I en färsk rapport från amerikansk underrättelsetjänst görs bedömningen att 315 000 ryska soldater har dödats eller skadats, varav 13 000 bara vid Avdiivka.Reuters skrev:A declassified U.S. intelligence report assessed that the Ukraine war has cost Russia 315,000 dead and injured troops, or nearly 90% of the personnel it had when the conflict began, a source familiar with the intelligence said on Tuesday.
The report also assessed that Moscow's losses in personnel and armored vehicles to Ukraine's military have set back Russia’s military modernization by 18 years, the source said.
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The Russian army began the war with 3,100 tanks, lost 2,200 of them and has had to "backfill" that force with T62 tanks produced in the 1970s, leaving it only 1,300 tanks on the battlefield, the source quoted the report as saying.
Russia’s Bank Chief Is Running Her Own PR Campaign
Rysslands ekonomi är farligt överhettad och snart duger inte ens de förfalskade siffrorna. Riskerar Elvira Nabiullina, chef sedan 2013, att bli syndabock?Foreign Policy skrev:The Kremlin boldly lies about its economic prospects both to the West and its own people, but it’s Russians who are actually more capable of recognizing the lies. They know the duplicity their government is capable of much better than most Western analysts. This knowledge creates additional opportunities for instability, because the groundwork for mistrust and rebellion has been laid by the Kremlin itself.
The Central Bank and the Kremlin are in league. But there is a paradoxical element to their relationship, wherein the Central Bank wants the Russian economy to be more transparent and to function normally, while the Kremlin is in a protracted fascist spiral that threatens these goals. Emphasizing those discrepancies, and tightening the screws on the economy, can cause the fissures in the relationship to fracture.
Conservative Russian zealots will be eager to blame Nabiullina once even falsified economic data can no longer distract the population from what’s happening, but as financial hits continue to pile up, both the Kremlin and the Central Bank lose. There are political wedges here to widen in the meantime, as ingrained mistrust of the Central Bank makes its position fragile, and fragility exists to be exploited in a time of war.
China’s rise is reversing
Xi har sina egna problem att brottas med och blir således knappast den räddare i nöden som Putin hade hoppats på. Nu handlas Ural-olja under pristaket!Financial Times skrev:After stagnating under Mao Zedong in the 1960s and 70s, China opened to the world in the 1980s — and took off in subsequent decades. Its share of the global economy rose nearly tenfold from below 2 per cent in 1990 to 18.4 per cent in 2021. No nation had ever risen so far, so fast.
Then the reversal began. In 2022, China’s share of the world economy shrank a bit. This year it will shrink more significantly, to 17 per cent. That two-year drop of 1.4 per cent is the largest since the 1960s.
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One reason this has gone largely unnoticed is that most analysts focus on real GDP growth, which is inflation-adjusted. And by adjusting creatively for inflation, Beijing has long managed to report that real growth is steadily hitting its official target, now around 5 per cent. This in turn appears to confirm, every quarter, the official story that “the east is rising.” But China’s real long-term potential growth rate — the sum of new workers entering the labour force and output per worker — is now more like 2.5 per cent.
