Civil war in Ukraine

[pmaitra]

Here is a good machine for you:

@Akim is looking for a 4 wheeler, not a 2 wheeler.

 

[pmaitra]

In no case!
.............................................................

Glad to hear that you will not sell your car.

So, back to my point.

Good decision. Now, put this song as your car horn.

 

[Akim]

Here is a good machine for you:

I'm not allowed to operate the two-wheeled transport. I have a titanium plate in his spine.
We are gaining popularity, the installation of the electric motor in the wheel bike, but it's a small percentage.

Glad to hear that you will not sell your car.

So, back to my point.

I don't know that country. Far I'm going with this signal?)))

 

[jouni]

I'm not allowed to operate the two-wheeled transport. I have a titanium plate in his spine.
We are gaining popularity, the installation of the electric motor in the wheel bike, but it's a small percentage.

Ok, take care. I was lucky, I had this kind of bike for seven years and also rode like this...now when older it feels scary to even look this video.

 

[pmaitra]

I don't know that country. Far I'm going with this signal?)))

Not sure what you mean in your second sentence. If you are not getting signal in your cell phone, either your nearest tower is down or you have low battery. )))))

Anyway, good luck with your 4 wheel transport.

 

[Akim]

Ok, take care. I was lucky, I had this kind of bike for seven years and also rode like this...now when older it feels scary to even look this video.

In Odessa due to heavy traffic. The average speed of 30-40 km/h. sometimes I directly faster walk to work than by tram or car.

Not sure what you mean in your second sentence. If you are not getting signal in your cell phone, either your nearest tower is down or you have low battery. )))))

Anyway, good luck with your 4 wheel transport.

DNR, LNR, Novorossia - terrorist organization. You will arrest any police officer

 

[pmaitra]

DNR, LNR, Novorossia - terrorist organization. You will arrest any police officer

I will not arrest any police officer.

The only terrorists are the Kiev Regime forces who are taking orders from an unelected regime and killing civilians.

 

[Akim]

I will not arrest any police officer.

The only terrorists are the Kiev Regime forces who are taking orders from an unelected regime and killing civilians.

:blah::blah::blah:
...............................................

 

[pmaitra]

:blah::blah::blah:
...............................................

Very informative post.

 

[Akim]

Very informative post.

your comment does not deserve more.

 

[pmaitra]

your comment does not deserve more.

But certainly elicits a response.

 

[pmaitra]

The Spiritual Roots of Russian-American Conflict

Whatever Russia is called outwardly, there is an inner eternal Russia whose embryonic character places her on an antithetical course to that of the USA


Where is Russia headed?

Kerry R Bolton | (Foreign Policy Journal) | Russia Insider

This article originally appearedat Foreign Policy Journal


Excerpts:

The rivalry between the USA and Russia is something more than geopolitics or economics. These are reflections of antithetical worldviews of a spiritual character. The German conservative historian-philosopher Oswald Spengler, who wrote of the morphology of cultures as having organic life-cycles, in his epochal book The Decline of The West had much to say about Russia that is too easily mistaken as being of a Russophobic nature. That is not the case, and Spengler wrote of Russia in similar terms to that of the ‘Slavophils’. Spengler, Dostoyevski, Berdyaev, and Solzhenistyn have much of relevance to say in analyzing the conflict between the USA and Russia. Considering the differences as fundamentally ‘spiritual’ explains why this conflict will continue and why the optimism among Western political circles at the prospect of a compliant Russia, fully integrated into the ‘world community’, was so short-lived.

. . .

The connections between family, nation, birth, unity and motherland are reflected in the Russian language:

род [rod]: family, kind, sort, genus

родина [ródina]: homeland, motherland

родители [rodíteli]: parents

родить [rodít’]: to give birth

роднить [rodnít’]: to unite, bring together

родовой [rodovói]: ancestral, tribal

родство [rodstvó]: kinship

. . .

