MBW - 2/28/2022
Good morning friends. Here’s your daily news digest to help you get started.
War has been raging in Ukraine during the weekend. Russian troops have been met with fierce resistance. Kharkiv, the second largest city in Ukraine, was briefly captured by the Russian army, but ultimately the Ukrainian defenders got the upper hand.
In the meantime daily protests have been taking place throughout Russia despite the heavy-handed crackdown by the police. In European capitals people have been flooding the streets as well. The photo below is from Berlin on Sunday:
The West has imposed some of the most draconian sanctions in history such as blocking SWIFT access to a select group of Russian banks, freezing assets for the Russian Central Bank, blocking access to European airspace for Russian planes etc. Furthermore, many western countries have announced delivery of weapons to Ukraine. Germany marked a radical shift of its foreign policy by increasing the defense budget to €100 bn which is above the 2% of GDP NATO recommended level, as well as starting to build two LNG (liquid natural gas) terminals at German ports in order to decrease the gas dependency from Russia.
The most critical moment of the past few days was when on Sunday Putin increased the readiness level of the Russian nuclear units. Here’s a bit of context on what this means. Russia has a number of readiness levels: 1. Constant, 2. Elevated, 3. Military Danger, 4. Full. Putin ordered nuclear forces to ELEVATED level today. Concerning, but not cause for panic yet.
On a positive note, a meeting between Ukrainian and Russian delegations has been scheduled to take place on the border with Belarus. Hopefully something good comes out of this.
Everyone seems to emphasize the importance of the SWIFT-related sanctions, but I believe that the true “nuclear bomb” of this war has been the sanctioning of the central bank. Russia currently holds $640 bn in reserves. About 32% held in euros, 22% in gold, 16% in dollars and 13% in yuan.
Most of the gold is held domestically and is beyond the reach of sanctions, but about $300 bn in reserves are held abroad. Freezing those will prevent the Central Bank of Russia from using them for things like currency interventions or transfers to the Russian Treasury to spend. This would likely lead to massive bank runs and dollarization, with a sharp sell-off, draining on reserves and, possibly, a full-on collapse of Russia’s financial system.
Not many people know that Ukraine is home to the largest cargo plane in the world, or better said, was. Antonov is a Ukrainian aircraft manufacturer, maker of the Antonov An-225 and its smaller cousin Antonov A-124. The world’s only An-225 was reportedly destroyed on the ground at Hostomol airport on Saturday. In addition to being a beautiful piece of engineering, it was the best way to transport oversized objects like helicopters, fire trucks, turbines etc.
During the weekend Dmitry Rogozin, the director general of Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, went on a Twitter rant on how the US sanctions on Russian space materials would be bad for everyone especially the crew of International Space Station. He even asked the question how is US and EU going to safely deorbit the station without Russia, to which Elon Musk replied with a logo of SpaceX.
Furthermore, Elon got asked by the Ukrainian vice prime minister via Twitter to send Starlink terminals so that internet coverage does not get impacted by the ongoing war, to which Elon replied by confirming that more terminals were on the way.
And lastly, the usual collection of pics and memes from around the web:
Just a bird on a lamppost.
Time spent with parents after the 20th birthday.
The context here being that the most successful sniper during wartime was a Finnish guy who killed more than 500 Russians during the Winter War.
Quite sad tbh.
That was all folks. See you tomorrow (hopefully).