Oil climbs back over $60. Ruble stable at 50 to 1?

[KevinNYC]

More trouble for Russia.
[QUOTE]Russia

[KevinNYC]

So if Putin starts having problems at home, what actions will he take?

The Ukraine War just got real hot.
The Donetsk airport was the scene of heavy fighting last week.


Civilians were shelled in the port city of Maripol. Check out the dashcam footage at the Wasington Post.

In Ukraine, pro-Russia rebels launch new offensive in port city of Mariupol

The key port city of Mariupol became the latest flash point of rapidly intensifying hostilities in eastern Ukraine on Saturday, as a barrage of rocket fire struck the area, killing dozens of civilians, and pro-Russian rebels announced a push toward the strategic coastal city that serves as Ukraine's last bastion of control in the region.

The onslaught on Mariupol, which separates Russia from its newly annexed territory of Crimea, comes just a day after pro-Russian rebels in Donetsk rejected an existing cease-fire agreement and pledged to press their offensive all the way to the borders of the region.

Saturday’s shelling sparked a fresh wave of outrage in Kiev and among its allies, who blame the rebels and Russia for the bloody event and warned that if Moscow did not withdraw support for the separatists, the West would step up already punishing pressure against Russia.

But the quick and dramatic escalation of hostilities and the silence from the Kremlin Saturday as at the death toll climbed — at least 30 civilians, according to city officials — suggests that neither sanctions, nor low oil prices, nor other economic difficulties are likely to persuade Russian President Vladimir Putin to heed Western demands to help end the conflict.

This shelling of civilians has led to calls for more sanctions (which in addition to the credit cut was why the ruble has fallen.

U.S. and European leaders threatened new sanctions against Moscow after a missile attack blamed on pro-Russian separatists killed 30 civilians in the eastern Ukrainian city of Mariupol, the latest escalation in violence that has brought Kiev’s fight with rebels back toward full-scale war.

Russia reacted with defiance, blaming Kiev and its Western backers for the surge in fighting, but it also called for urgent talks on implementing a September cease-fire. Separatists backed off earlier threats of a broad offensive on Mariupol and other targets, but shelling along the contact line between the two sides was extremely heavy over the weekend, Ukrainian military officials said.

U.S. President Barack Obama said he was deeply concerned about the latest break in the cease-fire and escalating separatist aggression, saying he would continue to ratchet up pressure on Russia. “I will look at all additional options that are available to us short of a military confrontation in trying to address this issue,” the president said at a Sunday news conference in New Delhi.

The European Union, saying the rebels “bluntly refuse to observe” the cease-fire, called an emergency meeting of foreign ministers for Thursday to discuss a response.

Diplomats said it isn’t yet clear whether the West is unified enough to agree on substantial new sanctions against Russia. The latest explosion in violence came as a surprise, just as the EU had begun considering the conditions under which it could start to ease some limits on Russia. The U.S., meanwhile, is wary of taking major new steps without Europe’s support.

[KevinNYC]

off topic, but the FBI just arrested 3 men as Russian spies in NY.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/27/ny...-new-york.html

[KobesFinger]

[dunksby]

So if Putin starts having problems at home, what actions will he take?

The Ukraine War just got real hot.
The Donetsk airport was the scene of heavy fighting last week.


Civilians were shelled in the port city of Maripol. Check out the dashcam footage at the Wasington Post.


This shelling of civilians has led to calls for more sanctions (which in addition to the credit cut was why the ruble has fallen.

Man I have been to that airport when visiting Ukraine with my brother a few years ago, I was watching BBC air footage of it last week, shocking and depressing scene. And it was named after a musician too, you can still make out the name in that photo "Prokofiev".

[KevinNYC]

Oh nooooooooo the evil Russians again! Quick everyone hide under the table

Meanwhile unmanned American drones just killed a bunch of civilians in Pakistan and Yemen, and American trained and financed ISIS Islamists just chopped off the heads of 12 Iraqi teenagers who dared watch a football game on tv.

The world knows who the real evil empire is. The one with hundreds of military bases around the world. The one who spends more on defense then the rest of the world combined. The ones supporting a puppet Fascist Neo-Nazi government in Western Ukraine while they bomb their own cities and civilians.

So how does this work? Do you submit an invoice afterwards or you have a flat rate?

[nathanjizzle]

Communist?

You really know nothing about Russia right now, do you? And the unintended irony of you suggesting someone else take the time to inform themselves, oh dear!

What's funny is that as Western nations have become progressively undermined by Marxian dogma and childish conceptions of 'equality' and 'rights', Russia has actually gone back in the other direction, and is a hell of a lot more 'capitalist' than the United States currently is. They have a 13% income tax rate for example, and actually value the family as an institution, generally leaving child-rearing to parents rather than the state as we presently do. Sounds like the opposite of Communism to me. You should actually read Marx and some of his followers, then listen to contemporary political and socio-economic discourse, and you may realise how strongly the opinions and sentiments of the time have been fixed by the moralisers (and thus superficial thinkers) of the past.

