Who oversees the human and economic calamity in which the world is immersed?

Thousands of Civilian Deaths and 6.6 Million Refugees: Calculating the Costs of War

Six months after Russia invaded Ukraine, the human and financial tolls are incalculable. But the figures that have emerged paint a bleak picture. NYT, By Alan Yuhas, 24, 2022

A) Day after day for 181 days, the grim ledger of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine grows longer with each missile strike, burst of gunfire and report of atrocities.

B) Ukrainian civilians have paid a heavy price: 5,587 are confirmed dead, and the true number is believed to be in the tens of thousands. The number of refugees has surpassed 6.6 million.

C) Military losses have been heavy on both sides, with about 9,000 Ukrainians and as many as 25,000 Russians said to be killed.

D) Ukraine has lost control of 20 percent of its territory to Russian forces and their proxies in recent years.

E) The destruction has already cost Ukraine at least $113.5 billion, and it may need more than $200 billion to rebuild.

F) Donor nations have pledged to give Ukraine more than $83 billion in total.

G) Ukrainian agricultural production and other countries that depend on it have been hit hard. Even with grain ships on the move again, the world hunger crisis is dire.

Yuhas, Alan. “Thousands of Civilian Deaths and 6.6 Million Refugees: Calculating the Costs of War.” NYT, www.nytimes.com/2022/08/24/world/europe/russia-ukraine-war-toll.html. Accessed 24 Aug. 2022.

Moscow, late November 1986, on the Russian winter's eve...

^{Landing in Moscow at the gloomy Sheremetyevo airport was nerve-wracking.  Stepping off the plane, one encountered a gigantic marble mausoleum in a sepulchral silence. Soviet soldiers constantly watched the passengers, causing intimidation and fear.  Standing in that migration line waiting to be admitted to the country was a real nightmare.  To feel oneself being auscultated repeatedly by that undaunted migration officer became the most unpleasant experience one could imagine.}

^{After a few hours, it was time to proceed to the second point of pressure: checking luggage and all personal belongings.  It was a procedure the Soviet customs staff performed most thoroughly.  They inspected everything.  The X-ray equipment in that air terminal created a perfect scenery for a science fiction movie.  So was the deal.  Once those two impossible missions were accomplished, the desire to get to the hotel bordered madness.  The body longed for a hot bath.  I felt acute anxiety about being in a room; the fever and the cold produced by dengue knocked me down.}

^{Arriving at the hotel, I was informed that no rooms were available.  "What?" I asked, somewhat indignantly.  "Here I have the voucher indicating that I reserved a room and that it has been paid for."}

The era of Leonid Brezhnev had ended a few years ago, and with him, one of the most totalitarian periods of the Soviet Union also vanished.  Conversely, Yuri Andropov promoted numerous reforms emphasising economic openness and eliminating the large bureaucratic apparatus, although his term of office was short.  Konstantin Chernenko, his successor, continued along the same lines. However, his period lasted one year and months.  Then, in 1985, with Mikhail Gorbachev's coming to power, Perestroika began, and changes entered a more accelerated phase.  By the time of my brief stay in Moscow in 1986, it was still complicated to sense any substantial change in the Soviet Union.  Sitting in the hotel lobby, waiting for some solution to the problem, I got a call that they already had a room for me.  I also received coupons for various snacks. I immediately went up to the sixth floor, where my room was.  When I got out of the elevator, there was a desk with an elderly lady, noticeably overweight, with a floral scarf on her head, a sad grey sweater, and worn out like the regime, of course with a hostile attitude, who I guess must have been at least from the KGB.  Her task was to check your passport every time you entered or left the room.  When I was about to get the key, she looked at me fixedly, and without sympathy, she said: "There is no hot water."  "What do you mean?" I asked her, with a mixture of surprise and anger.  "No, there is no hot water," she repeated, with an arbitrary tone.  At the end of November, in Moscow, it is impossible to bathe in cold water.  The water comes out of the taps like ice.  "Does the sauna work?" I asked, looking for an alternative.  "Yes," she answered boldly.  It was the best option I could turn to in desperation for a bath after a journey that lasted more than twenty-eight hours.