‘Russian Socialism’, Not Marxism
Of the Russian soul, the ego/vanity of the Western culture-man is missing; the persona seeks impersonal growth in service, ‘in the brother-world of the plain’. Orthodox Christianity condemns the ‘I’ as ‘sin’.[7]

. . .

Taras Bulba
Russian National Literature starting from the 1840s began to consciously express the Russian soul. Firstly Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol’s Taras Bulba, which along with the poetry of Pushkin, founded a Russian literary tradition; that is to say, truly Russian, and distinct from the previous literature based on German, French, and English. John Cournos states of this in his introduction to Taras Bulba:

The spoken word, born of the people, gave soul and wing to literature; only by coming to earth, the native earth, was it enabled to soar. Coming up from Little Russia, the Ukraine, with Cossack blood in his veins, Gogol injected his own healthy virus into an effete body, blew his own virile spirit, the spirit of his race, into its nostrils, and gave the Russian novel its direction to this very day.

Taras Bulba is a tale on the formation of the Cossack folk. In this folk-formation the outer enemy plays a crucial role. The Russian has been formed largely as the result of battling over centuries with Tartars, Muslims and Mongols.[11]

. . .

Petrinism
A dichotomy has existed for centuries, starting with Peter the Great, of attempts to impose a Western veneer over Russia. This is called Petrinism. The resistance of those attempts is what Spengler called ‘Old Russia’.[21] Berdyaev wrote: ‘Russia is a complete section of the world, a colossal East-West. It unites two worlds, and within the Russian soul two principles are always engaged in strife—the Eastern and the Western’.[22]

With the orientation of Russian policy towards the West, ‘Old Russia’ was ‘forced into a false and artificial history’.[23] Spengler wrote that Russia had become dominated by Late Western culture:

. . .

Katechon
Berdyaev states that while Petrinism introduced an epoch of cultural dynamism, it also placed a heavy burden upon Russia, and a disunity of spirit.[29] However, Russia has her own religious sense of mission, which is as universal as the Vatican’s. Spengler quotes Dostoyevski as writing in 1878: ‘all men must become Russian, first and foremost Russian. If general humanity is the Russian ideal, then everyone must first of all become a Russian’.[30] The Russian messianic idea found a forceful expression in Dostoyevski’s The Possessed, where, in a conversation with Stavrogin, Shatov states:

Reduce God to the attribute of nationality? … On the contrary, I elevate the nation to God…. The people is the body of God. Every nation is a nation only so long as it has its own particular God, excluding all other gods on earth without any possible reconciliation, so long as it believes that by its own God it will conquer and drive all other gods off the face of the earth…. The sole ‘God bearing’ nation is the Russian nation….[31]

. . .

But should I be asked, instead, whether I would propose the West, such as it is today, as a model to my country, I would frankly have to answer negatively. No, I could not recommend your society as an ideal for the transformation of ours. Through deep suffering, people in our own country have now achieved a spiritual development of such intensity that the Western system in its present state of spiritual exhaustion does not look attractive. Even those characteristics of your life which I have just enumerated are extremely saddening.[33]

. . .

Spengler saw Russia as outside of Europe, and even as ‘Asian’. He even saw a Western rebirth vis-à-vis opposition to Russia, which he regarded as leading the ‘colored world’ against the whites, under the mantle of Bolshevism. Yet there were also other destinies that Spengler saw over the horizon, which had been predicted by Dostoyevski.

. . .

Dostoyevski was indifferent to the Late West, while Tolstoi was a product of it, the Russian Rousseau. Imbued with ideas from the Late West, the Marxists sought to replace one Petrine ruling class with another. Neither represented the soul of Russia. Spengler stated: ‘The real Russian is the disciple of Dostoyevski, even though he might not have read Dostoyevski, or anyone else, nay, perhaps because he cannot read, he is himself Dostoyevski in substance’. The intelligentsia hates, the peasant does not. He would eventually overthrow Bolshevism and any other form of Petrinism. Here we see Spengler unequivocally stating that the post-Western civilisation will be Russian.

. . .

