Angry Empty Words

 

Angry Empty Words

 I just watched Joe Biden’s response to Putin’s attack overnight on Ukraine.

 What a sad, fumbling, doddering old man, reading from the teleprompters and attempting to answer 3 or 4 pre-planned, prepared questions.

 Angry sounding, empty words read from a prompter, and “Sanctions”.  That’s Biden’s answer to Putin’s invasion of a sovereign, democratically elected European country in a manner reminiscent of Hitler’s 1939 attack on Poland.  Visions of Neville Chamberlain, Czechoslovakia, Sudetenland, anyone?

 Threats of additional sanctions on Russia fall on deaf ears.  Russia has already absorbed substantial western sanctions related to Putin’s annexation of Crimea and other Russian infractions of international law.

 It’s also doubtful that Germany will acquiesce to not starting up the Nord Stream 2 pipeline with its promise of cheap Russian gas, or that the international financial community will ban Russian banks from using the SWIFT banking system.  Neither of these were mentioned during Biden’s speech, and he evaded a question about SWIFT, blaming resistance by European financial institutions.

 I personally observed one effect of past sanctions on Russia while I was visiting a Russian family in St Petersburg in 2017 as part of a tour.  One of the things that came up in our conversation is that some members of their family would have liked to visit Germany or England or the U.S., but they were enjoined from doing so by restrictions placed on them by sanctions placed on Russia because of their 2014 absorption of the Crimean Peninsula.  So, the Russian people were already feeling western sanctions in 2017.

 When something major like this attack by a nuclear power on a neighboring country to aggrandize more territory takes place, one has to wonder what’s really happening in the background.

 As I’ve expounded on in the past, Russia is not a great economic power, with a GDP between Mexico and Italy.  Russia has also been adversely affected by low energy prices, the Covid pandemic and past sanctions.

 Could it be that Xi Jinping and China, the world’s second largest economy (first, by some counts), will have a hand in financing Putin’s expansion into Ukraine?  This could dovetail with China’s “Belt and Road Initiative”, and their own long term, world-wide expansion plans.  Putin and Xi did meet at the Olympics in Beijing earlier this month.  I would have liked to have been a fly on the wall at that meeting.

 Ray Gruszecki

February 24, 2022