The impact of the West’s sanctions just seems to be getting worse and worse for Russia.
Now, 98% of Chinese banks — even small regional ones — are refusing to accept direct Chinese payment transfers from Russia, Alexey Razumovsky, the commercial director of the payments company Impaya Rus, told the pro-Kremlin media outlet Izvestia.
Such issues appear to have intensified over the past three weeks, as smaller Chinese financial companies were still processing Russian payments in May and June, Izvestia reported.
Last month, the Russian outlet Kommersant reported that about 80% of bank transfers made in the Chinese yuan were bouncing back with no explanation after being stalled for weeks while banks decided whether they could transact.
Razumovsky told Izvestia the payment challenges with Chinese banks could contribute to supply-chain difficulties and inflation in Russia.
Wow, tough break guys. I’d offer to help you out, but all I’ve got is half a roll of quarters and I need to use that for laundry. Good luck though.
Look, I’d help out, but all my donation budget had already gone to Ukraine (and Palestine).
Something’s happening in China. There’s talks that Xi doesn’t appear on official documents anymore.
Maybe a soft coup happened or similar.
That’s a pretty bold statement. Do you have a source?
Nothing official. Mostly speculation, but not
illogicalidle ones.Maybe I shouldn’t have said that, since there obviously isn’t an official source on it, just some YouTube channels reporting about China that claim it.
Well. They’re claiming it for two years already, but this time seems different.
So it’s not to be taken seriously and is just a gut feeling fueled by the YouTube algorhythms and news like this post.
I suppose time will tell.
was it laowhy86? That’s the only guy I’ve seen talking about it.
Between this and the looming collapse of the Russian rail network (due to lack of maintenance and supply chain issues for rolling stock parts), it’s finally looking really good for Ukraine. Now we just need Kamala to win so that they keep getting supplies for the campaign.
If everything goes right, Ukraine could topple the Putin regime. Kind of crazy to think about right now though.
The craziest part of all this is that when the invasion of Ukraine started, some of my coworker friends had genuine concerns that pootie was gonna lean on his nukes.
He still might! Suppose this goes on for several more years and Ukraine keeps getting support and gaining more territory. Then they decide to make a run at capturing Moscow, Prigozhin style. Putin might decide that nuking Kyiv is his only chance at stopping Ukraine from toppling his regime!
If there was ever a good time to use tactical nukes, it was now. Since he didn’t there’s obviously a reason, be it their questionable state or them being scared of the west’s retaliation.
Yes or he’s afraid that if he gives the order to fire a nuke it will be refused and then he is finished. Firing a nuke at Ukrainian forces on Russian soil is no trivial matter. You end up destroying Russian towns and civilian infrastructure.
Ukraine’s forces are now spread out too much within the Kursk region. He needed to fire the nuke at the beginning of the incursion. But of course that would’ve been before he had the chance to evacuate all the civilians from the area.
I think the realities of all this prove that tactical nukes are pretty useless as a defensive weapon. They seem to mainly have their use for a surprise first strike.
Gloomy yet plausible 🫨
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Between that, his US lap dog Trump looking like he’s going to lose the elections badly, and Ukraine taking control of more Russian territory in a week than they have been able to take from Ukraine in months, Putin is definitely not sleeping well right now.
The latest national numbers I saw was Harris 48 / Trump 47. That’s not “Trump looking like he’s going to lose badly”.
Well, there’s no way he’s going to lose gracefully
(I know that’s not how you meant it)
I’m honestly quite concerned that his cronies might actually succeed in stealing the election this time around.
They learned from their mistakes.
Last time, Donnie was at the helm, knew it was coming, and deliberately did and did not make certain phone calls that day.
This time, the opposition will be at the helm. And this time, we are expecting it.
If “what they learned” didn’t include diet and exercise (it didn’t), I’m honestly not too worried about how it’ll turn out.
Can we agree on him not being capable of doing anything gracefully? 😁
To be fair, his air accordion act, playing along to the circus music is his addled head, is fairly on point.
Nobody thought Trump would win the first time, Ukraine is still in rough shape, and this could be a new way to avoid sanctions. I like the optimism, but there are reasons to be skeptical.
Indeed, Russia still has some currency reserves, the shadow gas fleet, huge increase in domestic production of arms, and has some how kept it’s GDP growth up. Not that it doesn’t have issues on it’s horizon, but time is still there to wiggle around them. Also you are correct about Ukraine, many reasons to be enthusiastic, but Winter still looks like it might be rough.
And Trump, well yea still many days to the election and he may yet pull Vance’s thumb out of his ass. Can’t say I don’t like the nice poll numbers from swing states though, seems like Harris has some good appeal to the swing voters.
