Blazingcatfur

A tough choice between Muslim Europe and Muslim Russia.

Russia, with a birth rate of 1.5 children per woman, has invaded Ukraine, where the birth rate is 1.2 children per woman, to determine which nation with below replacement birth rates will go extinct the fastest. In the long run the only winners of the war to determine whether Ukraine will belong to the 1.2 or 1.5 people will be the Chechen and other Muslim soldiers doing the fighting.

The Chechens have a birth rate of 2.5. Their religion and mosques are more likely to inherit the territories they are fighting over than either the Russian or Ukrainian Orthodox churches.

With Russia largely blocked from the US dollar-based global financial system as a result of wide-ranging sanctions, some policymakers and money-laundering experts have warned that cryptocurrencies could provide a hidden route for Russians to preserve their wealth.

US Senator Elizabeth Warren said “cryptocurrencies risk undermining sanctions against Russia, allowing Putin and his cronies to avoid economic pain,” and called upon US regulators to clamp down. Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister, has repeatedly called upon crypto exchanges to block Russian users since the invasion began.

Ukraine will never bow down to a pro-Kremlin stooge

A week after it launched its attempted blitz across Ukraine, finally the Russian army has taken its first major city: Kherson, a key port city in the south of the country. But the defenders of Kyiv and Kharkiv have held out; elsewhere, Ukrainians have succeeded in repelling the invasion.

Two quite contradictory messages are emerging about the success, or otherwise, of the Kremlin’s efforts to control what Russians learn about the war in Ukraine. On the one hand, there is still, it appears, widespread ignorance about Russia’s actions, and disbelief about reports coming out of Ukraine. In other words, the official narrative prevails. But on the other hand, the imposition of an increasing number of media curbs, including on two independent domestic broadcasters and a slew of international news websites, suggests the authorities are running scared.

“How did we just kill a billion people?”

Over just three days, as I have done countless times over the last several years, a group of past and present senior U.S. government officials from both sides of the aisle gathered to wage a NATO-Russia war in a simulation at the end of 2019. In the course of what we called the NATO-Russia War of 2019, we estimated one billion people died. And if we aren’t careful, what happened in a simulation could happen if a NATO-Russia war erupts over Ukraine.

In fact, in the simulation I mentioned above from 2019, in which Russia invades Ukraine in a similar way as it did over the last week or so, not only does NATO get sucked in unintentionally, but Russia eventually releases nuclear weapons in its desperation. The result is an eventual escalation of bigger and more dangerous nuclear weapons whereby over one billion lives are lost.

There’s no way to feel confident about this report in the Times of London, as it tracks a little too closely with something Ukrainians would want the world to believe even if it weren’t true. The focus of Ukraine’s highly effective online propaganda effort has been to make the world believe that Russian morale is collapsing.