Funny that none of you idiots care that this international criminality will be costing jobs and livelihoods around the world, including the US? Guess that's just more on welfare, eh? I know that's a good thing in the mind's of some deluded people. Dependency is good because it makes their own purposeless lives appear more meaningful (i.e. no purpose can be found in their own lives, so they find meaning in the lives of others, in 'helping' them - which actually means helping themselves through the medium of power and control). I can understand how this makes nobodies feel important and valuable, but come on, it's damn counterproductive and incompatible with the concept of democracy, where each man must stand on his own, lest it become nothing except the domination of the herd.

edit: also notice how no one appreciates that Russia was capable of raising its interest rates to 16% to combat this clandestine and coordinated international attack on their economy and currency. No one talks about this, why? Because Russia (unlike us) was actually running a sustainable model, didn't have to bail out its banking sector, hasn't socialised the losses of its citizens (again, unlike us). With the economic mess the US is currently in, imagine if they were attacked in such a way: they wouldn't even be able to raise interest rates above 1% to protect the dollar without defaulting on debt payments. This collusion is also an attempt to make Western powers appear in a less vulnerable than their moronic economic policies have made them.

It's also pretty amusing how people don't even see NATO and EU expansion as an imperial project, and jump up to support it as if it were some great democratic and humanistic expansion where concepts such as power and the annexation of territory have been struck from the dictionary. Every time Empire has been repudiated as a moral barbarism, it has mutated into a new form of Empire and a new expression of power, but is again blindly accepted by the credulous and unthinking masses.

nobody read this, its for your own good.

[Andrew Wiggins]

Oh nooooooooo the evil Russians again! Quick everyone hide under the table

Meanwhile unmanned American drones just killed a bunch of civilians in Pakistan and Yemen, and American trained and financed ISIS Islamists just chopped off the heads of 12 Iraqi teenagers who dared watch a football game on tv.

The world knows who the real evil empire is. The one with hundreds of military bases around the world. The one who spends more on defense then the rest of the world combined. The ones supporting a puppet Fascist Neo-Nazi government in Western Ukraine while they bomb their own cities and civilians.

[rezznor]

Oh nooooooooo the evil Russians again! Quick everyone hide under the table

Meanwhile unmanned American drones just killed a bunch of civilians in Pakistan and Yemen, and American trained and financed ISIS Islamists just chopped off the heads of 12 Iraqi teenagers who dared watch a football game on tv.

The world knows who the real evil empire is. The one with hundreds of military bases around the world. The one who spends more on defense then the rest of the world combined. The ones supporting a puppet Fascist Neo-Nazi government in Western Ukraine while they bomb their own cities and civilians.

have you ever written a post that didn't bash the US? why are you even on ish? i'm sure there are plenty of eastern european forums that would be more receptive to your beliefs.

[SexSymbol]

LPG dropped to 47 euro cents per liter in Lithuania, which is down like 40 percent from what it was before all this and my ****ing LPG system stopped working. Somebody up there doesn't love me

[KevinNYC]

Oil keeps falling

Oil tumbled to the lowest in almost six years after a government report showed that U.S. crude inventories advanced to the highest level in data going back more than three decades.

Speculators are buying oil and just storing in tankers, hoping to sell it when the price rises.

Ruble keeps falling too. It's 69 to the dollar right now. Oil is a cause, but also politics as the EU is about to debate new sanctions on Russia

EU foreign ministers are due to meet in Brussels to discuss imposing further sanctions on Russia following an upsurge in fighting in east Ukraine.

The meeting was called after pro-Russian rebels attacked the port of Mariupol at the weekend.

The EU and the US have already slapped asset freezes and travel bans on Russian individuals and businesses as well as Ukrainian separatist leaders.

Nato says hundreds of Russian tanks and armoured vehicles are in east Ukraine.

Moscow denies direct involvement but says some Russian volunteers are fighting alongside the rebels.

BBC Europe Correspondent Damian Grammaticas says EU ministers will discuss fresh sanctions as well as extending the duration of existing measures.

EU leaders meeting on 12 February will have to confirm any new measures. They may also discuss possible new financial sanctions on Russia, co-ordinated with the US, our correspondent adds.

Lithuanian Foreign Minister Linas Linkevicius told the BBC that European values were under attack in Ukraine.

[KevinNYC]

The BBC has an article on "maskirovka - the hallmark of Russian warfare and a word which translates as "something masked" or "a little masquerade"."

How Russia outfoxes it enemies

In August Russian TV showed footage of water and baby food being loaded on to lorries heading for Ukraine's war zone. The Russian government called this humanitarian aid but many were more than a little suspicious. Nato already had plenty of intelligence about Russian air defence and artillery forces moving into Ukraine.

Maj Gen Davis calls the first convoy "a wonderful example of maskirovka" because it created something of a media storm. TV crews breathlessly followed the convoy, trying to find out what was really inside the green army trucks which had been hastily repainted white. Was this a classic Trojan horse operation to smuggle weapons to rebel militias? And would the Ukrainian authorities allow the convoy in?
"All the while at other border crossing points controlled by the Russians - not by the Ukrainians - equipment, personnel and troops were passing into Eastern Ukraine," says Davis. He sees the convoy as a clever "diversion or distraction".