Thanks for keeping it real. We can celebrate the wins but absolutely cannot become complacent.
This is emphatically false. I knew Trump had a chance, and so did countless others. I voted for Hillary despite really disliking her because of this.
Only idiotic democrats were overconfident enough to think he couldn’t win.
I also thought there was a good chance he could win. I hoped he wouldn’t, but I sure didn’t think it was even close to an impossibility.
As long as the Electoral College exists, there remains an almost 1 in 5 chance that the will of the American people will be overturned.
Sure, I’ll admit it. Of course I voted and encouraged anyone to, but the guy was a long time real estate con man known for not paying his vendors and for questionably complex tax avoidance. He bankrupted a casino, twice, and was known for a gold toilet. His biggest claim to fame was a huge misplaced ego. Have you listened to his speeches? How could anyone have taken his candidacy seriously, voted for him, expected him to win?
I prefer to think of it as giving a naive amount of credit to my fellow voters. They must have been “breaking shit” out of frustration and would vote seriously in the actual election. Nope
his US lap dog Trump looking like he’s going to lose the elections badly
Eh, we’ll see. Trump’s “crushing defeat” of Hilary came down to 80k votes in three states. Biden’s “decimation” of Trump was an even-thinner 40k votes across a slightly different mix of three states.
Dems love to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Just ask OG Tankie Michael Dukakis, Professional Wife-Kisser Al Gore, and Future First Woman President Hilary Clinton. All three gave up wide margins in the last few weeks of the race.
Would be nice to see Dems run up Reagan/LBJ-esque margins in 2024, but even the best polls still have Kamala in an electoral dead heat despite being miles ahead in the popular vote. She could very easily get Bush v Gore’d in some swing state with a red governor like Georgia or North Carolina or Nevada.
I doubt the Georgia governor would let Trump win because Trump hates him
GA passed laws that gives them the option to ignore the results, just N Carolina did a couple years ago
Yes, DO NOT GET COMFY, VOTE NO MATTER WHAT.
Now that I got that out of the way, yes yes yes, it can always be close and I think it will be just like it was close even in 20 goddamn 20, but here’s the thing.
Since the 2020 election:
- january 6
- asking for more votes than he had from governors
- stole confidential docs, lied about it, refused to give it up, was raided and still docs are missing, nuclear secrets shared to fat fucking foreign oligarchs simply because they paid to hang out at MAL. Many of America’s informants and spies started getting captured in disturbing trends out of nowhere…
- SA/Rape case with EJCarrol (judge officially wrote Donny was civilly liable for digital rape because she couldn’t prove it was his penis vs his finger), the multiple defamation cases that followed
- Felony conviction for election interference
- RICO case in Georgia for trying to steal votes
- Killed Roe precedent
- project 2025
- extreme side-effects of his frontotemporal dementia impossible to ignore by even laypeople
- He has said he will be a dictator on day 1
- Spoke about wanting to split up NATO
- Told Netanyahu to finish the job
- Clearly loves Putin, Xi, Kim, Maduro, etc. (dictator fascists, what he dreams of becoming)
- Switches views based on who is paying him (asked oil barons for a billion dollars to destroy whatever regs they wanted, Elon starts donating and Trump tells us he has to shill for EVs now, hated TikTok until Thiel (who owns stock related to TT) talked him into supporting it
I’m happy to provide sources on any of the above points :)
It’s not just that Dems have to win by +5% to make sure the Electoral College matches the popular vote, either. Now it almost has to be +7% to +10% to keep Republican election officials from contesting the result and it mattering in the end.
The Electoral College was bad enough. Its only justification is “whelp, them the rules”. Now Republicans made up a new set of rules and expect us to follow them.
OG Tankie Michael Dukakis
I was too young to have memories of the Dukakis run. Was he actually a tankie in the Hexbear sense, or are you just referencing that picture of him riding a tank?
are you just referencing that picture of him riding a tank?
That, yes
Although, it’s curious to see people draw the line between “Neoliberal/Neocon warhawk” and “Guy on the Internet who likes Stalin”.
Get under the hood, and the real distinction is economic policy, not military policy. They’re both big fans of kicking people’s teeth in to get their way.
We must never forget how much it matters to understand that the war is against the Russian government and that us and the Russian people are the victims of that government.
Most be really bad now when China stop helping them lol
Yeah China was staunchly neutral about this war and I suspected was subtly making it worse/prolonging it to keep the west distracted, wasting money, and divided while they put pressure on Taiwan and other interests.
But this is weird. I hope they aren’t doing this to keep funds in the country for their own eminent war.
Maybe China just got sick of Russian checks bouncing. They weren’t helping Russia because they like each other.
