wow, living rent free in your head, eh?
don't worry, I'm just caught up with a thing called "responsibilities"
Vergissmeinnicht
joined 3 months ago
War is expensive. Who would have thought? Does that prove anything about sanctions?
Yes, because war spending is still spending, and acts as a stimulus, increasing GDP. The amount of increased spending accounts for a bigger share of GDP than their GDP growth figures account for, so without this extra spending their GDP growth would be negative, due to sanctions.
And a 300B+ (rubles not USD)
You're right, I had my numbers mixed up. The NWF spending accounted only for $70B (5.3T Rubles)
It's the gutting of the liquidity of Russia's banks that accounted for the majority of the stimulus and was even higher than the $300B that I remembered, at $446B (36.6T Rubles) by early 2025 https://navigatingrussia.substack.com/p/russias-hidden-war-debt-full-report
This plus the NWF spending accounts for 20% of GDP, or roughly 5% per year over 4 years. Russia's growth numbers were significantly lower than that at between -2.1% and + 4.3%. So on average, without the stimulus spending not a single year since the beginning of the war would have been positive economic growth.
A human commenting online would just spell out delta.
Admit you don't know calculus without telling me you don't know calculus. You write the letter, you don't spell it out.
And the non-monetary consequences of sanctions, that you also keep ignoring. From your own source:
Russia’s military has difficulty procuring key components
Which is why the Iskander production figures are fluctuating for example, and are much lower than they would be without sanctions. To come back to your favourite weapon, the ballistic missile.
So you didn't read, nor understand. Which shouldn't be surprising given that having basic understanding of simple math can only mean copying from an LLM to you. You too can learn what the scary triangles mean, it's not that difficult.
Why did the $300 billion from the NWF plus whatever hundreds of billions of QE drain out of the economy?
You keep ignoring that part for some odd reason.
Do you know that if the percentage of GDP is above 0% it generally means that an economy is growing?
Ok buddy, you have got the spirit, but you really need to tackle topics in your wheelhouse.
The percentage of GDP being above 0% is meaningless. >0% of what?
If the GDP growth rate is >0 then the economy is growing. That would be the amount of additional GDP in relation to existing GDP over a given timeframe or (ΔGDP/GDP)/Δt, usually over one year (Δt = 1 annum) or annualized for ease of comparison. Usually expressed as (ΔGDP/GDP)*100% where the Δt is implied.
here is a more in depth explatation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_growth
Once you've digested that, look at Stimulus and Quantitative Easing
That will explain where the $300 billion of the NWF that weren't frozen disappeared to. And why the Russian banks now experience such a dire liquidity crisis.
And once you understand all of that you can put 2 and 2 together, and understand WHY the Russian economy had such low growth rates despite such a gargantuan stimulus effort.
There is a massive hole in the economy, through which an enormous amount of money has been draining, which is the aforementioned sanctions. And Russia had to pump almost the entirety of their remaining NWF into the economy and also do an enormous amount of QE to keep the economy at a slightly elevated growth rate. Although since late last year that's no longer working and the economy has been in a recession.
And we've come full circle. (Or rather we will have come full circle once you've done your required reading to understand the subject matter)
So how do you explain this: https://www.russiamatters.org/node/35164 ?
Then where did their $300 billion war chest drain to dumbass? Already addressed in previous comments. But you're too illiterate to read.
if you really think the first three packages were sufficient to drain the Russian economy,
You just don't fucking know what "drain" means.
You assume drain must mean drain completely to 0 so Russia completely starves.
The first package was already draining, the next were draining more. Already explained to you by others at the very beginning of the thread, and by me multiple times. That's how sanctions work.
I’m very positive I’m far more intelligent than you.
You certainly think so, yes, that is very obvious. That is your biggest problem really.
If the three sanctions packages were already draining the economy why oh why did she need 17 more? She didn’t say will be draining after we implement 17 more. If
1 hole in a bucket drains the bucket 3 drain it faster, so why do you need 17 more? because holes can be plugged and 20 drain it faster than 3. Are you really this fucking stupid?
Ok, let's start from the very very beginning.
Our sanctions and the self-sanctioning by companies themselves are draining Russia’s economy and thus draining the Kremlin’s war machine.
"are draining" is in the present progressive. It denotes an action in progress, not a completed action. Meaning the sanctions were in the process of draining the economy. Von der Leyen's claim was not that the draining had completed but that it was in progress.
next is your complete lack of understanding of how sanctions work.
the third package was indeed in fact, not draining the economy, since 17 more were needed after that
The very first sanctions package was immediately called "first sanctions package" at the time
The understanding, from the very first sanctions package, was that this would be a continuous process, with sanctions package after sanctions package, not a one and done deal that then needs to haphazardly be amended as you seem to think.
