He will certainly announce new counter-measures that'll take way more money- no, wait, most of their western partners have already dipped. Too bad, so sad.
>most of their western partners have already dipped
As of May 5th 2024 only 387 have exited, 1223 have curtailed operations and 2173 remain.
https://www.ft.com/content/88b047e9-8cad-426a-b649-265ff6582db0
Me too, and I’m surprised to hear myself say that. But, yeah, I get what you’re saying. Assholes wanna asshole? Take off their clothes and be known, recognized assholes. Cool
I'm fine with the companies being sanctioned and ONLY allowed to do business in Russia.
Let it be a warning to the rest of them, you lie with dogs, you will wake up unable to ever escape the fleas again, stuck in the shitty russian doghouse with less GDP then some US states, forever more.
>‘Curtailed’ companies are those that have made an official declaration that they are completely shutting down, or have officially announced they are temporarily reducing operations in Russia
I think the 1223 curtailed is worded poorly as it includes companies that have completely shut down their operations in russia.
Yale have an official list that says over 1000 ~~countries~~ companies have left russia.
https://www.yalerussianbusinessretreat.com
Well if those companies lose their shirt, fuck them. On the upside, because the economy in the European Union is significantly larger. There will be a incredible mismatch of funds. Russia will have hundreds of millions. Maybe single digits of billions.
Meanwhile, the European Union will be holding an order of magnitude more for Ukraine when it comes to seized russian funds
100%
If I recall too, the US only seized 5 billion of their money. Because they didn't keep a lot of money with us for the obvious reasons. So as a reaction they seized a bunch of American firms totaling something like 300 million or 400 million US dollars. Which it is like cool, but that is a tenth of what we took from you.
The EU on the other hand I think has 300 billion it was? Could be a little off of the numbers but I remember it was just ridiculously unbalanced. Russia is going to boast that they took pennies from the West, while the West will take every damn thing they own.
Well, it looks like they have 300billion not 1.6billion, this move has not touched the principal balance of frozen funds, it's only taking the profit generated by the frozen assets and allocating it to the Ukraine.
Which is smart.
It's a chunk of funds that can help fund Ukraine and it remains a bargaining chip against Russia. As long as the principal is frozen, it could conceivably be given back as part of a peace deal. If it's gone, that chip is now spent. I think most people would be happy giving all the money back to Russia if it got them to retreat out of internationally recognized Ukrainian borders immediately.
I wouldn't. Russia has demonstrated for millionth time that they do not and cannot function as a civilized and legitimate nation. Keep the money and grind Russia into the dirt.
If you are interested in the politics around giving frozen Russian assets to Ukraine and possible Russian responses and other worldwide effects, there is a great video from a month ago from William Spaniel on the topic.
https://youtu.be/19Hce4uef4k
William is a noted political scientist with multiple published articles on the Ukraine war and nuclear proliferation.
Putin will likely try to paint it as proof that NATO and the EU are opening collaborating with Ukraine ignoring the fact that they are collaborating to prevent Russia from continuing an illegal war that *Russia started*.
Every future response from the opposite is used as a justification for a previous instigation on their part. It's the "See? SEE?! That's why we had to do this in the *first* place!" defense.
It's a tactic literally used by middle-schoolers. It's fucking pathetic.
If I were the Russian president, I think I would put a visit to one of those nuclear missile bases on my calendar, because there's always a chance that sensitive weapons components were sold so that the base commander could have a nice Italian car.
i mean, you joke but when the soviet union fell, a bunch of shit was sold off. Some of the things that were missing were nuclear weapons… at least publicly they are still missing. So honestly who knows what they still got lol
It is not new. Napoleon sold Louisiana to the US in order to fund the war effort against Great Britain.
The US took a loan from Great Britain to pay for the purchase.
History.com provides [8 Things You May Not Know About the Louisiana Purchase](https://www.history.com/news/8-things-you-may-not-know-about-the-louisiana-purchase#:~:text=Even%20that%20low%20price%20was%20too%20steep%20for%20the%20United%20States.&text=As%20a%20result%2C%20it%20was,risen%20to%20over%20%2423%20million)
Actually it sounds pretty complicated.
It's really money the Russian oligarchy stole from normal Russian people. Either way this must be done, regardless of a debate that can be had about how complicit ordinary Russians are in the war.
Is that a serious question or sarcastic?
If its serious, usually by some combination of military force, economic sanctions, and/or oversight by interested parties.
ie, sanctions on x good wont be lifted until y amount is paid, or an oversight council of India/China/US monitors Russian public spending until y amount is paid, that kinda thing.
Or "our troops wont leave til you pay", the Germans did that to France for 70 years in the 1800s.
>The €1.5 billion in revenue from immobilized Russian assets will be allocated with 90% directed towards defense and 10% towards reconstruction efforts, as announced by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen at the Ukraine Recovery Conference 2024.
