer Nikolay Kuznetsov. Responsibility for the raid was claimed by the Nationalist organization C14.
Photo 8 — Flowers on the grave of Soviet intelligence officer Nikolay Kuznetsov on the Hill of Glory in Lvov
This list goes on and on.
Official “oblivion”
This “oblivion” or “memory reset” did not start today. Back in 2006, the head of the Ukraine Viktor Yushchenko, while congratulating veterans on the Victory Day in Kiev, has called for reconciliation between those who fought in the Red Army during the war years and the fighters of the so-called Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), Nazi collaborators known for their atrocities during the GPW, including the massacres of Russians, Jews and Poles.
Photo 9 — In the photo: Massacre of a Polish family: a young mother and her three one-year-old children, 1944. Traitors from the OUN-UPA massacred the ethnic Polish civilian population and civilians of other nationalities living in the territory of Volhynia. This tragedy went down in history as the Volhynia Massacre.
Yushchenko has said then, and repeated this idea many times later, that “the time has come to get rid of totalitarian paraphernalia and artificial pathos when approaching historical issues, which are uncommon for the Ukrainian people”.
That is, even then, the Ukrainian authorities called the symbols of the Victory of the Soviet people over Nazism “totalitarian paraphernalia”, and honoring the memory of war heroes “artificial pathos”.
By the way, it was under Viktor Yushchenko, at the end of his presidency, that the Nazi criminal Stepan Bandera was officially named the Hero of the Ukraine.
Photo 10 — A guard of honor at the monument to Stepan Bandera in the center of Lvov during a celebration of the Heroes’ Day by UPA veterans
And while the St. George ribbon, the red star and the Victory Banner are considered forbidden, “totalitarian” symbols by the authorities of today’s Ukraine, the swastika—on military chevrons (and on the servicemen themselves in the form of tattoos), on TV screens, in books, on art objects—is something mundane.
Photo 11 — Ukrainian Scouts with portraits of UPA veterans during a march on the Heroes’ Day in Lvov.
In 2016, they did not hesitate to tie the swastika even to the celebration of the Resurrection of Christ. Artist Natalya Voytenko showed the world an “Aryan” Easter egg in the very center of Kiev on Sophia Square. “Aryan Paska. Pysanka ‘Svastya’ ”—that’s the title of her work.
After Euromaidan
After the Euromaidan happened in the Ukraine in 2014, the country began to slide irreversibly and uncontrollably into national oblivion.
Photo 12 — A veteran of the Great Patriotic War in the Leninskiy Komsomol Park during the Victory Day celebrations on May 9 in Donetsk
In 2015, the Ukraine has already officially stopped celebrating May 9, replacing it with an indistinct “European” Remembrance and Reconciliation Day, which they began to celebrate at the state level on May 8.
Since then, May 9—the Victory Day—is for all intents and purposes ignored by the Ukrainian authorities, the main events occuring on May 8.
Also, the law introduced on April 9, 2015 has banned Soviet symbols in the country, and also ordered to replace the term “Great Patriotic War” in official documents with “Second World War”. In addition, it recognized OUN-UPA fighters who fought against the Red Army as fighters for the independence of the Ukraine.
The leaders are changing, but the Ukrainian authorities are consistently moving towards their goal—to break by any means this chain of memory of the Great Patriotic War and the common feat, the common victory over fascism that binds the Ukraine, Russia and other republics of the former Union.
In 2019, the President of the Ukraine Petro Poroshenko spoke unambiguously about this. According to him, the Ukrainians have distanced themselves from the “Kremlin victory frenzy”, which has appropriated the common victory of the anti-Hitler Coalition over Nazism. Poroshenko called the Immortal Regiment procession “a procession of mummers”.³
“The victory over Nazism 74 years ago is not a reason to walk masqueraded ‘Regiments of Immortals’ around the world.”
A year earlier, Petro Poroshenko has called the Immortal Regiment march part of Russia’s “hybrid war” against the Ukraine.
Photo 13 — Participants of the Immortal Regiment event in Kiev, dedicated to the 74th anniversary of the Victory in the Great Patriotic War, 2019
Living heroes
And yet the Ukrainians are celebrating our common Victory Day. Despite all the obstacles, threats from the radicals, the frankly Nazi policy that the Kiev authorities are adhering to, the punitive laws, people still remember and value it. Veterans of that truly Great and liberating war hope to live to see the day when it will be possible in the Ukraine to go out into the streets with medals and a St. George ribbon on the lapel of an old jacket and not be spat upon and beaten.