By the time Spengler’s final book, The Hour of Decision, had been published in 1934 he was stating that Russia had overthrown Petrinism and the trappings of the Late West. While he called the new orientation of Russia ‘Asian’, he said that it was ‘a new Idea, and an idea with a future too’.[40] To clarify, Russia looks towards the ‘East’, but while the Westerner assumes that ‘Asia’ and East are synonymous with Mongol, the etymology of the word ‘Asia’ comes from Greek Aσία, ca. 440 BC, referring to all regions east of Greece.[41] During his time Spengler saw in Russia that, race, language, popular customs, religion, in their present form… all or any of them can and will be fundamentally transformed. What we see today then is simply the new kind of life which a vast land has conceived and will presently bring forth. It is not definable in words, nor is its bearer aware of it. Those who attempt to define, establish, lay down a program, are confusing life with a phrase, as does the ruling Bolshevism, which is not sufficiently conscious of its own West-European, Rationalistic and cosmopolitan origin.[42]

. . .

Conclusion
As in Spengler’s time, and centuries before, there continues to exist two tendencies in Russia : the Old Russian and the Petrine. Neither one nor the other spirit is presently dominant, although under Putin Old Russia struggles for resurgence. U.S. political circles see this Russia as a threat, and expend a great deal on promoting ‘regime change’ via the National Endowment for Democracy, and many others; these activities recently bringing reaction from the Putin government against such NGOs.[47]

Spengler in a published lecture to the Rheinish-Westphalian Business Convention in 1922 referred to the ‘ancient, instinctive, unclear, unconscious, and subliminal drive that is present in every Russian, no matter how thoroughly westernized his conscious life may be—a mystical yearning for the South, for Constantinople and Jerusalem, a genuine crusading spirit similar to the spirit our Gothic forebears had in their blood but which we can hardly appreciated today’.[48]

Bolshevism destroyed one form of Petrinism with another form, clearing the way ‘for a new culture that will some day arise between Europe and East Asia. It is more a beginning than an end’. The peasantry ‘will some day become conscious of its own will, which points in a wholly different direction’. ‘The peasantry is the true Russian people of the future. It will not allow itself to be perverted or suffocated’.[49]

The arch-Conservative anti-Marxist, Spengler, in keeping with the German tradition of realpolitik, considered the possibility of a Russo-German alliance in his 1922 speech, the Treaty of Rapallo being a reflection of that tradition. ‘A new type of leader’ would be awakened in adversity, to ‘new crusades and legendary conquests’. The rest of the world, filled with religious yearning but falling on infertile ground, is ‘torn and tired enough to allow it suddenly to take on a new character under the proper circumstances’. Spengler suggested that ‘perhaps Bolshevism itself will change in this way under new leaders’. ‘But the silent, deeper Russia,’ would turn its attention towards the Near and East Asia, as a people of ‘great inland expanses’.[50]

While Spengler postulated the organic cycles of a High Culture going through the life-phases of birth, youthful vigor, maturity, old age and death, it should be kept in mind that a life-cycle can be disrupted, aborted, murdered or struck by disease, at any time, and end without fulfilling itself. Each has its analogy in politics, and there are plenty of Russophobes eager to stunt Russia’s destiny with political, economic and cultural contagion. The Soviet bloc fell through inner and outer contagion.

Spengler foresaw new possibilities for Russia, yet to fulfil its historic mission, messianic and of world-scope, a traditional mission of which Putin seems conscious, or at least willing to play his part. Coyer cogently states: ‘The conflict between Russia and the West, therefore, is portrayed by both the Russian Orthodox Church and by Vladimir Putin and his cohorts as nothing less than a spiritual/civilizational conflict’.[51]

The invigoration of Orthodoxy is part of this process, as is the leadership style of Putin, as distinct from a Yeltsin for example. Whatever Russia is called outwardly, whether, monarchical, Bolshevik, or democratic, there is an inner—eternal—Russia that is unfolding, and whose embryonic character places her on an antithetical course to that of the USA.

