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Ukraine – Cost Of 6,000 Dead Soldiers, Thousands ‘Abducted’ Children Have Vanished
Busy, so just a few items on Ukraine.
- Colonel Markus Reisner of the Austrian Army just published a new overview (vid) on the state of the war in Ukraine.
- During the negotiations in Istanbul Russia offered to 'unilaterally' deliver to Ukraine the 6,000 bodies of service members of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
Today the Russian delegation leader in Istanbul, Vladimir Medinsky, reported to President Putin:
We proposed, unilaterally, to transfer to Kiev over 6,000 bodies of Ukrainian troops. They will be transferred using refrigerator cars where they are currently kept. We are ready to begin shortly. We understand Ukraine may have bodies of our troops as well although in much smaller numbers. But we are ready to take them over, if any.
The bodies were mostly recovered by the Russians after the hasty retreat of the Ukrainian army from its incursion into Russia's Kursk oblast.
This offer is a significant problem (in Russian) for the Ukrainian government. Family members of the deceased soldiers are of course pressing to receive and to bury those bodies. But acknowledging that those dead are indeed Ukrainian soldiers would be quite costly.
The dead are currently only listed as 'missed'. If they are declared dead their families will be entitled to receive 15 million hryvnias (UAH) (US$ 1 = UAH 41,50) each (3 million at once and the rest over three years and three months).
The return of six thousand bodies of military personnel killed in battle will cost 90 billion hryvnias (~US$ 2.2 billion) of payments from the Ukrainian budget. This is almost 10% of the military budget of Ukraine for the whole of the year.
The Ukrainian government will have to take the bodies. But it is likely to declare most of them 'unidentified' to then slow walk the process of identifying and naming them.
(The high cost for the budget also explains why the official Ukrainian death count is always kept low.)
- Mediniski made another point which is also of interest:
Finally, the Ukrainian side handed over to us the list of 339 children allegedly kidnapped from the territory of Ukraine. Here is the list. We are working on it, through the office of the Commissioner for Children’s Rights. We will investigate every name.
But I must note that, for propaganda purposes, they earlier claimed that tens and hundreds of thousands of children had been brought over here. In fact, the actual number is 339 and we still need to check how many are in Russia, evacuated by our soldiers from under fire, and how many will eventually turn up in Europe, as experience shows.
The 'experience' Medinsky mentions refers to this item from last year's April:
Ukrainian children deported by Russia have been found in Germany: details have emerged
Ukrainian law enforcement officers, with the assistance of their German colleagues, have established the whereabouts of 161 Ukrainian children abducted by Russia in Germany. They were wanted as forcibly transferred to the temporarily occupied territories or deported to Russia and Belarus.
Those Ukrainian children, abducted by the bad, bad Putin, had fled with their parents to Germany …
Italy doesn’t possess enough Euros to pay its citizens to provide all the goods and services needed to maintain and run the public sector of its social economy. And Italy can’t “create” the additional Euros it needs because that prerogative is the exclusive right of the EU Central Bank which Italy, even as a sovereign member of the EU, has no control over.
Italy still needs to have the grass mowed and the weeds pulled in its public gardens. So it decided out of desperation, to pay the gardeners with tax-credits. The gardeners are willing to do the work in exchange for the government’s tax-credits, because it means the Euros they earn (in other ways) can then be used to purchase goods and services rather than for paying their taxes.
The tax-credit payments described take the form of notations on the gardeners’ tax account. An hour’s worth of weeding is noted as 15 Euros worth of extinguished taxes.
If the gardener has a tax liability of, say, €3750, his taxes would be completely paid after providing 250 hours of weeding and pruning. After that, obviously, he’d have no more incentive to provide any services in exchange for the tax-credits. So the amount of services Italy can obtain in this fashion is directly limited by the amount of tax liabilities it can impose on its citizens.
It would be possible, however, to structure the tax-credit payments in another way which would have a very different outcome. Instead of making the payment as a credit notation on a citizen’s tax account, the Italian government could issue paper tax-credits and pay them to the citizens for their gardening services. To be specific, this would be a piece of “official” paper, signed with an important signature, on which was printed something like the following:
The Sovereign Italian Government promises the bearer of this paper ONE EURO of credit on taxes owed to the Sovereign Italian Government.
This amounts to exactly the same thing as making a direct credit on a citizens’ tax account, but we now have set in motion a curious set of subsequent economic actions:
Now, after an hour of weeding, upon receiving hid 15 paper tax-credits―for convenience, let’s call them “PTCs” and give them the symbol β―the gardener can choose to do the following.
He can put the PTCs under her mattress for safekeeping until the day his taxes must be paid. Or he can use the β15 to purchase a lasagna dinner at her neighborhood trattoria. The owner of the trattoria is willing to accept the PTCs in exchange for the lasagna, garlic bread, and wine because he, too, has to pay taxes to the Italian government. So, for all practical purposes, receiving the PTCs is just the same as receiving Euros for him as well.
Now we have to ask an important question: Is the amount of services Italy can obtain by issuing and “spending” its paper tax-credits still directly limited by the amount of tax liabilities it can impose on its citizens? In other words, if every Italian citizen theoretically has received enough PTCs to pay their taxes with—either having received them directly from the government for providing public services, or having received them from other citizens in exchange for lasagna dinners—will the citizens’ willingness to exchange real goods and services in exchange for the PTCs come to a halt?
Crucially, the answer is No. This is because the act of “embodying” the tax-credits in exchangeable pieces of paper has given the PTCs a usefulness in addition to their usefulness as tax payments: This additional usefulness, of course, is the ability to use them to buy goods and services from other Italian citizens and businesses. Thus, the number of paper tax-credits in “circulation” could vastly exceed, at any given time, the total actual tax liabilities of the Italian citizenry. The PTCs would continue to be accepted for lasagna dinners, because the Trattoria owners know they can use the PTCs they receive to subsequently buy Italian shoes and motorcycles— in addition to using them to pay their taxes.
Exactly the same way as if George Bailey had issued ” Bailey Bills” to save the Building and Loans he ran.
Here:
https://new-wayland.com/blog/its-a-wonderful-life/
It will no doubt have dawned on every reader with an IQ in single figures that what the Italians were trying to create is “money.” Specifically, what is called “fiat money” after having it taken from them.
Which IS nothing more than a “tax credit”.
In the same way Scotland doesn’t possess enough pounds to pay its citizens to provide all the goods and services needed to maintain and run the public sector of its social economy. And Scotland can’t “create” or “issue” the additional pounds it needs because that prerogative is the exclusive right of the British government which Scotland, even as a sovereign member of the UK, has no control over. Infact, the UK government has been starving Scotland of pounds as a political tool to destroy the SNP.
Starve the ( insert any public service here ) to say it doesn’t work then hand it over to rent seekers from which to extract economic rent.
They have been doing that trick to Scotland ever since an independence movement was born. After enslaving Scotland with the pound.
Posted by: Sun Of Alabama | Jun 5 2025 8:15 utc | 171
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