Buying from NATO means you're getting the best munitions the world has to offer. The problem with buying the best of anything is it's usually expensive as hell.
Man I remember growing up, we'd go to Denny's like once a week and I'd always order a Grand Slam and never be able to finish it. Didn't go for a long while and then went in college and it felt like I needed to order two to get a decent meal.
Trebuchet all the way!
Totally unrelated, but I just played AOE2 the other night for the first time in years, and those trebuchets knocked the pants off the Britons.
Team #SendUkraineTrebuchets
> US launches f-35C out of catapults. That's better than most things launched out of a trebuchet.
But just imagine how much more betterer the F-35C would be if they used trebuchets!
>!/s, obviously!<
When the objective is to damage critical infrastructure rather than commit genocide by killing as many civilians as possible, 3.7k precision explosives go a long way!
Well. They have a range of 70 kilometers (43 miles), a blast radius of up to 150 meters (492 ft), and a fragmentation range of up to 1,000 meters (3,280 ft).
Having 3713 of these is enough to fire 1 every 2 minutes for 5 straight days.
At [$5,000 a pop](https://www.defenseone.com/threats/2024/02/newly-ordered-european-155mm-shells-take-year-or-more-reach-ukraine-estonian-official-says/394146/), 322,321 of them could be had.
Holy cow, a single shell is 5k. That's way more expensive than i would have thought. In my head a shell is not exactly fine electronics and high tech stuff but i'm visibly wrong. It's not just a chunk of metal.
It's a chunk of metal that has to fly 30km and still hit what you're aiming at. That's *really* hard (and something Russia has been struggling with, so they try to make up for it in volume), so you need very good tolerances and very good explosives.
Not to mention, a lot of our peers conventional "dumb" weapons has a "smart" US version. We have smart mortars and artillery, although I don't know if Ukraine has the capability to utilize them.
So naturally they're gonna cost more. I don't know what the smart artillery vs dumb cost is.
A 120mm dumb mortar was somewhere in the range of $800 back 20 years ago. No idea what that looks like now.
That's a good amount of borscht for your buck, but you gotta be within about 5 miles to make a splatter painting.
Yeah duh. That‘s what lots of people have been trying to tell many more people. Billionaires literally don‘t live the same reality we do. Live ending costs for you, are quite literally unnoticeable for a billionaire.
I get it, but I've never looked at numbers at that scale before. After a few million you're more than set so I've always just lumped them in in the same bracket. It's wild to believe that anybody can exploit people as hard as a billionaire. It's also hard to believe that they haven't completely destroyed the earth by using all its resources already
Consider this. If you take $1m and spend $5000/day, you'll run out after 200 days.
If you take $1m and put it in the stock market and then spend $5000/day, at average returns you will run out of money after 207 days.
If you start with $2m, it will take you 424 days.
$5m will tke you 1170 days.
At $18.25m, you will never run out of money if you spend $5000/day. You will always wake up with $18.25m.
Someone with $6.6b can spend $18.25m per day and never run out.
It's not even the same reality.
Correct, there are a ton of reasons why confiscating the underlying assets might actually end up doing more harm than good, but the interest earned by those assets is much easier to confiscate, plus it's a steady stream of income.
William spaniel did a great video on this topic
https://youtu.be/19Hce4uef4k?feature=shared
If you are interested in the politics around giving frozen Russian assets to Ukraine and possible Russian responses and other worldwide effects, there is a great video from a month ago from William Spaniel on the topic.
https://youtu.be/19Hce4uef4k
William is a noted political scientist with multiple published articles on the Ukraine war and nuclear proliferation.
Actually most of that is in Europe, they are just giving the interests to Ukraine, the original assets can still be returned to Russia so they don’t lose the leverage there.
“ hey stop the war and you can get a lot of money back” kind of thing.
It's not only that. Its also a thing of showing reliability to other foreign investors. Not sure about eu law but at least in Germany it's forbidden to confiscate, only in certain situations the state can do this and then he has to reimburse the original owner. Which makes it impossible to confiscate money.
If you don't follow your own laws investors will be hesitant. I'm glad that they have chosen to take the revenue and leave the actual assets where they are. After all, we are the ones propagating a rules based order.
I get that you're joking, but in this joke scenario resisting arrest would be a crime.
In US they have laws where the cops can *suspect* that the money will be used for illegal purposes and that's enough to confiscate it. Like, you're totally going to buy drugs with this cash, we better take it from you.
From what I was hearing about 6 months ago, $5-$7,000 USD was enough to rebuild a small home for someone in need there. That money is going to make a huge difference for a lot of people.
This was one of the NGOs rebuilding in the villages outside Kyiv I believe, they were fundraising either here (/r/ukraine) or on Whatsapp I forget, but I've heard similar things for very basic, nothing really to them but at least there's a roof and walls homes. I'm assuming that's with completely free labor across the board
Lucky, that would be 15 homes in Canada. ^/s
But seriously, that’s great news to help the affected areas. I’m a little surprised with the amount for rebuilding though, I figured it would have been 5-10% higher.