. . .

 

[jouni]

The Spiritual Roots of Russian-American Conflict

Whatever Russia is called outwardly, there is an inner eternal Russia whose embryonic character places her on an antithetical course to that of the USA


Where is Russia headed?

Kerry R Bolton | (Foreign Policy Journal) | Russia Insider

This article originally appearedat Foreign Policy Journal


Excerpts:

The rivalry between the USA and Russia is something more than geopolitics or economics. These are reflections of antithetical worldviews of a spiritual character. The German conservative historian-philosopher Oswald Spengler, who wrote of the morphology of cultures as having organic life-cycles, in his epochal book The Decline of The West had much to say about Russia that is too easily mistaken as being of a Russophobic nature. That is not the case, and Spengler wrote of Russia in similar terms to that of the ‘Slavophils’. Spengler, Dostoyevski, Berdyaev, and Solzhenistyn have much of relevance to say in analyzing the conflict between the USA and Russia. Considering the differences as fundamentally ‘spiritual’ explains why this conflict will continue and why the optimism among Western political circles at the prospect of a compliant Russia, fully integrated into the ‘world community’, was so short-lived.

. . .

The connections between family, nation, birth, unity and motherland are reflected in the Russian language:

род [rod]: family, kind, sort, genus

родина [ródina]: homeland, motherland

родители [rodíteli]: parents

родить [rodít’]: to give birth

роднить [rodnít’]: to unite, bring together

родовой [rodovói]: ancestral, tribal

родство [rodstvó]: kinship

. . .

‘Russian Socialism’, Not Marxism
Of the Russian soul, the ego/vanity of the Western culture-man is missing; the persona seeks impersonal growth in service, ‘in the brother-world of the plain’. Orthodox Christianity condemns the ‘I’ as ‘sin’.[7]

. . .

Taras Bulba
Russian National Literature starting from the 1840s began to consciously express the Russian soul. Firstly Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol’s Taras Bulba, which along with the poetry of Pushkin, founded a Russian literary tradition; that is to say, truly Russian, and distinct from the previous literature based on German, French, and English. John Cournos states of this in his introduction to Taras Bulba:

The spoken word, born of the people, gave soul and wing to literature; only by coming to earth, the native earth, was it enabled to soar. Coming up from Little Russia, the Ukraine, with Cossack blood in his veins, Gogol injected his own healthy virus into an effete body, blew his own virile spirit, the spirit of his race, into its nostrils, and gave the Russian novel its direction to this very day.

Taras Bulba is a tale on the formation of the Cossack folk. In this folk-formation the outer enemy plays a crucial role. The Russian has been formed largely as the result of battling over centuries with Tartars, Muslims and Mongols.[11]

. . .

Petrinism
A dichotomy has existed for centuries, starting with Peter the Great, of attempts to impose a Western veneer over Russia. This is called Petrinism. The resistance of those attempts is what Spengler called ‘Old Russia’.[21] Berdyaev wrote: ‘Russia is a complete section of the world, a colossal East-West. It unites two worlds, and within the Russian soul two principles are always engaged in strife—the Eastern and the Western’.[22]

With the orientation of Russian policy towards the West, ‘Old Russia’ was ‘forced into a false and artificial history’.[23] Spengler wrote that Russia had become dominated by Late Western culture:

. . .

Katechon
Berdyaev states that while Petrinism introduced an epoch of cultural dynamism, it also placed a heavy burden upon Russia, and a disunity of spirit.[29] However, Russia has her own religious sense of mission, which is as universal as the Vatican’s. Spengler quotes Dostoyevski as writing in 1878: ‘all men must become Russian, first and foremost Russian. If general humanity is the Russian ideal, then everyone must first of all become a Russian’.[30] The Russian messianic idea found a forceful expression in Dostoyevski’s The Possessed, where, in a conversation with Stavrogin, Shatov states:

Reduce God to the attribute of nationality? … On the contrary, I elevate the nation to God…. The people is the body of God. Every nation is a nation only so long as it has its own particular God, excluding all other gods on earth without any possible reconciliation, so long as it believes that by its own God it will conquer and drive all other gods off the face of the earth…. The sole ‘God bearing’ nation is the Russian nation….[31]

. . .