Footnotes:
¹ See Victory Banner (Wikipedia).
² In Russian, the Great Patriotic War is Великая Отечественная Война, ВОВ (VOV) for short, while World of Warcraft is commonly abbreviated WoW, transliterated also as ВОВ (VOV) in Russian. Hence, the phrase герои ВОВ (heroes of the GPW) could be taken to mean heroes of WoW.
³ A modernized translation of the term used by Poroshenko would be “cosplayers”. His accusation is, of course, nonsensical, as the participants of Immortal Regiment processions are simply carrying the portraits of their fathers and grandfathers who fought in the Great Patriotic War—they are not role-playing as Red Army soldiers.
Posted by: S | May 9 2022 21:17 utc | 103
I’m certain plenty of barflies dismiss Russia’s as well as my analysis that its battle with NATO over its security is existential. On our side of the argument, I can now add Alastair Crooke, for he sees it too as he explains in “Enemies Within and the Discomfort of Truth”. He begins by recalling a discomforting truth:
In one of his articles published in July 2014, Khashoggi had an experience which shocked him to the core: “At the beginning of Ramadan, I took my family to a Turkish coffee shop in Jeddah following evening prayers. It was a usual Ramadan evening. We exchanged conversation, consumed a lot of calories and Turkish tea”.
The next day, he wrote that he received the following tweet: “I saw you yesterday in (…) the restaurant. “State supporters are everywhere: Be careful!” [State supporters here, refers to the Islamic State (ISIS), not to the Saudi state]. Khashoggi deliberated: “Was this then, a threat, or advice? Or does the person want to tell me: ‘We’re here?’” I checked out the [Twitter] account and realized he’s … no joker – but a committed [ISIS] working member”.
“I tried to remember”, he wrote, “whether I saw him at the coffee shop … to the left of our table was the families’ section, and I don’t recall anyone who had ISIS characteristics. To the right side, there was the section of single men. There were ordinary youths enthusiastically talking about the World Cup. Of course, there wasn’t a masked man wearing black. What’s certain is that [he] was there. He was one of us”.
This was Khashoggi’s point: “He was one of us”. [Emphasis Original]
Many have discussed what is clearly the escalating Fascism of the EU, which is currently engaged in trying to dismiss its need for consensus so it can further damage its own members. Over the years, much of the Darkness of the past has had its dust swept under the carpet, but it still remains awaiting a rip in the fabric to loose it again. Crooke provides a few examples then returns to the Saudis:
Should we perhaps conclude that Europe’s ‘totalitarianism’ of today is of a more refined type – not so-violent, and therefore deserving of a ‘pass’?
Be that as it may, this has implications. Which brings us back to Jeddah. In a New York Times article in 2015, the Algerian novelist, Kamel Daoud, penned a provocative sub-title: Black ISIS: White ISIS.
“The former slits throats, kills, stones, cuts off hands, destroys humanity’s common heritage and despises archaeology, women and non-Muslims. The latter is better dressed, and neater. But does the same things. In its struggle against terrorism, the West wages war on one, but shakes its hands with the other”.
Shaking their ‘clear conscience’ hands with White ISIS or White fascism doesn’t matter. It can all be ‘normalised’ through casting war as a Manichaean struggle of ‘good liberalism’ against evil. [Emphasis Original]
And what do we see when we read the Establishment Narrative–NATO good; Ukraine good; Taiwan good; Russia evil; China evil. Crooke then poses an excellent question that informs far more than its surface meaning:
“Why are eastern Ukrainians waving the Red Flag rather than Russian flags as Russian troops pass-by? It is not because they support communism, nor because they want the Soviet Empire back. They fly it as the flag under which their fathers and grand-fathers fought to defeat Nazi Germany.
“They now perceive things in the same vein as Daoud. The neatly-dressed EU men and women in power-suits are shaking hands with ‘White Azov’, waging the continuation of a war that stretches back to Napoleon’s invasion of Russia. If this is so, look for no compromise. Russians well understand. For them it is existential. [My Emphasis]
There was a dispute upthread between a le Pen and a Macron supporter that Crooke details the essence of because he’s already experienced it without being privy to it here. Europe’s at a very dangerous stage with only a few national leaders understanding what’s occurring, something Putin noted several years ago, and that Lavrov fought accepting until last year’s epiphany. Yet it was written about in the Global Times editorial I posted to the previous thread–All help from the Outlaw US Empire is in reality a poisoned chalice, for it never promotes any interest except its own, thus the reality it has no friends, only interests to exploit then toss aside.
