The Weekly Distillation No.64
Ukraine; Food Prices; Morality of Sanctions; Nukes; Geopolitics; Hope
This newsletter is written for entrepreneurial leaders who want to learn about the moment we are living in but don’t have time to read broadly; who want to grasp the key themes; and who want to create better ways of advancing their mission. The Weekly Distillation covers a broad range of topics with the intent to curate the key narratives of the week, how they fit the broader themes of society and to pose questions that help you to think deeper on the application in your context. You can read more about the key themes I see here.
People once said……………
“Ukraine has a bio chemical weapons program using extracts from bats and h1n1 virus which are designed to target certain ethnic groups"- Vasily Nebenzya, Russia’s ambassador to the UN spouting nonsense, just before he claimed the Ukranians are shelling themselves and holding Ukrainian citizens hostage in cities.
“Many intelligence reports in war are contradictory; even more are false, and most are uncertain.” - Carl von Clausewitz
“Keep fighting – you are sure to win! God helps you in your fight! For fame and freedom march with you, And right is on your side!” - Taras Shevchenko, Ukrainian poet (814-1861)
“I’ve studied the possible trajectories of the Russia-Ukraine war. None are good. There are two likely paths: continued escalation, potentially across the nuclear threshold, or a bitter peace imposed on a defeated Ukraine.” - Christopher S Chivvis, Director of the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
“Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.”-Friedrich Nietzsche (who really was a miserable guy)
“Hope is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness.” - Desmond Tutu
Skim it in a minute
Well, that escalated fast
A friend of mine pointed out that I was wrong in my assertion that the Russians would only attack when the ground was covered in snow (and frozen underneath). He’s sort of right - but every picture of a Russian tank or truck abandoned in the mud makes me wonder what on earth they were thinking about. A couple of months ago I wrote about how a bear case for 2022 might include Russia invading Ukraine and it escalating into the West putting boots on the ground. It’s increasingly looking like I might be wrong on that too - not because of no boots on the ground but because we are well into the territory now where the use of nuclear weapons is no longer completely implausible.
Even to write that seems strange.
Have we learned nothing? I have a friend called Tyler who lives in Toronto. I call him a friend, we met at a party in a house in Beverly Hills that used to be owned by Elvis, and as 2 introverts we were both slinking along the walls . He’s an author and a campaigner for the abolition of nuclear weapons. He quoted this tweet from Mark Lynas recently - a thread that sums up the horror of a nuclear war.
The US is being clear on its messaging that it will not get involved. Yet Western former soldiers are travelling to fight in Ukraine. The UK will not fight Russia but is now supplying NLAWs (anti-tank missiles) and potentially Javelins (longer-range anti-tank) and maybe even SAMs (Surface to Air Missile). Poland is not fighting but would like to lend its entire collection of MiGs (Russian built fighter jets) to the Ukranian air force (vetoed by the US). Intelligence is almost certainly being shared from the US, France & UK with Ukraine. Funds are flowing to Ukraine for ‘lethal aid’ i.e. to buy things that kill Russians. There is a massive risk that Russia sees the West as active combatants in this war way before we see that ourselves.
Tell me this. If a man is hitting your best friend with big rocks, and a teenager next to him is handing him the rocks, would you consider that teenager to be a participant in that attack? Because Russia is the best friend in this story, and the teenager is the UK.
As I wrote last week, it is surprising the restraint that Putin has shown so far - no all-out cyber war, limited electronic warfare, restricted use of aircraft, no WMDs. And no major retaliation against the UK yet.
On the war front, Ukrainians are having significant success killing Russian soldiers. But Russia is still advancing around Kiev (5km yesterday alone), Odessa and into Khrakiv. The attacks on the Western cities today were to create fear, expand the refugee crisis into NATO countries and to take out airfields that might be capable of being used for weapons resupply routes.
Yet somehow all of the military gains and losses, and political and strategic manouverings are all nothing if we forget this - children are dying. There are 44 million people that live in Ukraine. Our countries are standing by and watching the systemic destruction of city after city, of likely chemical warfare in coming days, of no food and no water and no electricity in Mariupol, of constant shelling, of the destruction of a maternity hospital. There are no winners in war, only greater losers.
And in the rest of the world it has gone crazy
I used to write that geopolitical tensions and risks are rising but now it seems they are going right off the chart. A quick recap of the last few days, if I may:
North Korea unexpectedly launches 2 ICBMs as a test, ahead of an anticipated nuclear ready ICBM capable of hitting mainland US
Ceasefire violitions and shelling in the Armenia vs Azerbijian conflict are threatening to expand into war. Peace is kept by Russian troops. Armenian soldiers have been seen fighting in Ukraine.
A missile flew from India and landed in Pakistan
And if you thought that was bad enough, in some ways this article sums up the worst of the lot. Russia is stirring things up in the former Yugoslavia and there are material tensions rising and it is not implausible that fighting might break out again. Whilst NATO is distracted, Russia is taking advantage. The article is worth a read. The divides post the Balkan wars are still with us.
And did you forget about Covid? Highest case numbers (hospitalised) in Scotland for 13 months.
Does the future of the war lie in the Middle East?
My wife asked me tonight about how this war ends. I can only see three remaining outcomes - 1) Putin is bought off by the West and retreats 2) Putin flattens Ukraine and wins a horrible peace of constant repression and terror 3) War with the West. It seems that the Middle East may play a significant role in the calculus. There are a lot of countries that are playing both sides.
