And If the Improbable Happened in Russia … Could Vladimir Putin Be Impeached?
The road is long, but the grumbling against Putin's stupid war continues to rise inside Russia.
The Kremlin propaganda continues to make believe that everything is going well in Russia after more than six months of the war. The rouble is holding up well, or the inflation rate is in line with the current European norm. However, the reality is quite different. Russia is doing everything to hide the real figures and to conceal the ongoing paralysis of the Russian economy and industry.
In the aviation industry, for example, more and more domestic flights are canceled in Russia due to the lack of spare parts for the planes used. Russia had to seize 400 Western planes at the beginning of the war in Ukraine, but without spare parts, which all come from the West, Russia will have difficulty flying them for a long time.
Currently, grounded planes are dismantled to recover spare parts which are then used to repair the planes that can still fly. But this will only last for a while.
And this is the case in many industries in Russia.
In the face of this stalemate that Russia is heading towards, it now seems that Russian politicians have reached a higher stage in their anger. It must be said that the prospect of Russia's defeat in Ukraine is becoming more and more obvious. Putin feels it well, and he tried to start negotiations at the beginning of September 2022 and does not stop gesticulating to threaten the West.
You know what they say in this type of situation. The more you talk and bluster, the weaker you are. This is the case with Putin's Russia.
Putin keeps blaming others for the failure of the Russian invasion of Ukraine that he ordered on February 24, 2022, despite common sense. He blames his generals and ministers. Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, for example, has already been pushed out of a seat in the Kremlin classroom, and it is the generals in the field themselves who are accountable for the state of affairs on the front.
A request for impeachment against Putin ... Never seen in Russia
Things went to a new level on September 8, 2022. The district council of Smolny, a district in the Russian city of St. Petersburg, now wants to hold President Putin himself accountable. The council is calling for impeachment, a procedure to depose the leader. Impeachment has already been implemented several times in the United States, the latest and most well-known being the two unsuccessful proceedings against former President Donald Trump.
Vladimir Putin allegedly committed “high treason” with his “special military operation” in Ukraine, the Smolny District Council ruled. The proposal to try Putin was submitted to the State Duma, the Russian parliament. The indictment was shared on Twitter by Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a former oligarch who incurred the wrath of the Kremlin when he was CEO of Yukos, an independent oil and gas company. As a result of these events, Khodorkovsky was forced to flee Russia and currently resides in London.
Smolny has been the cradle of protest in Russia in the past
Local politicians from Smolny have long been opposed to the war in Ukraine. So what is happening is half a surprise. In March 2022, they already wrote a letter to President Putin explicitly asking him to withdraw Russian troops from Ukraine and to immediately submit his resignation as head of state.
It is striking that the protest of local authorities against Putin starts in Smolny. It is in this district that the October Revolution started on November 7, 1917 (in the Julian calendar November 7 corresponds to October 25). It was here that Vladimir Lenin founded the Bolshevik Party, the Marxist offshoot of the Social Democratic Labor Party that overthrew the Tsars and transformed Russia into the Communist Soviet Union.
It would be an amazing sign of history if the internal wind of revolt against the dictator Putin were to start once again from Smolny. There is still a long way to go before Putin is removed. However, this type of protest that is rising in Russia shows that the Russian defeat that will eventually occur in Ukraine may well be fatal to the dictator of Kremin.
It is finally only a question of time and Putin is playing his cards right now to break the cohesion of Europe with the approaching winter and the use of Russian gas as a weapon.
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You obviously have incomplete knowledge of how the Russian military operates.No Russian general whether they be from Imperial time, Bolshevik times, or today counts on spare parts. They bring their own machine shop with them and fix things on the go. Meanwhile, I refer you to an eminent French economist so you can read his paper in French, but I will excerpt it for you here.French economist Jacques Sapir once wrote an article about the Russian economy. This analysis is beyond any reasonable dispute. It is simple, hard economic facts. Ukraine is a dead dog and the best solution possible is to partition it between Russia, Poland and Hungary. The people can then choose which government to live under, but whatever their choice it will be far better than the corrupt Soris installed mafia led by a homo-erotic dancer turned Woken Hero. It will soon be revealed that the Obiden Junta;'s reckless shipments of tens of billions of "aid" to Ukraine was blackmail by the Zelensky mob. They have the incontrovertible evidence on Biden and his crime family and if the billions do not flow they will be exposed.
Returning to Jacques Sapir:
I quote him in general below.
A big reason for this miscalculation, according to Sapir, is exchange rates. If you simply convert Russia's GDP from rubles to dollars for comparison, you would indeed see it as an economy as large as Spain's. However, such comparisons are meaningless without adjusting for PURCHASING power parities, which account for productivity and living standards, and thus per capita welfare and resource use. In fact, PPP is the preferred measure of most international institutions, from the IMF to the OECD.
And when you measure Russia's GDP based on purchasing power parity, it's clear that Russia's economy is actually more like Germany's size, Russia's about $4.4 trillion versus Germany's $4.6 trillion. From the size of a small, somewhat sickly European economy to the largest in Europe and one of the largest in the world, this is not a gap to be ignored.
Sapir also encourages us to ask: "What is the share of the services sector compared to the share of the products and industry sector?" In his view, today's services sector is grossly overvalued compared with the industrial sector and commodities such as oil, gas, copper and agricultural commodities. If we reduce the importance of services as a proportion of the global economy, Sapir says, "Russia's economy is much bigger than Germany's, maybe 5 or 6 percent of the world economy," more like Japan than Spain.
This makes intuitive sense. When times are tough, we know it's more valuable to provide people with the things they really need, like food and energy, than with intangible things like entertainment or financial services. When a company like Netflix trades at a price-to-earnings ratio three times higher than Nestle, the world's largest food company, that is more likely a reflection of frothy markets than actual reality. Netflix is a great service company, but as long as some 800 million people in the world are undernourished, Nestle still offers more value.
All of which means that the current Ukrainian crisis helps to clarify our views on what we rightly regard as "archaic" aspects of the modern economy, such as industry and commodities, whose prices have soared this year; And perhaps overvalued services and "technology" whose value has recently collapsed.
The size and importance of the Russian economy is further distorted by ignoring global trade flows, of which Mr Sapir estimates Russia "may account for 15 per cent". For example, while Russia is not the world's largest oil producer, it has been the largest oil exporter, surpassing even Saudi Arabia. The same is true of many other basic products, such as wheat, the world's most important food crop, of which Russia controls about 19.5 per cent of global exports, as well as nickel (20.4 per cent), semi-finished iron (18.8 per cent), platinum (16.6 per cent) and frozen fish (11.2 per cent).
Such an important position in the production of so many basic commodities means that Russia, along with several other countries on earth, is in many ways the linchpin of the globalised production chain. Unlike "maximum sanctions" on countries like Iran or Venezuela, trying to cut Russia off from world markets has meant and will likely continue to bring about a huge restructuring of the global economy.
Much of this has been proved by the war in Ukraine. In fact, by controlling oil, gas, food and other commodities, the war of sanctions waged by the United States and its Allies in the Americas, Europe, and Asia has shifted to the originators and their people.