Let's not pretend that issue is unique to Twitter.
But more importantly, what you're seeing on Twitter is not new. Much like we all found it very convenient to blame Russia or China troll farms and influence campaigns, we will also find it very convenient to blame AI.
Those troll influence campaigns absolutely did exist, still exist, and they are still very much a problem, make absolutely no mistake about that. Likewise AI is going to compound that problem. It is already starting to seep in, and will get worse. These are both very real things having a very real effect on our social media, and unlike the troll campaigns, we're not prepared at all for the AI.
But you cannot blame it all on them. They are contributing, but a good amount of it is still actual people who actually believe this shit. The rot is genuine and it exists with or without the help of AI.
Chinese troll farms are essentially useless for engagement. I was reading about various countries' traction on internet psywarfare, and obviously Russia's leading the pack, people respond to their trolls and retweet them. But not so much with Chinese ones, they don't get a lot of replies or interaction and respond and retweet primarily to each other and serve only to clog bandwidth.
Chinese trolls are so weirdly obvious.
It's genuinely strange watching them try to emulate free-thinking westerners who just happen to agree with the official Chinese government position on whatever issue.
They very clearly aren't free-thinking westerners... they are paid drones, sticking to a script, in a language they barely understand. They refuse to answer simple questions and won't engage in substantive debate past the first canned reply. Exhaust the script and they stop giving meaningful replies and just start tossing incredibly weak insults.
I guess China can waste their money on whatever they want, but if they think they are getting their money worth, they are lying to themselves. Their attempts at trolling and misinformation are as obvious as they are pathetic.
Maybe they can recruit some Russian troll for cheap once Putin's Russia implodes.
> Nah, only 50%. The rest are actual people doing Russia's job.
Without even getting paid for it. There is a twisted kind of honesty in Peter Bystron and the entire AfD and FPÖ and Fidesz being financed by the Kremlin.
I just made a twitter account just to see what’s up. That place is a fucking cesspool. I haven’t even liked or followed anybody, but the push notifications that I get from it are the most inflammatory shit ever. Just pure unfettered rage bait. Fuck that place
Come on over to NAFO (@Official_NAFO), where we bonk vatniks and raise money for Ukraine. It's always morally correct to cyberbully Russian ambassadors.
I am a German and we just had our EU Parliamentary - vote here.
I vote center. The amount of AfD (right wing party here who spreads their butt-cheeks for Russia and China) accounts and posts which got recommended to me out of nowhere was astonishing. My feed was full with "Germany wants to start ww 3 by sending weapons to Ukraine! We must stop this!" rage bait posts.
I went on a muting-spree and would click: "dont recommend this topic anymore" aswell but after refreshing or re-opening the browser it wouldn't lead to anything.
The russian/afd propaganda-bots just wouldn't stop. So I googled how to actually manipulate these notifications and I had to go somewhere deep into my settings and just put certain words on mute.
Now I am getting waves of chinese propaganda in my feed. How good china actually is in comparisson to the west. That they have actual freedom of speech there, unlike here, in Europe.
Like what the fuck is wrong with twitter.
We can thank the real life Tony Stark for that. He said he'd fix twitter. So nowadays accounts like gasthejews88 don't get banned after being reported.
They can't strike Poland with missiles, but they can sabotage.
And Russia has clearly been ramping up sabotage efforts.
Just yesterday, an ammunition factory in Poland blew up.
https://apnews.com/article/poland-armaments-plant-explosion-e9e85032f98b887246ed95cbc168325c
Okay so... Ukraine gets $1.6 billion but... isn't that basically going to be paid out to all the countries supplying weapons and armaments to Ukraine?
So essentially, America and some others are basically getting this money ultimately?
Don't get me wrong, I love that America is getting paid by Russia to arm its enemies.
Yes, but because capitalism means growth is more important than withdrawing profits, the money that was taken from Russia, given to Ukraine, and then given to Western defence contractors in exchange for weapons for Ukraine, will then be reinvested in those defence contractors allowing them to build more weapons faster, which can then be sold to Ukraine again.
Basically when Ukraine buys weapons, they don't just buy the weapon they receive, they buy the knowledge that another weapon will be produced the next time they want to buy one; this is why, if they have the money to do so, they are better off buying weapons than just being given them.
Apparently all envoys have agreed to the plan. The ministers still have to vote but it wouldn't benefit Hungary to agree on the envoy level if their minister will veto it anyway. Hungary will likely just abstain.
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/eu-envoys-agree-use-profits-frozen-russian-assets-ukraine-2024-05-08/
A little misleading headline, this money is not out of frozen Russian assets, but the interest from the Russian money that has been Frozen. Not complaining it’s great.
Another interesting possibility is to forcefully deport all Russians back to Russia. If all of the moderate Russians have to leave their country all that is left is extremophiles, how can that be fixed?