Sanctions need to be amended as the economic reality shifts and loopholes need to be plugged as the target of sanctions finds ways to evade them.
The 17 packages after the third were always going to happen because that is fundamentally how sanctions work.
And let's look at numbers. European sanctions have reduced Russian fossil fuel export revenues by about $300-500 million per day. Not sure how you would describe this, other than "draining the economy". And this does not include any other sanctions affecting other parts of the economy.
In your favourite metric, ballistic missiles, that is worth about 750-1000 Iskanders per day given the $400-500k unit production cost. Now of course money isn't the biggest limiting factor in Russia's ability to manufacture those, it's largely parts availability that leads to big fluctuations in production quantities. Parts availabilities, which, surprise, are limited due to sanctions.
or do you really think just making things a little more shitty for ordinary Russians
Strawman. "draining the economy" is not about making things a little more shitty for ordinary Russians. It's about reducing Russia's ability to finance the war, which takes time considering Russia had a $600 billion war chest, half of which is frozen in mostly European banks, thanks to the sanctions, and the other half is now, thanks to the sanctions, that were draining the economy, mostly drained. And it is about reducing Russia's ability to source industrial machines and components to reduce their ability to manufacture weapons, like your favourite one, the ballistic missile. Where production quantities, as mentioned above, are fluctuating due to sanctions.
As I have stated before, it was constantly repeated all the way back in 2022 that sanctions would not defeat Russia on their own, and certainly not immediately, and would take years. The point was, from the very beginning, to make it increasingly difficult for Russia to finance the war and to produce weapons, so Ukraine could gain the upper hand, which is now manifesting on the battlefield, after years, as predicted.
People like you were told in at the very start in 2022 that the real world doesn't work like TikTok instant gratification, and here you are more than 4 years later still not having gotten the point.
If you think the official title of a report by the Kiel Institute is a clickbait headline you really have bigger fish to fry than this discussion.
So you base your arguments on a quote of Von der Leyen, articles by business Insider and CNN and whatnot, neither of which support your dumbass take. But suddenly they're not good enough, because you've been called out on your bullshit, and you reference a mysterious previous headline by the Kiel institute that you never even linked?
please do link the Kiel institute articles from the past that have non clickbait headlines that show that we've been "hearing this constantly since 2022"
See, these are examples of similar statements
Go sue me for copyright infringement, since you seem to have come up with that phrase all by yourself and totally didn't steal it
I am informed.
reading clickbait headlines isn't being informed.
But you keep forgetting you haven’t made a single valid point in this entire discussion.
You wouldn't notice one of it hit you in the face. Except maybe if it came with a clickbait headline.
Ahhhh, so you were… how you say it… “just asking questions”?
Since you're still on about this, yes, I admit I was wrong about this.
I assumed you were informed on the subject matter and were "just asking questions" to push an agenda.
But turns out you were trying to employ the Socratic method. Which requires a deep understanding of the subject matter, which of course you lack. You're just an idiot who doesn't understand how economies work and who takes clickbait headlines as fact.
Me accusing you of "just asking questions" was giving you orders of magnitude more credit than you deserve.
Don’t quote it. Read it.
Sure, let's do that.
I’ll believe it when I see it. I have been hearing this since 2022 and they’re unleashing more and more ballistic missiles on Kyiv every week
I’ll believe it when I see it.
no mention of the word "headline"
I have been hearing this since 2022
no mention of the word "headline"
and they’re unleashing more and more ballistic missiles on Kyiv every week
no mention of the word "headline"
I said I will believe it when I see it, since I have seen people say things like the headline of this article for years
huh
And how many questions of mine have you not answered.
yeah, not engaging in your gish gallop
My question to you was the answer dumbass
no
The sanctions were intended to drain the economy so much that Russia couldn’t continue fighting
no, and that's not what Von der Leyen said either.
That's your wishful thinking based on incorrect understanding. Again, don't blame others for your illiteracy.
There was discussion back in 2022 about what can and can't be achieved with sanctions. And it was constantly reiterated that it would take years to have major economic impacts as Russia wears out industrial machinery beyond its useful lifetime, and burns through its substantial monetary reserves. The only short term hope was that the Russian elite would have more power and force Putin's hand to protect their wealth.
So if you were one of the idiots who didn't listen back then that it would take years, and then misinterpreted every clickbait headline as a factual statement about the immediate collapse of the Russian economy that's on you. Maybe stick to simpler topics.
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Feels like the most likely answer.
Probably the same phenomenon that gave us Chornobaivka