A couple of worthwhile calls on your time today. Let's take the lighter one first.
From the mercurial AEP, whose regular output on energy-related issue is Pollyanna-ish net zero bilge, a lengthy take-down of the deep impracticalities of the putative AI boom as it is currently envisaged. The energy aspect is of course one major strand; cooling-water is another, and the emptiness of "OK, well we'll just build our own gas-fired power plants instead". And then the financial implications! Somewhere in there (or maybe it was BTL), though, there is a hint of how things may progress in subtler ways. If AEP is correct on the brick wall of physical limitations to AI's currently-planned trajectory, it'll need to be a subtler approach. Otherwise ... bubble is bubble.
From Zelenskyy; an open letter to Putin, suggesting face-to-face negotiations - which is worth reading in full, not just some newspaper summary.
At the very least, this is a useful and pretty comprehensive tour d'horizon from the Kyiv perspective, and a summary of just how many cards Mr Z holds right now. Interestingly, though, whether by design or accident it's also pretty insulting to Putin. Maybe Z has inadvertently overdone the projection of the (current) strength of the Ukrainian position - which you might argue he was always going to do at the start of a putative negotiation. Well, but better done in the proposed face-to-face meeting, hmm?
Or maybe (since, at his best, Z is pretty sharp) the intended audience is Trump and the ROW anyway, if he knows Putin has no intention of negotiating with Ukraine anyway. Remind the Donald that Z does actually hold several cards right now.
Or maybe, like the "permission" graciously given to Putin for his 2026 Victory Day parade (another sharp slap from Z), it's purposefully intended to humiliate Putin on the eve of today's big St Petersburg address to the SPIEF - if indeed he deigns to turn up in person after the impressive warning shots fired in that direction earlier in the week.
Or maybe it's to bring to Putin's attention the long list of things he doesn't seem to know - cat among the pigeons. Putin's people say he "is being briefed" on the Z letter. Yeah, they'll be dead keen not to let him read the original in full - they lie to him consistently about the true situation on many fronts, and wouldn't want him firing off the obvious supplementary questions. And they may well succeed, since by repute he never so much as touches the keys of a laptop, still less knows how to log in or access the www for himself. Old-fashioned red telephones for L'il Volodya ...
ND
20 comments:
"Putin's people say he "is being briefed" on the Z letter. Yeah, they'll be dead keen not to let him read the original in full - they lie to him consistently about the true situation on many fronts, and wouldn't want him firing off the obvious supplementary questions."
How do you know this? ISW/Chatham House? Because our official Foreign Office statements are just bare faced lies - for example the repeated statements that Russia are targeting civilians - after an attack with 600 drones and 100 missiles kills 11 people. Meanwhile 3,500 deaths in 62 days in Lebanon ... crickets.
During the hot days when I couldn't garden I read Edward Rutherfurd's "Russka" - a giant multigenerational epic that ran from AD 180 to AD 1980, in the style of his first book Sarum.
Rutherfurd is obviously an intelligent guy and does a lot of research, has visited Russia many times, and in his book he declares the Russian heartland to lie "north of the Black Sea, between the Dneipr and the Don". He also identified the beginnings of Russia as in the Kievan Rus where Viking traders from Novgorod sailed the rivers.
Totally unexceptional on publication date in 1991. Now, official UK government policy is that most of the the land between the Dneipr and the Don is Ukrainian, has always been Ukrainian, and any suggestion of it being the Russian heartland is Putinist propaganda and the rewriting of history.
@anon - continuing to lie about Russia targeting civilians doesn't do a great deal for your credibility.
As for the difference in death rates compared to Lebanon:
The IDF can fly around Lebanon pretty much at will, if the RuAF tried that in Ukraine they'd be down to hang gliders inside a week.
Ukraine has better air defences against missiles and drones, many get through, but not most.
Israel has a competent, well-drilled, military, Russia hasn't.
Lying consistently about the true situation may keep you in post with all related goodies in peace, I'd have thought it could be positively dangerous in war..
Does even less for yours CH. If over 1000 drones and missiles kill 10 people that's a remarkably low body count per missile. Surely of, as you say, Israel can fly at will over Lebanon, are the 56 people a day they kill, more than half of them women and children, all Hezbollah?
@anon - it certainly can. Ask the good people of St Petersburg.
As to the letter, very nicely crafted with some uncomfortable truths for Putin, and designed for a wider audience.