But should I be asked, instead, whether I would propose the West, such as it is today, as a model to my country, I would frankly have to answer negatively. No, I could not recommend your society as an ideal for the transformation of ours. Through deep suffering, people in our own country have now achieved a spiritual development of such intensity that the Western system in its present state of spiritual exhaustion does not look attractive. Even those characteristics of your life which I have just enumerated are extremely saddening.[33]

. . .

Spengler saw Russia as outside of Europe, and even as ‘Asian’. He even saw a Western rebirth vis-à-vis opposition to Russia, which he regarded as leading the ‘colored world’ against the whites, under the mantle of Bolshevism. Yet there were also other destinies that Spengler saw over the horizon, which had been predicted by Dostoyevski.

. . .

Dostoyevski was indifferent to the Late West, while Tolstoi was a product of it, the Russian Rousseau. Imbued with ideas from the Late West, the Marxists sought to replace one Petrine ruling class with another. Neither represented the soul of Russia. Spengler stated: ‘The real Russian is the disciple of Dostoyevski, even though he might not have read Dostoyevski, or anyone else, nay, perhaps because he cannot read, he is himself Dostoyevski in substance’. The intelligentsia hates, the peasant does not. He would eventually overthrow Bolshevism and any other form of Petrinism. Here we see Spengler unequivocally stating that the post-Western civilisation will be Russian.

. . .

By the time Spengler’s final book, The Hour of Decision, had been published in 1934 he was stating that Russia had overthrown Petrinism and the trappings of the Late West. While he called the new orientation of Russia ‘Asian’, he said that it was ‘a new Idea, and an idea with a future too’.[40] To clarify, Russia looks towards the ‘East’, but while the Westerner assumes that ‘Asia’ and East are synonymous with Mongol, the etymology of the word ‘Asia’ comes from Greek Aσία, ca. 440 BC, referring to all regions east of Greece.[41] During his time Spengler saw in Russia that, race, language, popular customs, religion, in their present form… all or any of them can and will be fundamentally transformed. What we see today then is simply the new kind of life which a vast land has conceived and will presently bring forth. It is not definable in words, nor is its bearer aware of it. Those who attempt to define, establish, lay down a program, are confusing life with a phrase, as does the ruling Bolshevism, which is not sufficiently conscious of its own West-European, Rationalistic and cosmopolitan origin.[42]

. . .

Conclusion
As in Spengler’s time, and centuries before, there continues to exist two tendencies in Russia : the Old Russian and the Petrine. Neither one nor the other spirit is presently dominant, although under Putin Old Russia struggles for resurgence. U.S. political circles see this Russia as a threat, and expend a great deal on promoting ‘regime change’ via the National Endowment for Democracy, and many others; these activities recently bringing reaction from the Putin government against such NGOs.[47]

Spengler in a published lecture to the Rheinish-Westphalian Business Convention in 1922 referred to the ‘ancient, instinctive, unclear, unconscious, and subliminal drive that is present in every Russian, no matter how thoroughly westernized his conscious life may be—a mystical yearning for the South, for Constantinople and Jerusalem, a genuine crusading spirit similar to the spirit our Gothic forebears had in their blood but which we can hardly appreciated today’.[48]

Bolshevism destroyed one form of Petrinism with another form, clearing the way ‘for a new culture that will some day arise between Europe and East Asia. It is more a beginning than an end’. The peasantry ‘will some day become conscious of its own will, which points in a wholly different direction’. ‘The peasantry is the true Russian people of the future. It will not allow itself to be perverted or suffocated’.[49]