Posted by: karlof1 | May 9 2022 21:39 utc | 113
Posted by: Tom Pfotzer | May 9 2022 19:36 utc | 78
Tom, nothing wrong with any of those ideas, but whether they will be sufficient or fast enough.
Retire ICE, replace with electric motors (simpler, much more energy efficient). Eliminate office- and retail-commute in metro areas (telework’s efficacy / desirability demonstrated during Covid). Insulate homes, upgrade HVAC equipment to latest performance level.
Yes obviously ICE will disappear, but it will be slow. Biggest issue might be replacing heavy vehicles and farm machinery. The culture of the autobahn will need to chance and electric vehicles will not get to the current speeds. Achievable over the next 10 years in the rich nations, but much harder in Greece and the eastern nations. Yes the office/retail commute will drop, long term by perhaps 60-80% but the need for social interaction is strong and will probably be replaced by more social trips. Also the use of on-line retail means a LOT more vehicle deliveries.
I would have thought that in Germany at least home insulation and use of most efficient HVACs was already standard. Given the high cost of replacement to individual families, this will take 15-20 years, unless there were a massive government subsidy program. Most poorer families will not have a spare $5000 to replace their HVAC. Nor will apartment building owners- especially where the poor are housed. Yes it can and will reduce electricity consumption by 20-30% but that last 70% will be very hard to reduce. People still need to cook, to warm their houses and to have hot water.
2. Materials. Most materials use is once-and-done. Notable exceptions are aluminum, steel, lead (easy to recover). Right now, we dig up, refine, transport, manufacture, transport-again, retail, transport-again, use at home/business, transport-again, dispose at landfill or sewer-to-estuary. Once and done.
2.1: Potential (likely) solutions: design products for re-use / reclamation. Design products to last. Re-design supply-chains for re-use, not single use. Put mfg’g (or at least matls warehouse) right next to reclamation center. Eliminate landfill, repurpose facility as reclamation / mfg’g center). Distribute manufacturing to be close to end-use-point to facilitate mat’l re-use. Economics of mfg’g has changed substantially last 40 yrs. Given advances in CAD/CAM, 3D-printing, etc. it is possible to do this and retain much mfg’g efficiency, and gain comparable-or-better full-supply-chain energy-use and mat’l sourcing efficiency.
Are you really in Germany? Surely Germany is a world leader in recycling. Rather than costly recycling and recovery schemes, simply ban many disposable products and return to reusable products. Take your honey jar back to the store to refill. Of course cannot work well with on-line retail. The total energy efficiency of 3D printing in a wide diversity of settings, versus centralised manufacturing would need to be assessed carefully, but I suspect that the resource efficiency may in fact not come out in favour of 3D printing because the raw materials still need to be delivered and the electricity generated.
T 3. Energy sourcing. Holding aside the nuclear-gen possibility – and nuke’s got a lot of merits – another alternative is solar and wind. “But it’s intermittent!”. Yes. So convert intermittent energy inputs into a fuel, store the fuel, and use the fuel to generate energy when sun/wind isn’t providing. What fuel? Methane or ammonia. Germans are great, great chem and industrial plant engineers. Use the talent. Methane (CH4)is natural gas; pipelines already in place. Ammonia (NH3) is harder to handle, but atmosphere is 80% nitrogen, plenty feedstock. Ammonia and methane fuel cells extant now, can be used to convert fuel to electricity on-demand.
The problem with solar and wind electricity generation, is that they rely on rare earths for the conversion process. Now they are all good but will still rely on imports for Australia, Africa, South America China or Russia (North America will probably use all theirs themselves). Now the shipping cost of these materials requires quite a bit of diesel. It would probably not make sense to convert solar and wind to gases, given the improved efficiency of batteries but again the rare earth problem arises.
Surely the very success of German industry is the availability of natural gas, via pipeline from Russia. This will probably not be available much longer. Germany is delusional if it thinks it will get natural gas at anything like the current prices, so industrial output will no longer be competitive. Unless things change, German industry will go the way of UK industry ie become obsolete. Ditto Polish industry.