I don't know if Trump can be distracted from his misadventures in the ME though, Iran has no interest in giving him in a win, and he's discovering Netanyahu has no comprehension of gratitude, just a desire to stay in power and out of the prison, and Trump finding out that he can't just deploy the US military and win must be really niggling his ego.
Europe is useless, as are we at the moment, so not seeing an end until any of those changes. So, it sinking into Putin that killing Russians en masse and mortgaging it's future to Beijing probably isn't going to make him the historical hero he so sorely desires is probably the best outcome we can hope for, forlorn as that may be.
@anon 11:49 - decide what you're asking, instead of kneejerk responding to anything not positive about Russia's totally-not-a-war-just-a-special-operation-honest-guv.
If you're asking about the disparity between kill rates, you've been answered. If you don't like the answer, that's a you problem, take it up with a therapist.
If you're asking about targeting the public, then yes, both Russia and Israel are doing just that, and neither are winning popularity contests over it, and from a Western perspective, both are pretty abhorrent for it, especially as both are doing double/triple taps.
Israel has burned through all the latitude given it after the Hamas attacks, Russia had none to start off with, other than that from the trolls and Putin stans.
I'm sure you'll have some wonderful retort, but it doesn't really matter, given the amount of times you and your ilk have told us Russia is winning it's a surprise they've not actually won yet.
"Europe is useless, as are we at the moment"
At last we find agreement, though probably for different reasons. Europe including the UK is being killed by the loss of cheap Russian energy. Ships, bricks, chemicals, glass... our policies don't help either.
"and mortgaging it's future to Beijing"
See above. Who's gonna be making cars in Sunderland?
Whereas we are proudly independent...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_external_debt
12% of GDP debt vs 278%. Hmm. And a fair chunk of our GDP is "imputed" aka imaginary.
I enjoy AEP, but he's forecast 23 out of the last four stock market crashes ... he'll have to be right now and again.
I wonder if this isn't like Railway Mania, where at the end we're left with a lot of lost cash but a lot of useful infrastructure - or indeed the dot-com boom.
Timing's everything though - in 2000 I knew Freeserve was worthless, but investors made a mint because Wanadoo was the greater fool and bought them out.
I wonder if all the AI IPOs are coming up in order to
a) give the top guys lots of lovely money
b) shift the crash risk more widely onto Joe Public's pension fund. Apparently the rules have been changed in the States so trackers will have to buy pretty much straight away.
@ How do you know this?
Easy, Anon - the multiple instances of garbage he's been given in public briefings, and which he then repeats subsequently in public, for all the world as though he believes it, ludicrous though it is
Two examples: the famous case where he was solemnly told in front of the cameras by some female Colonel of Signals that Telegram was a traitorous www service, not at all popular, and causing difficulties for RF forces at the front; whereas Max is wonderful
(in case you didn't know, none of this is even remotely true, and RF forces have long depended on Telegram for messaging. Based on - or perhaps bolstered by - her assurances, Putin gave the go-ahead for the banning of Telegram and compulsory switching to Max. Neither have been implemented yet, of course, because, errr, Max doesn't work. But the partial ban on Telegram has and continues to hinder RF forces)
Secondly, the equally famous case of the "capture of and complete RF control over Kupyansk", first announced to (and repeated by) Putin last year, and never true
(n case you didn't know, there was a small, completely surrounded and ineffectual RF infiltration team there for several months, holed up in a big hospital basement. In subsequent frantic efforts to "make the map match the report", RF forces fruitlessly expended a great deal of blood and treasure, as is often the case to cover embarrassment when the claims get wildly ahead of the facts: "running ahead of the locomotive" or "achievements on credit" as they call it in Russia)
If that's what happens when he's being briefed publicly - and then made to look a fool - do we really imagine he gets reliable casualty figures? Or economic data?
It's known in Russia as filing "beautiful reports" (красивых докладов or красивом отчёте)
The UK was only ever — even at a peak — a marginal importer of Russian-sourced energy. The Office for National Statistics reported total UK fuel imports from Russia at £5.2 billion in 2021 (9.7% of all UK fuel imports).
(Breakdown: refined oil (£3.0 billion, making Russia the UK’s largest supplier at 24.1% of refined oil imports), crude oil (£1.0 billion), and natural gas (£1.0 billion)). (https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/nationalaccounts/balanceofpayments/articles/uktradewithrussia/2021)
They weren’t even at below world prices. So your argument for the UK being dependent on “cheap Russian energy” was just pulled out your arse, wasn’t it?
