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Ukraine’s Demographics Dictate To End The Fight
The knives are out in the fight over the Ukrainian throne.
Various Ukrainian media (in Russian) report of plans to fire this or that general. Andrei Yermak, Zelenski's chief of office and the real power behind him, is currently in the U.S., allegedly to get the okay for firing the commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian army General Zaluzny. Other Ukrainian media are calling for Zaluzny to become the new president. Tomorrow CIA director Burns is expected to be in Kiev to tell Zelenski that his time is up and that he, Zelenski, will have to go.
Simplicius writes:
It appears obvious that two competing factions are trying to outdo each other in the sphere of Western media. Zaluzhny fired his shot in the unsanctioned Economist piece, and it would seem that Zelensky backers are doing their own parallel counter-work.
Larry Johnson reminds of the larger powers who are behind this fight:
One critical point I failed to make in yesterday’s article regarding the competing narratives regarding Zelensky and General Zalushny — it looks like the Brits are backing Zalushny while the CIA is trying to save Zelensky and dump Zalushny. I base that conclusion on the fact that the Economist, a British publication with close ties to MI-6, gave Zalushny the celebrity treatment, while the Washington Post, the go-to rag for the CIA, blamed Zalushny for Nord Stream.
Fun to watch, unless you are on the frontline.
There, things are getting worse for the Ukrainian army day by day.
The Ukraine wasted so many troops for impossible endeavors, to hold Bakhmut and in its the senseless 'counter-attack' against impregnable Russian lines, that it now lacks the troops to hold its defense lines.
Six weeks ago the former British defense minister Ben Wallace urged the Ukrainian government to draft more young people to fill the lines:
The average age of the soldiers at the front is over 40. I understand President Zelensky’s desire to preserve the young for the future, but the fact is that Russia is mobilising the whole country by stealth. Putin knows a pause will hand him time to build a new army. So just as Britain did in 1939 and 1941, perhaps it is time to reassess the scale of Ukraine’s mobilisation.
In a recent interview with the Ukrainian Pravda the Economist writer Shashank Joshi took a similar line:
Q: Are there resources to escalate trainings of Ukrainian soldiers abroad?
A: I would say that one of the biggest challenges, really, right now is, first of all, being able to mobilise more young Ukrainians, which, as you know, is a challenge, and a political issue and a social issue.
The ignorance displayed in those British statements becomes evident when one takes a look at the Demographics of Ukraine:
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When the Soviet Union dissolved in the late 1980s the economy of Ukraine went into a tailspin. People were suddenly very poor with no jobs available for them. They thus refrained from having children. Others fled when the war started and some of the young men were killed in the war.
While there are now some three hundred thousand Ukrainian men at the age of 40 there are less than a hundred thousand men at the age of 25.
As there are so few men and women of that reproductive age there are also only few new babies. Becoming independent was a social-demographic catastrophe for Ukraine that will haunt the country for the next hundred years.
The Ukrainian army can not draft younger soldiers because younger people are simply not there. The few thousand who are still hanging out in Kiev are actually university students who's knowledge and service will be needed over the next decades. To draft them would kill all positive perspectives the Ukraine still might have.
After the Ukrainian government, on order of the U.S., failed to make peace with Russia, the Russian president Vladimir Putin ordered his troops to 'de-militarize and de-nazify' the Ukraine. It then was obvious that the attrition of the Ukrainian army, not taking its land, was the main Russian plan.
The Ukrainian political and military command failed to correctly adopt to that. Instead of going into defense mode behind holdable lines it ordered its troops to attack Russian defense lines again and again. In consequence Russian losses were minimal while the Ukrainian losses exceeded all imaginations.
That this would end badly was quite predictable.
It is over. The Ukraine, and the powers behind it, have lost the war.
The Russian forces are now doing probing attacks along the whole frontline. Whenever a local Ukrainian local defense line will fail, which is just a question of time, they will break through and cover new grounds. Those drops leaking through will become a stream, then a river and a flood that will push the Ukrainian army into a full retreat.
The government of Ukraine, and its backers, can still prevent that.