The arch-Conservative anti-Marxist, Spengler, in keeping with the German tradition of realpolitik, considered the possibility of a Russo-German alliance in his 1922 speech, the Treaty of Rapallo being a reflection of that tradition. ‘A new type of leader’ would be awakened in adversity, to ‘new crusades and legendary conquests’. The rest of the world, filled with religious yearning but falling on infertile ground, is ‘torn and tired enough to allow it suddenly to take on a new character under the proper circumstances’. Spengler suggested that ‘perhaps Bolshevism itself will change in this way under new leaders’. ‘But the silent, deeper Russia,’ would turn its attention towards the Near and East Asia, as a people of ‘great inland expanses’.[50]

While Spengler postulated the organic cycles of a High Culture going through the life-phases of birth, youthful vigor, maturity, old age and death, it should be kept in mind that a life-cycle can be disrupted, aborted, murdered or struck by disease, at any time, and end without fulfilling itself. Each has its analogy in politics, and there are plenty of Russophobes eager to stunt Russia’s destiny with political, economic and cultural contagion. The Soviet bloc fell through inner and outer contagion.

Spengler foresaw new possibilities for Russia, yet to fulfil its historic mission, messianic and of world-scope, a traditional mission of which Putin seems conscious, or at least willing to play his part. Coyer cogently states: ‘The conflict between Russia and the West, therefore, is portrayed by both the Russian Orthodox Church and by Vladimir Putin and his cohorts as nothing less than a spiritual/civilizational conflict’.[51]

The invigoration of Orthodoxy is part of this process, as is the leadership style of Putin, as distinct from a Yeltsin for example. Whatever Russia is called outwardly, whether, monarchical, Bolshevik, or democratic, there is an inner—eternal—Russia that is unfolding, and whose embryonic character places her on an antithetical course to that of the USA.

. . .

These Dugin influenced/ promoted theories make Mein Kampf look like a masterwork of world literature.

 

[pmaitra]

These Dugin influenced/ promoted theories make Mein Kampf look like a masterwork of world literature.

Your struggle to compare everything Russian with Hitler makes your posts look like Dein Kampf.

 

[pmaitra]

Russian Unemployment Nears Historic Lows Despite Sanctions
Yet Bloomberg still wants to pretend this isn’t a positive sign

Jon Hellevig | (Awara) | Russia Insider


There's a job for anyone who wants one

This article originally appeared at Awara

The unemployment rate in Russia dropped in July to 5.3%, not far from the record low of 4.8% a year ago. Notably the number of the economically active population (those working or looking for a job) simultaneously grew from 76.5 to 77.2 million. This shows that real gains were made on the job market.

The unemployment rate must be considered the most accurate indicator of the real health of the economy as the other core indicators such are too much subject to estimations and conventions. Here we then have solid proof that not all is bad in the Russian economy as the press would have it.

According to some malicious and mendacious press reports the low unemployment rate is a mere chimera. The Russian government has supposedly attempted to save jobs in economically unviable areas in order to protect social stability rather in the way it was done during the planned economy in the USSR.

This is what Bloomberg claims in a story of August 18 titled Putin Revives Soviet Deal of Pretend-Work-and-Pay to Hide Crisis. This comes against the better knowledge we have about a slew of announcements of downsizing and shedding of workforce at Russian state owned corporations and authorities.

Indeed the Western press has been regularly gloating during the last few months over the reports of mass redundancy with headlines like these:

Russia hit with mass layoffs as economy worsens;

Russia’s Largest Carmaker Announces Major Layoffs;

Putin Cuts 110,000 Government Jobs;

Big Companies Cutting Staff in Gloomy Economy

At the end of this article, we will provide a brief digest of such press clippings for the education of those in doubt.*

It becomes remarkably clear that the unemployment has gone down against the backdrop of simultaneous mass layoffs and restructuring. The only proper way to interpret this is that the Russian economy indeed is resilient and that a real modernization of Russia’s economy is underway with new viable ventures absorbing the labor force made redundant.

Bloomberg continues its lamentation (or euphoria?) about the Russian job market by referencing to a recent OECD report on labor productivity in various countries. According to that report, Russians would be the least productive workers in Europe, as The Moscow Times interprets it. This is of course total nonsense partly based on Academic drivel and partly on calculation errors.

