Subject: Re: Dope, your orders have changed
Thus far, despite some sanctions, Putin has been able to fund his war by selling oil to China and India. According to you, it's not possible for the West to make a unified front via sanctions in such a way to impose enough costs on China/India to lessen that flow. So there's...nothing...that's going to change the economic or strategic calculus as Putin doesn't care how many soldiers he throws away.

No - because what he's doing is not sustainable over the long term. He's not fully funding the war by selling oil to China and India. He's partially doing so, but it's nowhere near enough. So he's also draining the economy of most of its savings. They've run down their reserves from about $120 billion before the war down to around $30 billion. He's able to do this for the short run, and can stretch it out perhaps as long as into next year. But it's not sustainable over the very long run.

Russia is facing a critical challenge to its war effort in 2025: The nation is quickly running out of cash, with financial reserves potentially running out before the end of the year, one European economist estimates.

Anders Åslund, a Swedish economist who's a former fellow at the Atlantic Council, has said liquid reserves in Russia's National Wealth Fund could be depleted by the fall of this year.

That spells trouble for the nation's military efforts in 2025, he said, given how heavily Russia has relied on its wealth fund over the past several years.

Liquid reserves in the wealth fund have been drawn down from $117 billion in 2021 to $31 billion as of the end of November, Åslund noted.

Yet, according to its 2025 budget, Russia is on track to spend a record $130.5 billion on defense this year.

"The most critical shortage, however, is budget financing, as Russia's last liquid reserves are likely to run out in the fall of 2025," Åslund wrote in an op-ed for Project Syndicate that was published Tuesday. "Budget cuts will then become necessary. In the meantime, the war economy might also require price controls and rationing — the old Soviet sins. As the risk of a financial crash rises, Russia's imperiled economy is about to pose serious constraints on Putin's war."

https://www.businessinsider.co...

Because he has authoritarian control over the entire economy, he can start consuming parts of the economy to continue funding the war past the point where a "normal" government could. IOW, rather than trying to borrow money from domestic sources to fund the war effort, he can just seize stuff. But there are massive costs to doing that. It will basically wreck the free market part of the economy, create massive stagflation and reduction in living standards for all Russians, and require partially (perhaps significantly) going back to the Soviet-style command economy. Even Putin may not be willing to go there.

So if it can't defend itself without being held hostage by one of its least important members (note that Hungary is also in China's pocket) then it's useless.

An economic union that can't act in unison against what it determines as an existential threat. Or are you going to start arguing that the Europeans don't view the Russians as an existential threat?

Again, it's not a foreign policy body. It's not an organization that's intended to "defend" itself from foreign threats. It's a finance, trade, and economic organization. NATO is the military and foreign policy body that was established to defend against existential threats. The EU is an economic, financial, and trade union. It's supposed to be somewhat separate from the military/foreign policy functions of these countries.

Whether you like that or not (and honestly, both the conservative and the MAGA position has generally been more towards the BREXIT/nationalist opposition towards a stronger EU) doesn't change the facts. EU sanctions against Russia have already probably been implemented to the greatest degree possible, except for perhaps the hail mary they're trying to do to cut of Hungary and Slovakian oil imports. Secondary sanctions are not on the table.