The distinguished gentleman and former Chancellor of Germany, Gerhard Fritz Kurt Schröder (born April 7, 1944, in Blomberg, Free State of Lippe, Nazi Germany), has not been fortunate enough to know the reality in which the Stoic Russian people live.  He (Mr. Schröder) has lived under the golden domes of Moscow's Amur citadel with an abundance of caviar and Beluga vodka, poor man!!!  

The reality is that the Philosophy of Life of Fyodor Dostoyevsky (born November 11, 1821, in Moscow, Russia; died February 9, 1881, in St. Petersburg) is not part of the soul of Mr. Schröder.

Why did I decide to start with this story, the article, and Mr. Henry Alfred Kissinger's (born May 27, 1923, in Germany) assertion about President Vladimir Putin's personality?

What does Mr. Henry Kissinger mean by this statement about President Vladimir Putin?

Kissinger responds as follows to his assertion: "His key point is that the West wrongly assumed, in the years before Putin annexed Crimea, that Russia would adopt the order based on Western rules.  NATO misunderstood Russia's deep-seated yearning for respect. you mean we provoked Putin... the case of Vladimir Putin and his imagination of Russia, and all this consequent invasion and annexation going on in Ukraine.  According to reports, the Russian strongman's two favorite writers are Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky. Both, it seems, presented him with a choice: belief in the latter's notion of Russia as a kind of Slavic civilizing force to be imposed on inferior beings, and Tolstoy's more humanistic outlook.  And it seems that Mr. Putin has chosen the former." 

To try to be as objective as possible on this transcendental subject, Fyodor Dostoyevsky defines the life of the human being as follows: "Man must earn his happiness by suffering: It is the law of the land."

What is interesting is Mr. Henry Kissinger's reflection on perhaps anthropological behaviour (combining an intellectual biography with an explanation of methodological principles). Here it is necessary to be specific not of the noble Russian people but of its leaders about the "Slavic civilizing force that must be imposed on inferior beings."  Now, what is certain is that the Russian people, since their imperial past, subsisting on the Soviet socialist system and the current regime, have had to survive within a society alienating the uprooting of individual identity through the cruel policy of exile.  That is to say, the deliberate migration of its inhabitants to remote areas is culturally different from their birthplace.  Fyodor Dostoevsky knew the hardships of Siberia that affected his health with irreparable damage and, therefore, his life.  Putin, although he has not lived in exile, lived the law of the strongest to survive in the St. Petersburg underworld.

The answer is I wanted to make a parallel between these two antecedents.  That is, during my trip in November 1986 to the Soviet Union, the authoritarian communist system was intact.  And in the Portafolio magazine interview of Mr. Henry Kissinger in the French restaurant Jubilee in downtown Manhattan in New York on July 27, 2018, after meeting 17 times with President Putin, Mr. Kissinger defined him as "a Slavic civilizing force that must impose on inferior beings."  This assertion could be interpreted in two ways: in the end, it is the same thing, because of a superiority complex the first would be the incarnation of a czar, and the second, because of his conspiratorial character, that of a Siberian wolf hungry for revenge.  And there is more to the story of the background of the Nord Stream contract. 

First recap:

ü There are significant weaknesses in the pipeline safety system. For example, there are no "sealing mechanisms" along the pipelines, so all the contents will likely leak out.

ü A description in broad brushstrokes of the Soviet communist system in November 1986 has been provided.

ü Through Fyodor Dostoevsky's philosophy of life, we examined some aspects of the Russian leadership's human genesis in its vision of political power.

ü We attempted to interpret specific statements made by Mr Henry Kissinger about President Vladimir Putin's character.

ü Former President Donald Trump's claims about the Nord Stream 2 project to former German Chancellor Angela Merkel incorporated the idea of the United States.

ü Russian gas has been made available to Germany for 50 years.

ü Boris Johnson claims Germany wanted Ukraine to fold quickly after Russia's invasion – but he says it would've been a disaster.