The Academic drivel part lies in the entire notion behind this measure, the idea that by dividing a country’s GDP by the number of hours worked would yield the productivity of the worker. (Let’s be fair, the question is in fact about the productivity of the economy as a whole including – and to a big degree – its management. By referring to low productivity of workers, The Moscow Times only wanted to add insult to the story.)

We have in this study from last year criticized this idea of trying to derive measures of labor productivity from the GDP figures. The GDP measures the value of goods and services produced and not the productivity. A lot of macroeconomic actions and events affect the GDP, such as taxes that push up the general price level and hence GDP in high-tax countries.

Borrowing at all levels of the national economy, government, corporations, and households increase GDP and therefore the base for calculating this faulty labor productivity measure without any real improvement in actual labor productivity. The more leveraged an economy is, the better this skewed labor productivity looks. – We could then argue that the Russian worker is particularly inept in participating in the debt-binge that is so totally defining the behavior of his Western peers.

But that’s not all. Not content with distributing such products of fantasy, the OECD also made a major calculation error. In their method they purported to use the GDP adjusted to purchasing power (PPP). Considering the significant devaluation and the volatility of the ruble during 2014 (the year of OECD refers to), it is indeed a daunting task to determine both the base nominal price of the hour of labor and the PPP coefficient. It seems to us that the correct adjustment coefficient should be closer to 3 than the 2 that OECD used. This would radically change the ranking of Russia in this Academic leisure game.

Finally, we must draw attention to one more gross error in the Bloomberg article. They claimed that “Putin” now has “some of Europe’s most restrictive labor rules”. Nothing could be further from the truth as any practicing lawyer or business executive in Russia knows. Russia has some of the most lenient rules (from point of view of the employer) in Europe allowing mass layoffs by mere giving of a two-month notice without being restricted in this by cumbersome labor union rules and legal restrictions.

*What follows is a brief digest of some of the news of frequent mass layoffs at large Russian corporations and government. Reading these one wonders who is pretending, Bloomberg or Putin!

Russia hit with mass layoffs as economy worsens

Tells: “Large layoffs have begun. The Moscow construction sector has seen 100,000 people being laid off. We see signs of crisis in the auto industry,” (Alexey Kudrin interviewed)

Russia’s Largest Carmaker Announces Major Layoffs

Tells: “AvtoVAZ, [maker of Lada cars] will shed 27,600 jobs under an agreement negotiated with unions. Management had earlier sought to cut some 36,000 positions.”

Russia’s Putin orders cuts to Interior Ministry payroll

Tells: “Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed an order reducing the maximum number of staff on the Interior Ministry payroll by 110,000, or about 10 percent, according to a document posted on a government website on Monday.”

Tens of thousands of officials will be dismissed

Tells: “Prime Minister of Russia Dmitry Medvedev has ordered to reduce the number of officials at the regional and Federal levels by 10%, which is about 150 thousand people. “

Russia can’t afford to pay state employees

Tells: “Russian President Vladimir Putin signed three new decrees into law that will slash government salaries — including his own and that of Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev — by 10% from 1 May. – The government has also announced plans to cut the number of government officials by 5% to 20%.”

Big Companies Cutting Staff in Gloomy Economy

Tells: “A slew of announced layoffs is rattling the domestic labor market, threatening to further undermine a weak economy. // Russia’s two largest banks, state-owned Sberbank and VTB, have joined the country’s biggest carmaker, AvtoVAZ, in declaring significant staff reductions in the upcoming months. // [VTB Group chief] Kostin said the group would consolidate some operations, leading to the layoffs. // Sberbank, the country’s largest bank by assets, said it would reduce personnel to 220,000 people over five years from the 250,000 people that it currently employs.“

Putin Cuts 110,000 Government Jobs

Tells: “President Vladimir Putin fired 110,000 Interior Ministry jobs with the stroke of a pen. The Interior Ministry control the police, paramilitary security forces, and the traffic safety agency.”