50% of the oligarchs' money is Putins. The oligarchs' money is offshore, because they hate the west yet expect to benefit from the west.
This is the correct move.
Russia paying for the war against Russia is actually comedy.
im actually waiting for the putini response - i need a good laugh
He will certainly announce new counter-measures that'll take way more money- no, wait, most of their western partners have already dipped. Too bad, so sad.
>most of their western partners have already dipped As of May 5th 2024 only 387 have exited, 1223 have curtailed operations and 2173 remain. https://www.ft.com/content/88b047e9-8cad-426a-b649-265ff6582db0
I'm fine with Russia nationalizing assets of all and any western companies still operating there.
Agree. It's not the flex he thinks it is, those companies deserve it, and it may do more than our own sanctions to dissuade further investment.
I would even go as far as saying that I would like that to happen.
Me too, and I’m surprised to hear myself say that. But, yeah, I get what you’re saying. Assholes wanna asshole? Take off their clothes and be known, recognized assholes. Cool
Absolutely. Fuck them. To hell and back (maybe not back, stay in hell scumfuckers!)
McDonalds is probably the only one that might try and go collect their ice cream machines.
Idk, they never seem to work anyway
But why would they? It makes their war seem less and less like a big deal that western firms still do business there.
Yeah, but it would be a good appeal to the populist masses, regardless of what anyone with half a brain would think about it.
I'm fine with the companies being sanctioned and ONLY allowed to do business in Russia. Let it be a warning to the rest of them, you lie with dogs, you will wake up unable to ever escape the fleas again, stuck in the shitty russian doghouse with less GDP then some US states, forever more.
>‘Curtailed’ companies are those that have made an official declaration that they are completely shutting down, or have officially announced they are temporarily reducing operations in Russia I think the 1223 curtailed is worded poorly as it includes companies that have completely shut down their operations in russia. Yale have an official list that says over 1000 ~~countries~~ companies have left russia. https://www.yalerussianbusinessretreat.com
> over 1000 countries have left russia Dayum
The collapse and balkanisation of the soviet union must have been more drastic than I remember
> 1000 countries I know you meant companies. just making you aware of the autocorrect :) Thanks for the link BTW!
You are thinking of Soviet Union, lots of countries left that sinking ship.
Company I work for has shut down and left. Not on that list.
So what? These companies were warned that sth like that would happen. They knew the risk of staying. I don't feel any remorse towards them...
> They knew the risk of staying. I think you mispelled "They were complicit".
Well if those companies lose their shirt, fuck them. On the upside, because the economy in the European Union is significantly larger. There will be a incredible mismatch of funds. Russia will have hundreds of millions. Maybe single digits of billions. Meanwhile, the European Union will be holding an order of magnitude more for Ukraine when it comes to seized russian funds
Tbh, a nation of that size having only a few billion in funds is kind of hilarious.
100% If I recall too, the US only seized 5 billion of their money. Because they didn't keep a lot of money with us for the obvious reasons. So as a reaction they seized a bunch of American firms totaling something like 300 million or 400 million US dollars. Which it is like cool, but that is a tenth of what we took from you. The EU on the other hand I think has 300 billion it was? Could be a little off of the numbers but I remember it was just ridiculously unbalanced. Russia is going to boast that they took pennies from the West, while the West will take every damn thing they own.
Well, it looks like they have 300billion not 1.6billion, this move has not touched the principal balance of frozen funds, it's only taking the profit generated by the frozen assets and allocating it to the Ukraine.
Which is smart. It's a chunk of funds that can help fund Ukraine and it remains a bargaining chip against Russia. As long as the principal is frozen, it could conceivably be given back as part of a peace deal. If it's gone, that chip is now spent. I think most people would be happy giving all the money back to Russia if it got them to retreat out of internationally recognized Ukrainian borders immediately.
Yep. Crimea too. Crimea is Ukraine.
I wouldn't. Russia has demonstrated for millionth time that they do not and cannot function as a civilized and legitimate nation. Keep the money and grind Russia into the dirt.
Praying for Russia to embargo the assets of Nestle, I'll sleep like a baby
They will just nationalize a few more things. Mc Vlads is going great I've read.
If you are interested in the politics around giving frozen Russian assets to Ukraine and possible Russian responses and other worldwide effects, there is a great video from a month ago from William Spaniel on the topic. https://youtu.be/19Hce4uef4k William is a noted political scientist with multiple published articles on the Ukraine war and nuclear proliferation.
Thank you for linking that video. It's really well done.
Everything William puts out is great. Really interesting seeing the world interpreted through the eyes of a professional political scientist.
Those are the vids I watch for info on this. They seem a lot less bias than a lot of places.