As for the rest of the EU, you seem to be resorting to a curiosity American category error, handwaving as they do along “the country of Europe” lines. If you were to say “Germany” then you might have had a point but even Donald Trump told Germany is had just about the dumbest energy policy imaginable and hey didn’t listen. Well, having just inked a big LNG deal with Canada (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cg4pwxwvz1go) they are showing no signs of repeating their Russia mistake again any time soon.
As far Chery’s deal to utilise excess capacity at Nissan’s Sunderland plant, I’m really not at all sure what a Japanese firm’s tie-in with a Chinese firm tells us about UK’s trade policy vis-a-vis China. Here’s the top 10:
1
United States
£331.5bn
2
Germany
£152.5bn
3
Netherlands
£119.3
4
China
£104.9
5
France
£104.3
6
Ireland
£89.3
7
Spain
£68.3
8
Belgium
£59.9
9
Italy
£53.7
10
Switzerland
£52.8
So China is useful to the UK, but not systematically important like it is to Russia.
Adding, for the sake of completeness, I’m equally unsure how a country becoming uninvestable in, which is what a lack of a government debt market shows (a broader symptom of a lack of any capital market is Russia even remotely worthy of the name), is supposed to be A Good Thing for the country concerned.
Ta. I certainly see your point re Telegram. I assume the administrative suspicion is because Pavel Durov is outside Russia, and has been "interviewed" by certainly French Intelligence.
"9.7% of all UK fuel imports"
For a guy who claims to understand markets, it's remarkable that you don't (apparently) understand how taking a big chunk of supply away from the market can raise prices even for those who don't directly buy from that supplier.
Apparently the Russian bit of the ISS is leaking, and it may be evacuated. How I wonder would you fix that?
The price of oil and oil-derived products was unchanged from February 2022 onwards. Russian oil availability (or lack thereof) was a total non-event for the UK (and Europe too, except for those countries foolish enough to have a dependence on pipelines from Russia, which wasn’t many).
What did get impacted is gas. But not in 2022. Russia was squeezing supplies in the latter half of the 2021. There isn’t much a customer can do when your supplier throttles your supplies, as we’ve told you repeatedly before.
And you can hardly expect the said customers to return to a proven unreliable supplier, now, can you? No matter what promises are made that they’ll behave themselves next time
In any case, natural gas supplies were falling sharply for European customers as copious sources of supplies were arranged, right up until three months or so ago when Trump got a bright idea…
… but such things happen at sea and the economic environment in Europe is now looking quite healthy, compared to China and much of the rest of the world.
Russia, not so much.
The price of oil and oil-derived products was unchanged from February 2022 onwards. Russian oil availability (or lack thereof) was a total non-event for the UK (and Europe too, except for those countries foolish enough to have a dependence on pipelines from Russia, which wasn’t many).
What did get impacted is gas. But not in 2022. Russia was squeezing supplies in the latter half of the 2021. There isn’t much a customer can do when your supplier throttles your supplies, as we’ve told you repeatedly before.
And you can hardly expect the said customers to return to a proven unreliable supplier, now, can you? No matter what promises are made that they’ll behave themselves next time
In any case, natural gas supplies were falling sharply for European customers as copious sources of supplies were arranged, right up until three months or so ago when Trump got a bright idea…
… but such things happen at sea and the economic environment in Europe is now looking quite healthy, compared to China and much of the rest of the world.
Russia, not so much.
@anon 12:44 - there's a large difference between deindustrialising and slowly becoming to China what Belarus is to you.
"the economic environment in Europe is now looking quite healthy, compared to China..."
Hmmm. So what was Mario Draghi "pulling out of his arse" as you put it - in 2025? He seemed quite worried then.
https://commission.europa.eu/topics/competitiveness/draghi-report_en
Or this?
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/may/19/china-shock-eu-european-union-industry-imports
"Europe is facing a fresh China shock that threatens to cannibalise local factories, leading to job losses and de facto colonisation of industry by Beijing, trade analysts and representatives have said."
"Europe" is buying cars, ships, pretty much everything except aircraft - and how long can that hold out? - from China. I was amazed to find my ferry from France was Chinese.
" Apparently the rules have been changed in the States so trackers will have to buy pretty much straight away."
Depends which trackers. Nasdaq and Russell indexes probably yes, S&P no. S&P have said existing rules will apply - any newly listed company has to wait 12 months after its IPO before it can be considered for entry into its indexes.
https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/sp-global-keeps-fast-entry-proposal-unchanged-spacex-listing-looms-2026-06-04/
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