Economic & unconventional warfare against Russia

Things are getting quite ugly for Putin - who faces "elections" shortly - and Russia generally.  High on his list of irritants is the ever more visible and effective campaign of economic and psychological warfare being waged from the skies by Ukraine, adroitly conceived and impressively executed.  The initial phase of this was targeted against oil and gas infrastructure, which has had the desired two-fold effect: genuine economic harm, and extremely visible with it, in terms of both enormous and persistent plumes of black smoke, not least around major cities, and the pockets and P&Ls of all who need to buy oil products.  (We had a truly risible troll BTL a few weeks ago suggesting the Ukrainians were histrionically putting a tank of kerosene in with the drone warhead to create a more photogenic explosion.  Errr, and better combustion on the target, maybe?)

The even more cleverly conceived campaign is that being waged against the mega-depots of the WildBerries chain**, often likened to Amazon.  If anything, relative to the Russian economy WB is even more economically significant than Amazon, because a vast number of Russia's extensive raft of small businesses uses WB as not only a route to market in marketing terms, but also as their sole storage and distribution means.  The impact is every bit as big and more, as would be systematic disruption to Amazon in the West; and, again, the smoke plumes are black, enormous, and visible to much of the population, either first-person or extensively on social meejah.  Needless to say, with enormous, combustible, static targets like refineries and depots spread across the vastness of the Russian land mass, there's not much realistic prospect of shooting down everything that is coming their way, much as efforts are being made.  

From studiously ignoring it all in the early phases, pre-election Putin has felt obliged to make oblique references to indicate he does really know what's going on as it affects the Russian in the street, and that it's all being brought under control.   Right.

So much, so obvious - to even the casual watcher of the BBC News.  But there's something else going on that you may not be aware of.

A clever little psychological campaign has been running for several months now, using social meejah in Russia to suggest that bank deposits will inevitably be frozen once the "elections" are over.  It's been nicely understated: a word to the wise, a tap of the nose, nudge nudge wink wink.  But it's starting to have the desired effect - the early signs of a run on the banks.  This of course could easily become a self-fulfilling dynamic, and it is reported that powers have been taken to effect a freeze whenever L'il Volodya is willing to give the word.  A very high-profile Russian economist has just been fired for having the temerity to state publicly -  in plain but very measured terms - that an economic crisis for Russia is around the corner on a scale that can be survived, but not without extreme steps being taken by the state.  

It is against this background that Putin's posse has announced "there will be consequences" for the UK, our having supplied Ukraine with drones.  Given that we supplied Storm Shadow missiles, very much more effective (and expensive) several years ago, it cannot be said that we've crossed any particular red lines just recently.  The list of Putin's red lines that we and the West generally have blithely crossed since 2022 is long indeed, so this recent huffing and puffing is clearly to be assessed in today's precise context.  My guess would be that right now, they really don't want any more interference on the banking front and are hoping to deter us from anything that might exacerbate the aforesaid nascent run on the banks.  Russia has long been obsessed with the dark powers they associate with the City.  Watch this space.

Finally, and anticipating what might be the trolls' response to this little update; OK yes, Ukraine is suffering badly, too.  Of course it is!  Ukraine has been suffering badly - very badly - every day since February 2022!  As we well know.  The point is, everyday life in Russia is hurting now, in ways that can't be ignored, even as Putin clamps down on the internet.   The introduction of a bit of symmetry is a big, big difference in the overall situation.

ND

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** As ever with big, prominent enterprises in Russia, there is a lot of politics and organised crime associated with WildBerries, by far the biggest of several such chains.  WB itself is run by very well-connected Armenian interests: its connections in very high places are just as well because it is at daggers drawn with the Chechen mafia.  The other, lesser chains have been left more or less unmolested, which stirs up Russian politics even more.

C@W - 20th anniversary!

Well.  Hard to believe, but this blog has been going for 20 years.  Check the listings in the sidebar - there it all is.  5,431 posts - and 72,878 comments[1].  As noted a while back, nowadays we get more hits than ever, which I ascribe to a long and persistent tail following the massive AI "training" blitz of last year that saw us getting truly astronomical daily numbers for a couple of months.  But we were hardly alone in experiencing that.  (What impact our mighty back-catalogue of accurate reporting, partisan posturing and perfect English prose has had on the collective AI intellect, I cannot imagine.)

