Alex Ates Haywood
1 min readApr 16, 2023

--

Depends on how "winning" is defined isn't it?

Russia's objectives going back to Putin's speech at the Munich 2007 Security conference are pretty clear.

If winning in this case means demilitarizing and destroying Ukranian infrastructure to the point where it is useless to the West, that has been accomplished.

If it was to push the borders 100-150 km. West to give Russia space and eradicate Eastern Ukraine of short-range missiles? Done.

Securing Crimea (thus its Sevastopol naval base) and its Russian speaking population? Yep.

Building alliances and providing and alternate source of energy to China to stand up to the U.S. Also accomplished.

Will they "win" more? The de-dollarization of world trade? Who knows but they are working on it. The Saudis and Brazilians are already settling trades in Chinese Yuan.

One thing is for sure, Putin has made sure Russian oil will never belong to the West. Is that winning?

The better question is what have WE "won" by trying to include Ukraine in NATO? So far it looks like we have traded Finland's inclusion in NATO for tens of thousands of Ukrainian lives, persistently high inflation, a divided Europe trying to play both China and the US, a deindustrilazed Germany, and a UK that is imploding, soon to be followed by other European economies.

The few true winners of this madness are Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, BAE systems and other "defense" contractors, not to mention the oil majors and LNG companies that have booked records profits.

--

--

Alex Ates Haywood
Alex Ates Haywood

Written by Alex Ates Haywood

After 20 years in finance I realized it was all a lie. Now I'm trying to figure out what 'it' is. Human being tired of being lied to.

No responses yet