Russia’s automobile manufacturers begin layoffs campaign

Tells: “Russia’s automotive industry leader AvtoVAZ has launched a layoffs campaign” (see above), and

“Russia’s other automobile manufacturers have been reducing personnel, too. The General Motors plant in St. Petersburg will be working one shift a day instead of three as of October 1. Ford in Vsevolzhsk, the Leningrad Region, and Volkswagen, in the Kaluga Region, too, have declared they will be working shorter hours.”

Russia is imposing cuts on its healthcare system — and doctors aren’t happy about it

Tells: “As part of cost cutting measures, authorities announced last month they plan to close dozens of hospitals and lay off up to 10,000 medical staff. “

Russia’s Rosneft facing layoffs

Tells: “Russian media reported Thursday state-owned oil company Rosneft could shed as much as 25 percent of its staff as early as next month.”​

 

[pmaitra]

NATO troll uses two handles in the same discussion and gets busted. I wonder how many NATO trolls are out these using different ids.

@jouni, would you happen to know how much these trolls get paid?

El Guardiane eventually decided to uphold their "European Values" and did this:

 

[pmaitra]

Ukraine to Resell Russian Electricity to Poland at Double Price
Ukraine which itself is a net electricity importer will export electricity to Poland at twice the rate it pays itself for Russian power

(TASS - Russian news agency) | Russia Insider

KIEV, August 19 (TASS) - In the framework of aid to Poland, the power engineering sector of which has been hit by an anomalous heatwave, Ukraine will sell electricity to that country at 7.5 eurocents per 1 kwh, the National Commission for Energy and Utilities said on Wednesday.

Operators of Polish and Ukrainian power grids signed an agreement on August 17 on supplies of electricity to Poland. The national operator of power grids, Ukrenergo, says the maximum size of Poland’s emergency need for electricity is 235 megawatts.

Experts say 7.5 eurocents per 1 kwh is high enough a price. It stands in a marked contrast to the 3.68 eurocents per 1 kwh, which the Minister of Energy and Coalmines Vladimir Demchishin named to TASS somewhat earlier as the price of purchasing electric power from Russia.

Exports of Ukrainian electricity to Russia from January through to June 2015 totaled 0.8 million kwh, while in the same period of last year no such exports took place.

At the same time, Ukraine imported 1.393 billion kwh of electricity from Russia. The exports in June alone totaled 2.8 million kwh.

 

[pmaitra]

'Reverse Flow' Didn't Save Ukraine Money. It Cost It Millions Extra
Surprise, surprise. It would have been cheaper for Ukraine to purchase Russian gas directly from Russia, rather than get the same gas from the EU

(Sputnik - Russian news agency) | Russia Insider


Burning money

Excerpt:

As it turned out, the average price of European gas without transportation was $267 per 1,000 of cubic meters and $275 – including transportation towards the national border.

Interestingly, Russia’s Gazprom previously offered $247 for the same amount, but its proposal was rejected with a demand for a larger discount.

However the purchase of the European gas has become more of a political and, likely, a corrupt process, affecting the decisions to buy more expensive reverse gas. Thus the idea of reverse gas as an alternative to Russian gas can be discounted and could be seen as more of a “soap bubble”, which can burst at any moment.”

 

[jouni]

NATO troll uses two handles in the same discussion and gets busted. I wonder how many NATO trolls are out these using different ids.

@jouni, would you happen to know how much these trolls get paid?

El Guardiane eventually decided to uphold their "European Values" and did this:

Obviously not enough. I am worried that were all the foreigners have disappeared from DFI? Last year there were many people around the world, now only few. Not a good sign.

 

[pmaitra]

Obviously not enough. I am worried that were all the foreigners have disappeared from DFI? Last year there were many people around the world, now only few. Not a good sign.

Must be the bluster about sanctions in Europe turned out to be a financial disaster that they cannot pay enough trolls?