Well they do kinda “like” each other in that they rely on each other. They make trades with each other and their economies rely on each other. That will affect China. These are the types of reasons we are helping Ukraine, its not like we “liked” them or that geopolitics is ever based on “liking” per se. Anyway, it’s super weird.
There is a rumor that a coup had placed Xi under house arrest and had silently taken over the country a few weeks ago. Normally rumors don’t mean anything in most countries. But this is China where anyone speaking out against their leader would mean you’d get “disappeared”.
Supposedly the coup plotters don’t like the direction China has taken and want a return to good relations with the West when everyone was making money.
Moving away from relations with Russia could be a sign of this.
The rumour of coups against Xi always comes and goes. There was rumour of Xi being arrested as well during COVID.
You never hear rumors of them just taking a break. It’s always some distraction happening that are almost always never true.
This is from July, but there’s definitely financial shenanigans going on. And if the Chinese economy tanks… https://essanews.com/chinas-banking-turmoil-40-banks-vanish-as-crisis-deepens,7047618605385345a
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Press ‘x’ to doubt
Those rumours have been around for years, every time he drops out of public view for a while
But…but…but we are besties, Xi jinping ? - Putin probably
I don’t have a Chinese Riker, sorry.
I tried to make one, but ironically, all the famous Chinese trombone players have copyright protection on their images, so I couldn’t.
The slow-moving dildo of sanctions rarely comes lubed.
This is no problem for Russia since their economy is booming! As the tankies on Lenny repeatedly has reminded me, sanctions has no effect att all!
They started buying weapons from N Korea with goats. Nothing signifies a strong economy like hocking food.
Who’s Lenny?
For some reason it’s really hard to teach Gboard not to autocorrect Lemmy to Lenny.
The guitarist from Notörhead
Lenny Kilnister?!
!Also, Lemmy played bass.!<
Technically still a guitarist
The Russian version of Lemmy
…or auto correct 😁
Some people have likened the economic growth that Russia is experiencing like that of the US’ post war boom. So, some analysts believe that Russia will be okay for the foreseeable future. I don’t want to sound coping and I still leave room for imagining other possibilities (the war is still unpredictable after all), but those analysts haven’t considered that 1) USA became the sole major free market economy untouched after World War 2 and the rest of the world became reliant on US as the result. 2) USA has not been sanctioned during and after the war by major Western powers, unlike Russia is today.
Russia has already won.
Economy. War.
Wars.
Democracy.
GDP.
Everything.
Why the hell are people downvoting this one, it seems pretty obvious that it’s sarcasm
Granted it does not follow the 3+1 joke formula.
War Economy is still economy. Right? RIGHT?!
laughs in American post-WW2 propaganda
I assure you that a handful of well-positioned arms dealers in Russia are getting extraordinarily wealthy. I just wouldn’t want to be one of the kids of a 20-something young man who has been shipped to the front right now, cause they’re growing up broke as shit.
I mean they were broke as shit before, Russia has been broke as shit since the 90s.
'91 is the year that privatization started in earnest.
The most booming economy.
so there’s a hole in the market and I can make a lot of money?
In this instance there would be real consequences
Just gotta make enough money to pay off enough senators before you get punished
meh
Uhoh they’re in t’ruble!
Why would they not just use cryptpcurrency at this point?
Like, there is a solution right there. I don’t support either of their governments btw but I mean come on, the answer is right there
Lol
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Why would they not just use cryptpcurrency at this point?
Waiting two hours for my cryptocurrency transaction to process against a third party broker “NoScamSafeTransact.ru” only to discover that I’ve had my wallet hacked and all my funds plundered.
Lol well this depends on the crypto used and its hard to think that bank fees of any kind would be better than to just pay the fee to speed the transaction up.
Also, presumably they would use dummy wallets and not send amounts from their cold wallet with the full amount on it.
Idk, just seems like they deserve the trouble at this point if they can’t utilize the ways around it.
its hard to think that bank fees of any kind would be better than to just pay the fee to speed the transaction up
Paying which fee using what currency to which third party? Hell, can you even get a good conversion rate on Rubles to Yuan, by way of some third crypto broker, at this point? Seems like its the same problem (foreign brokers don’t trust Russian banks to process transactions) with extra steps.
Also, presumably they would use dummy wallets
Adding a fourth point of failure in my Ruble to Crypto to Yuan transaction. What could go wrong?
Idk, just seems like they deserve the trouble at this point
Tell you what. Take $10 and convert it to Rubles. Then convert those Rubles to crypto. Then cover the crypto to Yuan. Then buy something and ship it from China to Russia. And let me know how this experiment ends. Then you can wax poetic about how only an idiot wouldn’t be doing it your way.