So: what to say now?  Take a look back at the 10th anniversary ruminations, which noted a bit of the original history and 2006 context - with more nostalgic stuff from many of our first decade of readership, in the 31 comments below the post.  You'll find many notes on, and contributions from, some of the great bloggers of yesteryear.  Is Guido really the only other current blog still wholly recognisable from 20 years ago?

In the overall context of today's wildly hyper-financialised, hyper-ventilating politico-social media space, the 'conventional' blogosphere is incredibly sedate and, it must be acknowledged, heavily dated.  How many folks nowadays have the attention-span for even a 'medium read', never mind a long read?  Well, you guys do: and there is a world of thoughtful long-reads - it's Substack.  But I've never really felt I had the time to make a proper go of that - an order of magnitude more demanding, I'm guessing, than what's needed to 'curate' a leisurely blog like C@W. 

I suppose in terms of outright www presence, the C@W highlight must be when we were getting so many links and hits via the FT ('Alphaville') and, most impressively, from Robert Peston's blog - which was for a while one of the very biggest UK news blogs, indeed possibly the biggest[2] - that the BBC actually installed some kind of filter and banned any cross-blog linking from Pesto.  Amazing to relate, but true. 

Guido himself tried to persuade CU and me to join his empire as the business rumour-mongering arm of Order-Order.  We turned him down, for this reason.  He gets away with blue murder because he is slagging off politicians: but that's a free hit - they almost never sue.  Try doing that with the corporate community and you'd have Carter Ruck down on you in a nanosecond.  He had to admit, that thought hadn't occurred to him.

Around here, the big change latterly is of course that the great CityUnslicker himself has moved on to other things, and Bill Quango MP is now just an occasional, if always exceedingly welcome, visitor.  Your truly found himself the last man standing a while back, and the flickering flame has never quite gone out - thanks to the many readers that, over those two decades, have adorned the BTL acres with great commentary and wit.

I find it hard to guess what will happen over the next several years.  There will continue to be plenty of events' dear boy, events; and I don't see myself becoming any the less opinionated.  But nothing lasts forever.

Anyhow - I think we're all set for the foreseeable future.  If you're up for it, I am too.  Till the annual predictions round-up, at any rate!  Cheers to you all - 

ND

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[1] The google stats say there have been over 15m site visits but that's an underestimation, since that particular record doesn't go back the whole way, for some reason.  The comments data need to be taken with a pinch of salt, too, because old posts can attract advertising bots posting BTL (often 'commenting' in Chinese or Arabic), and the task of cleaning it all up is beyond what's even vaguely sensible to contemplate. 

[2] Michael Crick's was the other.  

Aardman at the Young V&A - must see

Grommit's garden.  Galleon in background

Mrs Drew & I have just visited a truly superb exhibition at Young V&A* in Bethnal Green. 

It's brilliantly well done and is chock full of original Aardman stuff (Morph, Wallace & Gromit, Creature Comforts, Chicken Run, Shaun the Sheep etc) - meaning, of course, that it's in full collaboration with the famous animation studio itself.  A marketing ploy?  Who cares.

It works along so many dimensions.  Where do the ideas come from for the models and characters?  We learn a lot about the creative, artistic processes involved, every inch and frame the equal of Disney.  How do they make the models?  Yep, we learn that, too.  You wanna see the models themselves?  All there, from the tiny rivets on the space ship (they use lentils) to the immense galleon from The Pirates!  How do they make it all move?  Plenty of that, too.

How is a were-rabbit articulated?   Now we know ...  

And it's a lot of fun!  Loads of kids - as one might expect - really enjoying themselves.  Kids of all ages.

Getting a bit more po-faced about it all, in the context of Hockney I recently rehearsed my views on what constitutes Art is threefold:  complete mastery of the craft au fond; boundless, compulsive creative output; and a strong eye / ear for abstraction.  It's all here at Aardman.  Nick Park is a true artist.  Go and see his stuff.  