But it requires to acknowledge the facts on the ground.
Calling for more younger Ukrainian people to be drafted to die is the opposite of doing that.
@Peter AU1 #102
How long can the US afford to maintain its military empire?
For the foreseeable future. Especially if parasitizing Europe and Japan.
Weapons? Stem graduates are required for the high tech weapons of today. How much is the US spending on new replacement civil infrastructure?
You don’t need a large absolute number of STEM graduates to make new weapons. You just need the smart ones working in the MIC.
Civil infrastructure – nowhere remotely enough for even maintenance.
Some now think the Xi Biden meeting will be partly to try and sell what is called T bills. China is now offloading treasuries at a fast rate rather than buying.
Only fools for the former statement.
As for the latter: China has more Treasuries today than they did in 2009 – so the amount held is down but is hardly small nor tremendously divergent than the long term average.
The petro dollar credit card is drying up.
The petrodollar standard was never a credit card – it is just the largest part of the reason why there are trillions of US dollars outside the US – above and beyond the central bank holdings in Treasuries. This extra float held by non-Americans is what allows the US to print more money without inflation than otherwise. And yes, while it is decreasing, it is not decreasing more than say, 10% a year meaning it will be decades before the float shrinks enough to cramp the extra spending. The problems the US is seeing now is because it is spending even above the huge cushion provided by the float, not because the float is significantly shrinking (yet).
If we look at education and economics the only way out is for the US to greatly downgrade its empire. Rather than downgrading, US deep state is intent on maintaining it.
Since when is decadence and arrogance unusual in a failing empire?
Interest on debt now near the same as military spending. That will increase sharply with increased debt and increased interest rates.
Increased interest is because of increased inflation. Increased inflation also reduces the repayment burden of existing debt. This is a dynamic process with damping mechanisms, not tipping points. Tipping points only occur with debt if the debt is foreign currency denominated.
Increased interest rates are required to sell the new debt.
Yes but this also means more income for someone including retirees and Social Security and so forth.
US banks now holding worthless bonds as equity. Perhaps the US can fiddle the books and stay afloat for some time, perhaps not.
Completely wrong. The bonds, if held to maturity, will have zero losses and pay exactly as they are supposed to. The problems only arise if the bonds are forced to be sold before maturity – but even then the losses are in the 20% to 30% range. They are hardly “worthless”. Furthermore the US Treasury has put funding mechanisms in place so that such bonds can be traded in for full face value, so SVB/First Republic type situations will not be happening.
Putin said something interest sometime in 2022. Inflation in the world is mainly due to US money printing during covid. The US printed another 30 or 40% of dollars in circulation. In the past, because US dollars were used around the world for trade, US was able to export its inflation. That is all coming to an end.
You’ll have to point the specific reference to me, but the US was absolutely NOT the only entity printing during COVID. The EU, China, everybody did. The US may well have printed more than the others, and the US printing was larger in an absolute sense because the US economy is larger in an absolute sense than other economies, but it is utterly false that the existing inflation is solely or even primarily due to the US printing.
The worldwide printing is a factor but a larger factor is systemic underinvestment all forms of productions for well over a decade. Anything on the entire periodic table – if it is mined, investment is needed to bring new mines and production online as existing production declines. This wasn’t done.
For example: I attended the North Dakota Petroleum Council annual meeting in September. The director for North Dakota’s Department of Mineral Resources presented production data for the ND Bakken shale for 2023. The number of rigs operating in July and August 2023 was 37 each vs. a peak of 218. The number of rigs operating in July and August 2022 was 45 and 46 and 2021 numbers were 21 and 23. So looking at 2022 and 2023, drilling activity is down 79% to 83% vs peak which was in May 2017.
A secondary factor was the massive disruptions induced by COVID lockdowns and production stoppages.
But on the flip side: the US is basically self sufficient in food and energy unlike Europe and Japan. The problems in US society due to underinvestment and deindustrialization and deprioritization of Americans vs. other people are fixable, but not so long as the US keeps throwing blood and treasure on stupid foreign adventures.