On February 20, 2014, the Russian military operation to annex the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea began, which lasted until March 18 of the same year.  Geographically, Ukraine has played an essential role in marketing natural gas for Gazprom.  This position has given it a preferential price on the Russian gas market.  However, the discussion about this historical fact has focused on the Kremlin's expansionist policy through Gazprom, which makes sense.  Still, it is not the main issue in this geopolitical dilemma.

If we go deeper into the matter, nine months after the military coup facilitated by the Kremlin in Ukraine (i.e., on September 4, 2015), Gazprom announced in a press release from Vladivostok the signing of the agreement creating the company that will operate the second branch of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline: Nord Stream 2 agreement signed. VLADIVOSTOK, September 4, 2015 – Project shareholders have signed a contract to establish a company to operate the Nord Stream II pipeline, Russian news agency RIA Novosti reported on Friday.  Gazprom will hold a 51-percent stake in the new company, dubbed New European Pipeline AG.  French electric company Engie will have a 9-percent stake, and German chemicals company BASF, European power and gas fund E.ON, Austrian oil and gas company OMV, and Shell will each hold a 10-percent stake.  In June, Gazprom announced a €9.9-billion offshore extension to the Nord Stream pipeline connecting Europe to Russia, planned to increase Russia's gas flow to Europe to 55 bcm (1.94 tcf) per year.  "Nord Stream 2 will double the throughput of our direct, state-of-the-art gas supply route via the Baltic Sea," Gazprom chairman Alexey Miller said to RIA Novosti at the Eastern Economic Forum, where the deal was signed.  "It is important that those are mostly the new gas volumes, which will be sought for in Europe due to the continuous decline in its domestic production."

Thus, the business negotiations for forming the company that would be in charge of the Nord Stream 2 operation were in progress simultaneously with the preparation of the military operation for the invasion of Crimea. It is here that the big question arises: What information did the great friend of former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder – Lieutenant Colonel, Comrade Vladimir Vladimirovich (Platov) Putin, a former KGB agent, who from 1984 to 1990, towards the end of the Cold War, served as a spy in Dresden in the former German Democratic Republic – have that despite this serious geopolitical milestone, Germany would not abandon this strategic project for the Kremlin?

I think the question is not difficult to answer if one considers the resume of President Vladimir Putin:

Vladimir Putin→→→→ year of information exchange in the context of a long “male” friendship and the Laws of Omerta ←←←←Gerhard Schröder.  Then, the retort is that Lt. Col. Putin counted all the first-hand information from the Bundestag.

With this firm agreement, Vladimir Putin would have a gas pipeline with a length of about 1200 km buried at a depth of 60 to 80 metres in international waters of the Baltic Sea, where no one, absolutely no one, could have any intrusion on the pipe, the property of the citadel of Moscow.  This is Putin's first victory in his strategy to bend Europe by increasing the toxic dependence on Gazprom, an extraordinary checkmate to the West.

Until now, President Vladimir Putin's policy has been flawlessly executed on a German expressway with no speed restrictions. So far, so good – at least for the Kremlin.

The riddle:

Political risk refers to the difficulties that governments and businesses may face because of what are commonly referred to as political decisions - or "any political change that alters the outcome and the expected value and value of an economic action by modifying the probability of achieving the objectives."

“Political Risks | MXB.” Political Risks | MXB, www.mexbrit.com/political-risks.

The Kremlin was prepared to checkmate the West, counting on a new commando-style invasion of Ukraine, a short-term military campaign based on mistaken military assumptions. Finally, and probably most crucially, Germany would defy foreign pressure – particularly from the United States – and preserve strong relations with Russia. Nothing could be farther from the truth; the only thing Putin provoked with this invasion was European cohesiveness, notwithstanding Germany's hesitancy at the start of this crisis. After failing in his attempt to split Europe, President Vladimir Putin is using Gazprom, more specifically the Nord Stream pipeline, to limit gas supply – a devastating weapon for the global economy. The effects of this atrocity against humanity and the economy are well known.