But all this is assuming they want to convert it into another currency at all, I was thinking why not just use it in that form for international trade although some of the other comments have explained the dollar amount equivalent wouldn’t be able to exist right now due to mining limits.
But why not use a combination then of crypto, precious metals, and just straight up raw currency. I mean if chinas bank doesn’t want to accept it they could just ship a container with money in it directly to them right?
I mean criminal enterprises move BILLIONS all the time without banks so I don’t see how its so hard for two of the larger nations in the world.
Edit: I’m guessing the conversion into the Yuan would betheissue with sending them straight up cash huh?
I mean criminal enterprises move BILLIONS all the time without banks
That’s totally untrue. In fact, we’ve had a litany of bank scandals - some very recently - involving large scale criminal financial trafficking. HSBC, JPMorgan, and DeutchBank have all gotten flak for processing transactions on behalf of crooked clients. USB is practically legendary for their numbered accounts and anonymous transactions.
The value of cryptocurrency is usually tied to the price. The price is determined at exchanges. Russia however can’t use foreign exchanges as the accounts there normally require identification (some offer pseudonymous crypto to crypto swaps) as the exchanges don’t accept Russians, and if you want to convert crypto to a currency, you need a bank account calling in that currency, which is not happening. If the exchanges even transferred money to those as they’d lose their license.
The value of cryptocurrency is much less than what you see on CMC etc. if you can’t actually convert it to those currencies. Which is the main issue.
Add to this that most crypto currencies can be traced and having transacted with known Russian problematic accounts - even via proxies - taints your wallet, making it hard to impossible to buy and sell on exchanges later down the line.
The points do make sense. But I mean at that point why not just use the crypto solely for international trade with other parties going the same thing?
Especially using the one that can’t be traced or tied back to any entity (Monero)
At that point it seems it would be trivial to convert into cash but also why would you have to if you could just use it between countries like that.
I mean I know people hatecrypto here but even they have to admit it seems like a better idea than getting no money through at all.
Because for those states and companies, crypto is a toy and not real money. Also not having a bank means your transactions are always final (nobody is putting up with multisig).
Crypto has been great for buying drugs via darknet and taking money from investors for partnerships that don’t exist or make sense. Been using it myself actually. Also facilitates gambling, either via crypto casinos or directly against its price. Outside of that, traditional banking wins.
It’s also questionable whether a state could acquire so much crypto quietly at this point. Most big holders are either very publicly about it, like Argentina, or confiscated it from illegitimate sources (like when Germany raided a darknet market operator).
I suppose they could mine it all themselves. To handle all its international trade, a good sized nation state would need the electrical production of a smaller nation state just for that.
The amount of crypto you can theoretically mine is independent of your hashrate and only dependent on the block reward plus transaction fees… and these are minuscule compared to what a state needs.
In practice, if an actor held even slightly more than 50% hashrate, trading with him would be a major risk. Which means that’s about the upper limit of what you can actually mine.
See this was what I was really wondering. Some cryptp like Dogecoin and Monero have unlimited amounts that can be mined and while certainly not practical in my mind I was 100% thinking why not just mine a fuck ton of Doge or something and have it agreed upon that that is the international trade money.
I do see how converting it into a fiat currency would be problematic though but in that case wouldn’t gold or silver also he able to be utilized?
The goal of a banking system is to move money (possibly a lot) quickly, without physical exchange, for the maximum number of goods and services. States also want to control a currency for their fiscal policy, and they want to be able to go into debt.
Established crypto fails the maximum number, fiscal policy and debt criteria. As soon as you introduce mandatory physical exchange via previous metals, what remains?
And yes; Monero theoretically has an infinite amount of coins. However, it has reached tail emission since about two years, meaning the block reward is 0.6XMR every two minutes, which currently equates to about $65.000 per day. However, mining requires CPUs, which would need to be acquired first.
All in all, the current numbers don’t make it a feasible solution.
Pass the bong brother!
This is not the crypto flex you think it is…
Not flexing. Its a way to make decentralized payments.
Why would they not utilize it more? I saw that Russia said they would and then they just keep talking about banks not accepting the cash.
Imaginary money you say.
Bitcoin has a marked capitalization of about 30 billion USD. A S-400 air defense system costs 1.2 billion USD. So you could trade 25 of those systems using the entire “supply” of bitcoin. Russia calimed to have about 450 of these systems before the war. Even if they would use bitcoin for trading military equipment, cryptocurrency simply does not have the volume to pay for a meaningful amount of equipment.
No sane country is gonna accept payment in wildcat bank money, and there’s no reason to not continue to use the ruble within russia