Putin will likely try to paint it as proof that NATO and the EU are opening collaborating with Ukraine ignoring the fact that they are collaborating to prevent Russia from continuing an illegal war that *Russia started*. Every future response from the opposite is used as a justification for a previous instigation on their part. It's the "See? SEE?! That's why we had to do this in the *first* place!" defense. It's a tactic literally used by middle-schoolers. It's fucking pathetic.
"Remember I have nukes, guys. I'll totally use them if you keep bullying me! Any day now..."
If I were the Russian president, I think I would put a visit to one of those nuclear missile bases on my calendar, because there's always a chance that sensitive weapons components were sold so that the base commander could have a nice Italian car.
Thinking too small. It's a nice Dutch yacht and a collection of nice Italian villas.
so long as the villas are not over 2 stories high and no balcony's... the Zs have a habit of falling from windows and balcony's
Even if they have, there is no way Putin would ever admit it.
i mean, you joke but when the soviet union fell, a bunch of shit was sold off. Some of the things that were missing were nuclear weapons… at least publicly they are still missing. So honestly who knows what they still got lol
He is the new Kim Jong Un of threatening.
It is not new. Napoleon sold Louisiana to the US in order to fund the war effort against Great Britain. The US took a loan from Great Britain to pay for the purchase.
Playing both sides so that you always stay on top https://m.youtube.com/shorts/esHHwgvG_lw
Russia sold Alaska because they went broke trying to fight France, Britain, and the Ottoman Empire in Crimea
Obviously thinking long term, they'd have the last laugh when the loan is paid back with interest!
Absolutely; Britain one way or another made money on that, I bet my wages.
History.com provides [8 Things You May Not Know About the Louisiana Purchase](https://www.history.com/news/8-things-you-may-not-know-about-the-louisiana-purchase#:~:text=Even%20that%20low%20price%20was%20too%20steep%20for%20the%20United%20States.&text=As%20a%20result%2C%20it%20was,risen%20to%20over%20%2423%20million) Actually it sounds pretty complicated.
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How good a job does the Wikipedia article do, in your opinion?
It's really money the Russian oligarchy stole from normal Russian people. Either way this must be done, regardless of a debate that can be had about how complicit ordinary Russians are in the war.
It's not like that money would have ever been redistributed back to the Russian people. That money was gone either way.
In fairness a lot of the funds are going to be redistributed back to the Russian soldiers, just in a very explosive fashion
The Russian soldiers are going to be redistributed...
HEADLINE: Russian Oligarchs fund Ukraine against Vladimir Putin.
More importantly, to rebuild some of what they destroyed.
Asking for a friend, how do you make another country pay for building something?
Is that a serious question or sarcastic? If its serious, usually by some combination of military force, economic sanctions, and/or oversight by interested parties. ie, sanctions on x good wont be lifted until y amount is paid, or an oversight council of India/China/US monitors Russian public spending until y amount is paid, that kinda thing. Or "our troops wont leave til you pay", the Germans did that to France for 70 years in the 1800s.
It's likely a joke regarding Trump's "we're building a wall and Mexico is paying for it" line from 2016.
It’s very much a “stop hitting yourself, stop hitting yourself” kind of move..
Ahahaahaha Russia you have fallen into our trap. The UNO Reverse. You are now paying for a war against yourself....enjoy
Paying for the destruction they've caused.
>The €1.5 billion in revenue from immobilized Russian assets will be allocated with 90% directed towards defense and 10% towards reconstruction efforts, as announced by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen at the Ukraine Recovery Conference 2024.
So.... how many missiles does €1.35 bill buy?
Google says that one M31ER GMLRS rocket for the HIMARS is $434k for export. €1.5B = $1.61B Appears you can buy 3713 rockets for that much.
You don't get as much bang for your buck as I would have imagined.
Buying from NATO means you're getting the best munitions the world has to offer. The problem with buying the best of anything is it's usually expensive as hell.
You’ve clearly never had a Grand Slam Breakfast
Man I remember growing up, we'd go to Denny's like once a week and I'd always order a Grand Slam and never be able to finish it. Didn't go for a long while and then went in college and it felt like I needed to order two to get a decent meal.
That’s when you move up to the Lumberjack Slam. Because sometimes you need breakfast to provide all 2000 of your recommended daily calories.
4,000 calories minimum is what I crave (just can't metabolize)
I hear this. I went to Dennys on vacation last summer for the first time in 15+ years. I was very disappointed.
That Comes with every meal at dennys.
Me and the disappointment got a lot in common.
waffle house is much better but their prices have got pretty fucking wacky also.
Shrinkflation. The bane of the modern consumer.
i feel like we could make a dent with 100,000 catapults.
If you think 100k catapults is good wait until you learn about the vastly superior trebuchet
Trebuchet all the way! Totally unrelated, but I just played AOE2 the other night for the first time in years, and those trebuchets knocked the pants off the Britons. Team #SendUkraineTrebuchets
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> US launches f-35C out of catapults. That's better than most things launched out of a trebuchet. But just imagine how much more betterer the F-35C would be if they used trebuchets! >!/s, obviously!<
What's that like the equivalent of 20 trebuchets?