Turkey is a member of NATO but ruled by an authoritarian leader. It was on the opposite side recently of the Armenia-Azerbijian war. It gets S400 Air Defence systems from Russia. It is supplying Bayraktar UAVs (drones) to Ukraine, which is having a devastating effect on Russian columns of vehicles. It also guards the entrance to the Black Sea.
Syria is being approached to send fighters (as with Kazakhstan and Krygystan) and the Russians claims 16,000 troops are on their way.
One of the first calls Putin made was to Saudi Arabia. It exports 7m barrels of oil a day, versus Russia’s historical 5m bpd. By controlling supply, Russia can keep oil prices high (good for Russian income and bad for Western societies). Saudi is also not a liberal Western democracy, but is well connected into the US and may be an honest broker of a way out of the war. Interestingly the Saudis allegedly refused to take Biden’s call recently.
There are rumours that the US is accelerating talks with Iran on a return to the JCPOA (or its successor), the nuclear development treaty that the US withdrew from under trump. Iran, which is close to Russia and receives weapons from it and political support, could be a major oil exporter again and this may lower prices in the West.
Israel hates the idea of Iran being free to expand its nuclear ambitions (given it has threatened to wipe Israel off the map) and therefore will resist this. But surely not enough to align with Russia? Israeli Prime Minister Bennet flew to Moscow recently (on the Jewish sabbath, so very unusual), after Zellensky (who is Jewish) asked him to mediate with Putin (who is close to Israel) but returned home quickly, advising all Israelis to leave Russia. Israel, as an ally of the US, may also be an honest broker here.
The UAE is another oil powerhouse but recently when the Houthis (backed by Iran) attacked Abu Dhabi, the US took 3 days to call. Not the work of a close ally - and not surprising that when Biden called to ask for more oil, the call was snubbed.
And Yemen. A country mired in poverty, war and famine. Fought over between the Saudi faction and the Iranian faction, with a proxy war of the Government and the Rebels, but many people in horrific circumstances. Yemen is a tough country to live in at the best of times, which these are not. When food prices started rising previously, the Arab Spring began. Yemen will be one of the worst hit on food availability. Expect political turmoil in the region.
Russia losing is a not necessarily a good outcome. This article from Foreign Affairs explains why. So how do you get Russia to not lose, without flattening Ukraine or embroiling the world in WW3? You buy off Putin - basically appeasement. The US is claiming that it is offering off-ramps to Putin but he is taking none of them. Presumably as his armies are still advancing and the more chaos he creates, the greater the deal he will be offered to stop it. It’s hard to see the West doing much to offer Putin an off-ramp, but if he does, the path to mediation may just lie through Saudi or Turkey.
When the prices go mad and people riot
The consequences of the sanctions are hitting hard, in Russia and in the West. The rising price of oil, gas, nickel and many other metals is a major issue for any major producer. There is a rationale for sanctions - it gives you more to negotiate away (and helps Western leaders pretend they are helping Ukraine). They may indeed shape the peace.
The problem with sanctions is that they are, like nuclear weapons, indiscriminate. They harm babies as much as adults, the sick and the elderly as much as the professional and the healthy. Many studies have been done on the morality and effectiveness of sanctions and they are pretty damming:
The majority of the studies for this report highlight the negative impact that economic sanctions have on the average member of the population, whilst arguing that elites generally find ways to negotiate the sanctions. Moreover, the studies also demonstrate the failure of sanctions to reach their desired result in most cases, and when paired with the human suffering they enact they are often seen as comparable to armed interventions, but without the same success rate in regime change. Mack and Khan (2000, p. 280) succinctly summarise this point in their summary of the sanction literature - https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5bace471ed915d259c43d848/136_Impact_of_Economic_sanctions_on_poverty_and_economic_growth.pdf (The UK Government’s own website!)
They are also not going to be very effective if China continued to trade with Russia. Two weeks ago I said to watch what China did. So far it has stayed on the sidelines, but it clearly has more of a bias to Russia than towards the US. The term #dragonbear was coined a while ago to reference this relationship of authoritarian regimes that aims to reshape the world.
Don’t get me wrong - I’m sorry that your bread costs more money and you can’t now buy Russian vodka. I am however more sad about the impact on the poor in Russia, or the poorest here who have no spare cash to pay for what are essential food supplies. Or right across the Middle East, the Sahel and North Africa. Food prices are heading for ‘hell on earth’.
So we have:
Indiscriminate sanctions hurting ordinary Russians whilst the elite prosper
China undermining the effectiveness of the sanctions
The sanctions leading to rising prices of most commodities, thus hurting the poorest in society and likely to lead to mass protests
Russia murdering Ukranians and the West responding with sanctions
Sanctions will not end this war - they might escalate it but they won’t end it. So do we pursue peace through negotiations, or do we accept we are going to war and stop dragging this out at the expense of Ukranian children?
Thanks for reading. Last week’s newsletter received 530 views with a 69% open rate and the number of subscribers is now at 226. Thanks to the many people who sent positive feedback last week. I’m trying to balance an intellectual interest in the war, with an emotional horror at what is happening and anger at our unwillingness to do whatever it takes to help stop this. That combination doesn’t, in my view, always make for good writing so it was helpful to hear it landed in a good place for some. Let’s hope this ends soon and we can all get back to talking about different things.