Author: Blazingcatfur

Ever since he first seized the Russian presidency 20 years ago, a question has lingered around Vladimir Putin. Is he crazy, or not?

The jury always seemed to be out. On the one hand, there were the signs of relatively harmless crazy. The tiger-wrestling, semi-naked horseback riding and more. There were also more than enough signs of harmful crazy. Such as sending his henchmen to poison enemies in foreign capitals using nerve agents which, if leaked, would have killed tens of thousands of people in those cities.

Chaos creates countless opportunities for mistakes.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine is not a nuclear crisis. Yet. Concern about the role of nuclear weapons is perfectly understandable, however, now that a paranoid dictator has led Russia into a major war in the middle of Europe, attacking a country that shares a border with four of America’s NATO allies. A nuclear crisis is unlikely, but not impossible.

Looks like we’ve achieved nearly a full consensus on Mitt Romney’s vindication — even before Russia invaded Ukraine. A Gallup poll conduced between February 1-17 shows anger rising rapidly toward Russia, across all political denominations. It had already gotten bad shortly after Barack Obama’s 2012 bon mot to Romney that “the 80s called and they want their foreign policy back,” but Vladimir Putin’s aggression has turned it into a consensus even before the first shot was fired.

Oil shocks crash economies and enable enemies

Oil prices are surging. Brent crude has broken through the $100 per barrel mark — the highest level since 2014. And this could just be the start of a new oil price shock.

Russia is the world’s second biggest exporter — supplying nearly five million of the 100 million barrels of crude oil the world consumes every day. More than half of those exports flow westwards into Europe, through pipelines that cross Ukraine and Belarus. It’s difficult know which is the grimmest scenario: that the oil stops flowing due to sanctions or sabotage; or that the trade continues — filling the Kremlin’s coffers while Russian bombs rain down on Kyiv.

Occupying a nation can very often backfire, as the United States learned in Afghanistan

At least for the moment, it looks like Russian president Vladimir Putin is intent on conquering Ukraine, a nation he’s never believed has the right to exist.

While the fog of war always limits accurate real-time military analysis, it seems for now that Russia has committed to annexing at least large sections of Ukraine and is winning the day militarily with ease.