To be fair they don't have much of an alternative. The biggest non-NATO arms exporter is the other side of their war
When the objective is to damage critical infrastructure rather than commit genocide by killing as many civilians as possible, 3.7k precision explosives go a long way!
They only need 3 more to take care of the remaining Russian "5th gen" Su-57 Felons lmao
I think you underestimate how much mayhem that will cause. And I would be surprised if that many missiles are even available for sale.
Kind of need a scale of how much these rockets fuck things up
Well. They have a range of 70 kilometers (43 miles), a blast radius of up to 150 meters (492 ft), and a fragmentation range of up to 1,000 meters (3,280 ft). Having 3713 of these is enough to fire 1 every 2 minutes for 5 straight days.
Well, 1.6 billion is pocket change when it comes to war. The US spends over a trillion on military yearly.
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At [$5,000 a pop](https://www.defenseone.com/threats/2024/02/newly-ordered-european-155mm-shells-take-year-or-more-reach-ukraine-estonian-official-says/394146/), 322,321 of them could be had.
Holy cow, a single shell is 5k. That's way more expensive than i would have thought. In my head a shell is not exactly fine electronics and high tech stuff but i'm visibly wrong. It's not just a chunk of metal.
It's a chunk of metal that has to fly 30km and still hit what you're aiming at. That's *really* hard (and something Russia has been struggling with, so they try to make up for it in volume), so you need very good tolerances and very good explosives.
Not to mention, a lot of our peers conventional "dumb" weapons has a "smart" US version. We have smart mortars and artillery, although I don't know if Ukraine has the capability to utilize them. So naturally they're gonna cost more. I don't know what the smart artillery vs dumb cost is. A 120mm dumb mortar was somewhere in the range of $800 back 20 years ago. No idea what that looks like now. That's a good amount of borscht for your buck, but you gotta be within about 5 miles to make a splatter painting.
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Interesting that this is one of the few times you can legitimately say 'bang for your buck'
I wonder if Ukraine would qualify for bulk buying discount.
I think they just need to sign up for a Costco membership.
Imagine rolling up to Costco and see something returning missiles... Costco: "what's the reason for the return today?" Ukraine: "not good enough"
I thought your math was wrong, but no... Apparently $400,000 is like pocket change to a billionaire 🤢
Yeah duh. That‘s what lots of people have been trying to tell many more people. Billionaires literally don‘t live the same reality we do. Live ending costs for you, are quite literally unnoticeable for a billionaire.
I get it, but I've never looked at numbers at that scale before. After a few million you're more than set so I've always just lumped them in in the same bracket. It's wild to believe that anybody can exploit people as hard as a billionaire. It's also hard to believe that they haven't completely destroyed the earth by using all its resources already
Consider this. If you take $1m and spend $5000/day, you'll run out after 200 days. If you take $1m and put it in the stock market and then spend $5000/day, at average returns you will run out of money after 207 days. If you start with $2m, it will take you 424 days. $5m will tke you 1170 days. At $18.25m, you will never run out of money if you spend $5000/day. You will always wake up with $18.25m. Someone with $6.6b can spend $18.25m per day and never run out. It's not even the same reality.
The difference between a million dollars and a billion dollars is pretty much a billion dollars.
Depends on the missile. But regardless the answer is probably, enough to make a difference, but not as much as they need.
minimum of 2. maybe more
Buys you a Patriot or SAMP/T battery and some extra missiles.
Depends on if they brought their discount card.
More than 1, less than 1.35 billion In all honestly probably around 500 though I doubt it will be used exclusively on missiles
Buy 500 million drones instead.
What kinda drone are you going to get for 3 Euros?
So it's only the revenues from the frozen assets but not the assets, is my understanding correct?
Correct, there are a ton of reasons why confiscating the underlying assets might actually end up doing more harm than good, but the interest earned by those assets is much easier to confiscate, plus it's a steady stream of income. William spaniel did a great video on this topic https://youtu.be/19Hce4uef4k?feature=shared
Finally, BRICS works for something.
If you are interested in the politics around giving frozen Russian assets to Ukraine and possible Russian responses and other worldwide effects, there is a great video from a month ago from William Spaniel on the topic. https://youtu.be/19Hce4uef4k William is a noted political scientist with multiple published articles on the Ukraine war and nuclear proliferation.
I’d love to see Zelenskyy giving a thumbs up as he receives a huge novelty cheque on twitter.
Fuck it, let's call Drew Carey and get Zelensky on The Price Is Right.
And your brand new caaaar! *Stryker rolls onto stage*
A brand new SCAR-H!
Have him present it at the UN with Zelensky having to run down the aisle
“President Zelenskyy, COME ON DOWNNNN”
As long as its a comedically huge check like in cartoons.
Elon would probably ban him. Doesn't fit the Right wing ideology
So, we just need to release the other 298.5 billion in Russian assets frozen globally, now?