Posted by: watcher | May 9 2022 22:59 utc | 158
@108 RSH:
“Whether their political problems and submission to the US will interfere with that and for how long is the question. ”
Yes. That is the big question. What’s interesting to me is how fast perspectives can change, when the enabling technologies make the scene, or the pain-front (think derecho storm-front) obtrudes itself. So far, households are experiencing talk-your-way-out-of-it pain. That isn’t going to last.
@127 Robin:
“This explains, from a US perspective, the strong impetus to act quickly to hinder the expected eastward drift of Europe.”
Yes. It certainly explains a lot of their desperation. Their investments in existing infrastructure and their inability to actually create anything explains their reluctance to change.
@135 G:
“Your proposition is utopian fantasy. Where is your “concrete-work”, ie costs and time-scales?”.
Which one of these propositions is a fantasy:
switch from ICE to electric.
office-workers telework.
insulate houses better.
update HVAC to latest tech
convert solar/wind to fuel (methane or ammonia)
Only one that hasn’t made a major increase in enabling tech and widespread adoption is the last one: convert renewables to fuel. There are several projects in place now, major investment in Hydrogen economy in N. Europe (the hydrogen would be the major input to creating the fuel I propose). Recall that it was German engineering (Fisher Tropsch) that did the pioneering work to synthesize ammonia from nat gas (using the Hydrogen) in 1925. Been around a while. Germany did it once, can certainly do it again.
Please explain further which one of those is utopian fantasy.
@156 Watcher
All your objections are valid at the moment. Recall, tho, that:
a. A few decades (of change-over effort) is not that much time. Think how long it took telephone infrastructure to switch from landlines to cellular (radio). A few decades. Consider the installed phys plant, and how motivated the phone companies were to _not_ change, to not write off all the physical plant. But they did. It was cheaper, long-term, to run radio nets .vs. land-lines.
b. Heavy machines. Note that railroad locomotives, even diesel ones, have _electric_ traction motors. Think how heavy a 150-car (each car weighs 100 tons) train is. Electric motors deliver an enormous amount of torque. More than ICEs per unit-weight. And electric motor drives are substantially simpler and easier to mfg. That’s the main reason auto mfg’rs are compelled to change.
c. Recycling. No, I am not in Germany, and (btw) I am hoping that German nationals will continue to pipe up and set me straight about how Germany really works .vs. my across-the-atlantic not-well-informed perspective. I agree with the rest of your assertions about mat’ls re-use. There is enormous economic potential. The “cost” is to write off the old stuff, invest in the new. That’s very expensive, and it takes decades to do, as many other have and will point out. I rebut: it may be expensive, but industrial obsolescence and crashing the planet are way, way _more_ expensive. Industrialists get this, and that’s why they are shutting down ICE production lines and moving to electric propulsion products. These folks know how to run a spreadsheet.
d. Rare earths. I (currently) buy that argument w/r/t solar panels, but not wind turbines. Magnets – OK, maybe you need rare materials for high-power magnets, but you can gen the magnetic field for the alternator w/o magnets. It’s done all the time. So, do the engineering, and make an efficient alternator (generator) that uses a field provided by electrical input, not magnets. (your car has one!)
And as for solar panels, remember that solar, like the rest of the alt energy field, is a rapidly moving target. There’s a lot, and I mean a _lot_ of money being spent to design solar panels that are fully recyclable, and that don’t use that much rare earth inputs. And even if it doesn’t happen, and the West has to buy either the materials or the panels from China or other supplier, so what? That’s what trade is for. The West’s challenge is to create products other nations want, and will trade for.
e. “Unless things change, German industry will go the way of UK industry ie become obsolete”. Yes, that’s what will happen if N. Europe doesn’t adapt. However, this story is being written in 2022, not 1980. A lot of learning (observing what happened to U.K., for ex, and U.S. for another) has happened. I can’t believe management of VW, BASF, Siemens, et. al. have not been paying attention. That’s why they tried so hard to open access to Russia and the eastern markets. They get it. Per RSH’s point above, the only question is how long / far into the economic hari-kari scene they’re willing to drift.
I say “not much farther”. These people have been around the block a few times, they understand how things work. The economic pain hasn’t yet materialized in N. Europe, and when it does, I expect the reality to trump propaganda.
Posted by: Tom Pfotzer | May 9 2022 23:43 utc | 172
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