Posted by: c1ue | Nov 14 2023 20:34 utc | 225
@Peter AU1 #102
How long can the US afford to maintain its military empire?
For the foreseeable future. Especially if parasitizing Europe and Japan.
Weapons? Stem graduates are required for the high tech weapons of today. How much is the US spending on new replacement civil infrastructure?
You don’t need a large absolute number of STEM graduates to make new weapons. You just need the smart ones working in the MIC.
Civil infrastructure – nowhere remotely enough for even maintenance.
Some now think the Xi Biden meeting will be partly to try and sell what is called T bills. China is now offloading treasuries at a fast rate rather than buying.
Only fools for the former statement.
As for the latter: China has more Treasuries today than they did in 2009 – so the amount held is down but is hardly small nor tremendously divergent than the long term average.
The petro dollar credit card is drying up.
The petrodollar standard was never a credit card – it is just the largest part of the reason why there are trillions of US dollars outside the US – above and beyond the central bank holdings in Treasuries. This extra float held by non-Americans is what allows the US to print more money without inflation than otherwise. And yes, while it is decreasing, it is not decreasing more than say, 10% a year meaning it will be decades before the float shrinks enough to cramp the extra spending. The problems the US is seeing now is because it is spending even above the huge cushion provided by the float, not because the float is significantly shrinking (yet).
If we look at education and economics the only way out is for the US to greatly downgrade its empire. Rather than downgrading, US deep state is intent on maintaining it.
Since when is decadence and arrogance unusual in a failing empire?
Interest on debt now near the same as military spending. That will increase sharply with increased debt and increased interest rates.
Increased interest is because of increased inflation. Increased inflation also reduces the repayment burden of existing debt. This is a dynamic process with damping mechanisms, not tipping points. Tipping points only occur with debt if the debt is foreign currency denominated.
Increased interest rates are required to sell the new debt.
Yes but this also means more income for someone including retirees and Social Security and so forth.
US banks now holding worthless bonds as equity. Perhaps the US can fiddle the books and stay afloat for some time, perhaps not.
Completely wrong. The bonds, if held to maturity, will have zero losses and pay exactly as they are supposed to. The problems only arise if the bonds are forced to be sold before maturity – but even then the losses are in the 20% to 30% range. They are hardly “worthless”. Furthermore the US Treasury has put funding mechanisms in place so that such bonds can be traded in for full face value, so SVB/First Republic type situations will not be happening.
Putin said something interest sometime in 2022. Inflation in the world is mainly due to US money printing during covid. The US printed another 30 or 40% of dollars in circulation. In the past, because US dollars were used around the world for trade, US was able to export its inflation. That is all coming to an end.
You’ll have to point the specific reference to me, but the US was absolutely NOT the only entity printing during COVID. The EU, China, everybody did. The US may well have printed more than the others, and the US printing was larger in an absolute sense because the US economy is larger in an absolute sense than other economies, but it is utterly false that the existing inflation is solely or even primarily due to the US printing.
The worldwide printing is a factor but a larger factor is systemic underinvestment all forms of productions for well over a decade. Anything on the entire periodic table – if it is mined, investment is needed to bring new mines and production online as existing production declines. This wasn’t done.
For example: I attended the North Dakota Petroleum Council annual meeting in September. The director for North Dakota’s Department of Mineral Resources presented production data for the ND Bakken shale for 2023. The number of rigs operating in July and August 2023 was 37 each vs. a peak of 218. The number of rigs operating in July and August 2022 was 45 and 46 and 2021 numbers were 21 and 23. So looking at 2022 and 2023, drilling activity is down 79% to 83% vs peak which was in May 2017.
A secondary factor was the massive disruptions induced by COVID lockdowns and production stoppages.
But on the flip side: the US is basically self sufficient in food and energy unlike Europe and Japan. The problems in US society due to underinvestment and deindustrialization and deprioritization of Americans vs. other people are fixable, but not so long as the US keeps throwing blood and treasure on stupid foreign adventures.
Posted by: c1ue | Nov 14 2023 20:34 utc | 226
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