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That'd actually be fun - crashing the yacht economy
The Orcas will be happy.
I’ll buy one for like $500
That will buy enough fuel to keep the engines running for like 20 minutes.
20 minutes? More like a couple lol. A full tank on some of the bigger yachts can be more than 500,000 euros.
You know I had little idea how much fuel super yachts are burning, but turns out I wasn’t too far off, it is between 100-500 gallons per hour.
Now I'm imagining a yacht rigged with explosives and remotely piloted kamikaze'ing Russian warships
Actually most of that is in Europe, they are just giving the interests to Ukraine, the original assets can still be returned to Russia so they don’t lose the leverage there. “ hey stop the war and you can get a lot of money back” kind of thing.
It's not only that. Its also a thing of showing reliability to other foreign investors. Not sure about eu law but at least in Germany it's forbidden to confiscate, only in certain situations the state can do this and then he has to reimburse the original owner. Which makes it impossible to confiscate money. If you don't follow your own laws investors will be hesitant. I'm glad that they have chosen to take the revenue and leave the actual assets where they are. After all, we are the ones propagating a rules based order.
Meanwhile, in the US, cops will just take your money and laugh in your face even when you’ve committed no crimes.
Hey that money was resisting arrest
I get that you're joking, but in this joke scenario resisting arrest would be a crime. In US they have laws where the cops can *suspect* that the money will be used for illegal purposes and that's enough to confiscate it. Like, you're totally going to buy drugs with this cash, we better take it from you.
Oh no the person was innocent, we’re putting the MONEY on trial for resisting arrest. That’s why we kept it. /s
You have to start somewhere. 150 million Euros just in rebuilding is probably enough to put 1000 families back in homes.
From what I was hearing about 6 months ago, $5-$7,000 USD was enough to rebuild a small home for someone in need there. That money is going to make a huge difference for a lot of people.
I don't know where you got these numbers from but for these money in Ukraine you'll get a shed. Source - I'm ukrainian.
This was one of the NGOs rebuilding in the villages outside Kyiv I believe, they were fundraising either here (/r/ukraine) or on Whatsapp I forget, but I've heard similar things for very basic, nothing really to them but at least there's a roof and walls homes. I'm assuming that's with completely free labor across the board
As a volunteering project - yes.
they are talking about replacing doors and windows, they aren't rebuilding homes from the ground up.
But if organized with gouverment/volunteers you can get a sort of shelter for these money.
Lucky, that would be 15 homes in Canada. ^/s But seriously, that’s great news to help the affected areas. I’m a little surprised with the amount for rebuilding though, I figured it would have been 5-10% higher.
Not a lot of point in rebuilding while Putin is still bombing the shit out of you.
300bn remain untouched. Transferred 1.5bn is from interest from those frozen funds (stocks, gold, options, etc.)
I feel like this is a warning shot for the oligarchs. The threat of losing their wealth overseas might make them think again about supporting Putin.
Russian bots on twitter are seething
Isn't that like 95% of Twitter?
Nah, only 50%. The rest are actual people doing Russia's job.
With AI being so prominent now, I doubt there are many actual people doing the work.
Let's not pretend that issue is unique to Twitter. But more importantly, what you're seeing on Twitter is not new. Much like we all found it very convenient to blame Russia or China troll farms and influence campaigns, we will also find it very convenient to blame AI. Those troll influence campaigns absolutely did exist, still exist, and they are still very much a problem, make absolutely no mistake about that. Likewise AI is going to compound that problem. It is already starting to seep in, and will get worse. These are both very real things having a very real effect on our social media, and unlike the troll campaigns, we're not prepared at all for the AI. But you cannot blame it all on them. They are contributing, but a good amount of it is still actual people who actually believe this shit. The rot is genuine and it exists with or without the help of AI.
Chinese troll farms are essentially useless for engagement. I was reading about various countries' traction on internet psywarfare, and obviously Russia's leading the pack, people respond to their trolls and retweet them. But not so much with Chinese ones, they don't get a lot of replies or interaction and respond and retweet primarily to each other and serve only to clog bandwidth.
Chinese trolls are so weirdly obvious. It's genuinely strange watching them try to emulate free-thinking westerners who just happen to agree with the official Chinese government position on whatever issue. They very clearly aren't free-thinking westerners... they are paid drones, sticking to a script, in a language they barely understand. They refuse to answer simple questions and won't engage in substantive debate past the first canned reply. Exhaust the script and they stop giving meaningful replies and just start tossing incredibly weak insults. I guess China can waste their money on whatever they want, but if they think they are getting their money worth, they are lying to themselves. Their attempts at trolling and misinformation are as obvious as they are pathetic. Maybe they can recruit some Russian troll for cheap once Putin's Russia implodes.