On till November and tickets go quickly during the hols.   

ND

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* This V&A outpost dates from 1872 and has had several incarnations: it once housed the V&A's Rodin collection; in 1974 it became the V&A Museum of Childhood.   Once the heart of Kray territory and very readily accessible from central London, Bethnal Green after the Krays became a magnet for South Asian immigration, notably from Bangladesh; and more recently, it's been gentrifying - just one tube stop from the heart of the City, with lots of fine brick buildings from the Georgian era onwards, ripe for conversion to smart, up-market housing.  The wonder is, it took so long to become trendy.

The museum itself went through a typically annoying woke phase some years ago; but in this case, as in many others, peak woke is mercifully behind us. 

Another reality-check: Rayner approves data centre!

 ... against fierce local opposition - and in the teeth of, yes, housing as potentially being an alternative use for the site.  It's the controversial Brick Lane Data Centre which, in a delightfully pointed insult, offers 4 (four) units of social housing.

What makes it exquisitely amusing is that none other than Housing Secretary Angela 'Stamp-Duty' Rayner has been the one to put her name to the government order overriding lower-tier authorities that would have withheld approval.  One can just imagine the agonies she will have gone through; but, hey, that's the price you pay for the privilege of slipping back into the Cabinet room, eh?  Them's your orders, girl, and leave your scruples at the door.  Still, at least she was able to push a junior minister out in front to make the actual announcement (in her name).   Happily, Parliament is not sitting. 

What I find doubly amusing is the way puzzled progressives can't understand how a data centre can be needed simply to speed up City financial transactions by milliseconds (which is one of the justifications for a DC in the East End).  Surely, they, cry, this is some kind of capitalist joke?  - nobody needs to make even quicker financial transactions ... do they ..?   Well, I have a first-hand story about this for another occasion: bottom line, it's all a lot more real than the ignorant could ever imagine.

On the subject of Them's your orders, girl ... with the fatuous 'consultations' on the Jackdaw and Rosebank fields being about to close, we are all greatly looking forward to Miatta Fahnbulleh being forced to walk the same plank and approve one or perhaps both of them in the next few weeks (doubtless on one quiet Friday evening during the Recess, with another junior minister out in front).  It'll be fun to watch her squirm.

ND

Arday: hard not to laugh

There's a light mood in Schloss Drew this weekend.  The Jason Arday affair is possibly even funnier than Keir Starmer 'resigning' when his legacy is as golden as he and his loyal backbenchers loudly proclaimed.  

As the story rumbled inexorably towards the front pages, progressives reflexively dropped everything and rushed headlong towards the sound of gunfire.  On arriving at the battlefield they immediately hurled themselves into digging mighty entrenchments - nay, positive tank-traps - as a prelude to what they fondly imagined would be a swift and decisive counter-attack.  Unfortunately, the deeper and more frenziedly they dug, the more they became buried in the shit from their own shovels.  Far from any prospect of burying a handful of inconvenient little fabrications, they must now confront the uncontainable, volcanic eruption that is their man's stupendous output of truly creative confabulation.  We are plainly dealing with a decade's worth of deceit from (to switch idioms) an ocean-going liar.  I look forward to receiving a letter from Carter-Fuck on the subject.

Some years ago I sat on the jury of a lengthy Old Bailey murder trial.  One of the sadder aspects was that alongside the two murderers in the dock was the mother of one of the perps, who had fabricated an elaborate but laughably transparent alibi for her son that was contradicted by his own defence case.  Inevitably, she was banged up for attempting to pervert the course of justice.  In mitigation, her Counsel could only offer the excuse that nobody had ever believed her in the first place.  In the ranks of the more reflective and self-critical progressives there's a growing suspicion that we are in similar territory with Arday: did any grown adult** who'd been exposed to more than a couple of lines of his fantastically fabricated life story ever believe a word he said?

Which then leads the sadder-and-hopefully-wiser wokists to wonder - what kind of perverse, inverse racism they have themselves been guilty of?  Patronising, or what?

It all adds to the gaiety of the nation.  Enjoy your weekend!

ND

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** That said, it is Cambridge academics we are talking about