The fog of war isn't something which just happens - it's something which can be manufactured. In this case the Western media were bamboozled, but the compliant Russian media has also worked hard to generate fog.

Ukrainian novelist Andrei Kurkov says he is constantly amazed by what he calls "the fantasy and imagination of Russian journalists". One of the most lurid stories broadcast on a Moscow TV channel claimed that a three-year-old boy in Sloviansk - a town in eastern Ukraine with a mostly Russian-speaking population - was crucified... for speaking Russian.

The TV report is still online. A blonde woman, her voice choked with emotion, tells a serious-looking Russian news reporter that the three-year-old child was nailed to a wooden notice board in front of his mother and died in agony. The mother she alleges, was then tied to a tank and dragged through the streets until she died. She adds that she is risking her life by talking but wants to protect children against Ukrainian soldiers who behave like beasts and fascists.

"The lady claimed she'd witnessed this horrible story in Sloviansk," says Kurkov. "But then she mentioned the name of the square where it happened and this square doesn't exist in Sloviansk. There's no such place."

As Kurkov says, the story doesn't stand up. It emerged that the woman eyewitness had a history of filing false police reports and her own parents said they thought she'd given the interview for money.

Peter Pomerantsev, who recently spent several years working on documentaries and reality shows for Russian TV, argues that Russian state media are not just distorting truth in Ukraine, they go much further, promoting a seductive nihilism.

"The Russian strategy, both at home and abroad, is to say there is no such thing as truth," he says.

"I mean, you know, 'The Americans are bad, we're bad, and everyone's bad, so what's the big deal about us being a bit corrupt? You know our democracy's a sham, their democracy's a sham.'

"It's a sort of cynicism that actually resonates very powerfully in the West nowadays with this lack of self-confidence after the Iraq War, after the financial crash - and that's what the Russians are hoping for, just to take that cynicism and then use that in a military environment."

[GimmeThat]

and Ben Affleck is Batman.

I'm dead serious.

[KevinNYC]

So Russian strategy is get news agencies distracted, set up a "humanitarian convoy" for the media to focus on while infiltrating your troops into the Ukraine from where the convoy and the media is. Or post, fake stories about children being crucified in the Ukraine.

Russian lawmakers are thinking of passing a resolution condemning an illegal annexation? Are they talking about Crimea in 2014? No, Germany in 1990.

Russia mulls censuring 'annexation' of East Germany, some 25 years late
Lawmakers in Russia are considering a proposal to condemn Germany's 1990 reunification, labeling it an "annexation" of the East by the West. ....

The speaker of the Russian parliament's lower house, Sergei Naryshkin, ordered lawmakers from its foreign affairs committee to consider the appeal arguing that the absorption of the post World War II communist state of East Germany - officially known as the German Democratic Republic (GDR) - into a reunified Germany in October 1990 was illegal.
"Unlike Crimea, a referendum was not conducted in the German Democratic Republic," said Nikolai Ivanov, who suggested the appeal.

From the BBC article above

Peter Pomerantsev, who recently spent several years working on documentaries and reality shows for Russian TV, argues that Russian state media are not just distorting truth in Ukraine, they go much further, promoting a seductive nihilism.

"The Russian strategy, both at home and abroad, is to say there is no such thing as truth," he says.

"I mean, you know, 'The Americans are bad, we're bad, and everyone's bad, so what's the big deal about us being a bit corrupt? You know our democracy's a sham, their democracy's a sham.'

"It's a sort of cynicism that actually resonates very powerfully in the West nowadays with this lack of self-confidence after the Iraq War, after the financial crash - and that's what the Russians are hoping for, just to take that cynicism and then use that in a military environment."

[KevinNYC]

Russia cut its Central Bank interest rate and the ruble spiked to 71 to the dollar. This was a surprise move and has the effect of giving less support to the ruble.

I think 70 to the dollar was the highest it was in December when there was a sense of crisis, so they have not found the bottom yet in this crisis.

Today’s “decision will bring more negatives than positives,” Vladimir Tikhomirov, chief economist at BCS Financial Group in Moscow, said by phone. “The rate cut is counterproductive because it goes counter to market expectations. So it’s only increasing pressure on the ruble and will provoke further acceleration of price growth.”

So the reason for the move is that Russia is now more worried about inflation that a weak ruble.

The central bank explained its decision to cut the rate from 17 percent to 15 percent by saying that the risks of an economic slowdown are now higher than the risks associated with the ruble's drop. The currency's 50 percent drop since the summer has caused a spike in inflation.

Higher interest rates can help a currency but also hurt economic growth by making loans more expensive.

Analysts said Friday's move was likely due to pressure by government officials and Russian businesses, which are suffering from the high rates.

The central bank said it expected inflation, currently at an annual 13 percent, to peak in the middle of the year and fall below 10 percent next year as the economy adjusts to the weaker ruble.

"Inflation and inflation expectations are expected to decrease," the bank said in a statement.