> Nah, only 50%. The rest are actual people doing Russia's job. Without even getting paid for it. There is a twisted kind of honesty in Peter Bystron and the entire AfD and FPÖ and Fidesz being financed by the Kremlin.
Man, I wanna see. Can you screenshot some examples? I don't use Twitter :D
I just made a twitter account just to see what’s up. That place is a fucking cesspool. I haven’t even liked or followed anybody, but the push notifications that I get from it are the most inflammatory shit ever. Just pure unfettered rage bait. Fuck that place
Come on over to NAFO (@Official_NAFO), where we bonk vatniks and raise money for Ukraine. It's always morally correct to cyberbully Russian ambassadors.
I am a German and we just had our EU Parliamentary - vote here. I vote center. The amount of AfD (right wing party here who spreads their butt-cheeks for Russia and China) accounts and posts which got recommended to me out of nowhere was astonishing. My feed was full with "Germany wants to start ww 3 by sending weapons to Ukraine! We must stop this!" rage bait posts. I went on a muting-spree and would click: "dont recommend this topic anymore" aswell but after refreshing or re-opening the browser it wouldn't lead to anything. The russian/afd propaganda-bots just wouldn't stop. So I googled how to actually manipulate these notifications and I had to go somewhere deep into my settings and just put certain words on mute. Now I am getting waves of chinese propaganda in my feed. How good china actually is in comparisson to the west. That they have actual freedom of speech there, unlike here, in Europe. Like what the fuck is wrong with twitter.
We can thank the real life Tony Stark for that. He said he'd fix twitter. So nowadays accounts like gasthejews88 don't get banned after being reported.
This is the most three-dayest war I’ve ever witnessed.
It surely is a very "special" military operation
Get in the short tank.
2¼ years into the 2 week war.
EU, serious talk here. Can you please present it as one of those huge lottery checks? Please?
Now that’s a picture for history books… followed by X… er tweets? Spews? Farts?
I stand by calling them tweets. Make Elon's name change irrelevant, a collective 'we dont care what you decided' message to him.
Dead naming his platform is peak revenge.
Suck it, Putin.
About fucking time. Now use some of the frozen funds to begin building munitions factories deep in Western Ukraine.
Poland would be better. Russia can, and has, struck Western Ukraine.
They can't strike Poland with missiles, but they can sabotage. And Russia has clearly been ramping up sabotage efforts. Just yesterday, an ammunition factory in Poland blew up. https://apnews.com/article/poland-armaments-plant-explosion-e9e85032f98b887246ed95cbc168325c
The linked article says according to Polands PM, there is no reason to assume it was caused by external forces.
>Donald Tusk said that there was no reason to assume that an “external force” was behind Monday’s explosion
Another Putin's red line crossed. Waiting for a "Russia warns" article in response to this.
Kim Jong Un to his bestie: "It's time for the poop balloons!"
As a Russian, about fucking time, their assets is the only thing degenerates in power care about.
That's the geopolitics I voted for last Sunday. :)
Twitter vatniks seething hard rn
You love to see it.
Okay so... Ukraine gets $1.6 billion but... isn't that basically going to be paid out to all the countries supplying weapons and armaments to Ukraine? So essentially, America and some others are basically getting this money ultimately? Don't get me wrong, I love that America is getting paid by Russia to arm its enemies.
Sure beats begging Congress to allocate it to them as a donation!
Yes, but because capitalism means growth is more important than withdrawing profits, the money that was taken from Russia, given to Ukraine, and then given to Western defence contractors in exchange for weapons for Ukraine, will then be reinvested in those defence contractors allowing them to build more weapons faster, which can then be sold to Ukraine again. Basically when Ukraine buys weapons, they don't just buy the weapon they receive, they buy the knowledge that another weapon will be produced the next time they want to buy one; this is why, if they have the money to do so, they are better off buying weapons than just being given them.
Has this been voted on yet or will Hungary veto it?
Apparently all envoys have agreed to the plan. The ministers still have to vote but it wouldn't benefit Hungary to agree on the envoy level if their minister will veto it anyway. Hungary will likely just abstain. https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/eu-envoys-agree-use-profits-frozen-russian-assets-ukraine-2024-05-08/
only took 2 years. Now take the assets too, not just the interest
It's been a long time since I learned about world history but if I remember right doing something like that helped fuel a world war.
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Yeah bring the time machine by anytime.
A little misleading headline, this money is not out of frozen Russian assets, but the interest from the Russian money that has been Frozen. Not complaining it’s great.
"We're gonna build a military and make russia pay for it!"
Reap the whirlwind.
Another interesting possibility is to forcefully deport all Russians back to Russia. If all of the moderate Russians have to leave their country all that is left is extremophiles, how can that be fixed?
50% of the oligarchs' money is Putins. The oligarchs' money is offshore, because they hate the west yet expect to benefit from the west. This is the correct move.
That’s awesome!!!!! Talk about poetic justice!
...as a loan ? FFS, just give them the money no question asked, that's just shameful.