Eurasia note #68 - Russia, Ukraine, Europe All Risk Plunder By Kleptocrats

The Great Reset is the same shock doctrine perfected by bankers over centuries

People manipulate individuals; oligarchs manipulate nations.
Germany’s Merkel admits the Ukraine peace talks bought time to prepare for war.
The object of Western deception was to stir a fight; perhaps to partition Russia.

Protecting Ukrainians was never the aim; deposing Putin remains the scalp.
Control or denial of Russian resources has been the bankers’ goal for a century.
Rebuilding the post-Soviet space was never the aim; merely to plunder resources.

Yet a similar strategy is emerging in the West; energy, food, living standards at threat.
Objective is to break things rather than fix them; the welfare bill is simply too high.
If this is the new world order, we will defeat it — and we shall be successful.

(2,700 or 13 minutes’ read)

Moscow, 1998

Tbilisi, Dec 18, 2022

In August of 1998 I landed in Moscow. A driver for Reuters met me at Sheremetyevo airport and we went to the Slavianskaya Hotel, on the Moskva embankment, where the news bureau was based in a business centre.

After greeting colleagues, one took me through the dimly-lit paths between Soviet panelka apartments, into the draughty podyest or the stairwell, where I took the keys and struggled with the steel door. No amount of unfamiliarity or unease could prepare for the next day.

The rouble went into freefall; people queued at Sberbank or ATMs to withdraw their cash; Russian colleagues would leave the office and return with hard goods: microwaves, electronics, dresses, leather shoes.

The country was in the midst of “shock therapy” prescribed by a group of economists and investors known informally as the Harvard Boys. With a weak president in Boris Yeltsin, oligarchs — both Russian and foreign — ran amok. It spilled into gangsterism and violence in the street.

The owner of the hotel that housed our office was gunned down in the underpass outside. He had rejected an offer to share his enterprise with a group of Chechen “investors.”

With the end of the Soviet Union the vast mineral wealth of its former republics was up for grabs. A mechanism was sought to transfer these public assets to private management.

Shock doctrine

It was chaotic but it was medicine as prescribed by the International Monetary Fund and the Harvard Boys. They hoped — at least they claimed in public — that the rapid mass privatization of state enterprises would stimulate the sclerotic, centralized economy. It was known at the time that this risked more of an asset grab than a reform programme. [1]

These slick, Western proposals missed, or ignored, the complex and interwoven Soviet inheritance in which entire cities relied on a single employer — monogorods like the vehicle city of Togliatti whose taxes supported the local administration. Extracting this or that resource would be like pulling bricks out of Jenga: in many cases it would take decades of work, including modernizing Soviet legal code, to get these companies into a shape where they could seek new commercial investment.

Ukraine still finds itself in this situation where, by and large, the patient work has not been done — neither before the 2014 coup nor since. In fact, according to Carnegie Europe, the pace of reform actually slowed down after the installation of a Western-friendly government. [2]

The reasons it gives include consolidation of the government and conflict with Russia (actually it was Kyiv’s attack on Russian-speaking Ukrainians). We learned this month from former German chancellor Angela Merkel that the Minsk accords which supposedly obtained a peaceful resolution were really just an attempt to buy time to weaponize Ukraine against Russia.

Merkel told Die Zeit on Dec 7, “The 2014 Minsk Agreement was an attempt to buy time for Ukraine. Ukraine used this time to become stronger, as you can see today.”

Russia’s foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said the admission could be used as evidence in an international tribunal.

Not only were hours of talks coordinated by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, and mediated by France and Germany, a deception. Head of the Russian State Duma, Vyacheslav Volodin, said the latter should compensate the people of the Donbas who were shelled by Kyiv for eight years while a process purporting to work towards their safety was a sham. During those years more than 14,000 Donbas residents were killed. [3]

A tangled web

What was the objective of this deception other than to provoke war between the two countries?

Like all catastrophes there tends to be three points of failure. An individual can cope with one mishap, often with two. Multi-faceted organisations like governments can perhaps cope with more, but it is usually the unexpected third blow that throws us off balance or that confounds our ability to juggle.

What were these mishaps? Consider also the opposite of mishaps. What of the strategic decision to obscure incoming discombulations - equally effective as a means of influencing outcomes?

The West desires to see president Vladimir Putin deposed. We know this from establishment journals like The Times, whose correspondent interviews Mark Galeotti, a criminologist and Russia watcher at Mayak Intelligence. [4]

It barely requires repeating: the West’s long history of regime change in which afterthought is the bastard son of the lack of forethought for who and what will follow. The Balkans, Iraq, Libya, Venezuela — and look out Africa.

You, dear reader, must BYOB: bring your own BS detector or account for your credulity.

What links the Harvard Boys’ approach to Russia in the 1990s and today’s scripted war is the same eye upon the region’s resources.

The stamp collector

Two precepts to bear in mind are that control is as valuable as ownership. One does not need to own every piece on the Monopoly board if their alignment suits one’s interest.

Secondly, you don’t need to acquire all resources if you can take another’s off the table. The apocryphal philatelist tears up a stamp because the remaining stamp becomes more valuable. In 1900 Russia surpassed the U.S. in oil exports. The oilers in then Russian-controlled Caspian basin were, in order of market share: Rothschild, Nobel and Rockefeller.

A potted history: Rothschild defeated the Nobels in a battle for market share and then began to exit the market in the year of the first Russian revolution, 1905. In 1907 Royal Dutch and Shell Transport and Trading merged, to become Royal Dutch Shell. By 1912 they had fully transfered their Russian oil interests to Shell for cash and a 20 per cent stake, alongside the British and Dutch royal families. Rockefeller was duped: he held on and struck a deal with the Bolsheviks eventually selling out in the 1920s.

According to the well-connected historian Simon Sebag-Montefiori (the Montefioris being a family very close to the Rothschilds) Joseph Stalin was employed by the Rothschilds at their Caspian oil plant, even after he’d led strikes, held a manager hostage and killed him — still the bankers financed his Bolshevik party. [5]

This account serves to show that taking a competitor off the market is as valuable as acquiring that competitor, whether in diamonds or oil where perception or scarcity determines the price.

Eastern riches

The eastern part of Europe and Central Asia, roughly defined as the former Soviet Union, holds more than one-third of the world’s reserves of oil, gas, uranium, bauxite and gold.

Yet privatisation in Ukraine generated only $10 million in 2019, and twice that the following year, doubling again in 2021 but the majority of assets remain unsold. The reason the process moves like molasses is corruption, monopoly and tycoons; along with capital restrictions, lack of equal treatment before the courts, and the need for political protection.

See Moneycircus, Mar 2022 — Eurasia note #29 - New Russia-Ukraine Talks

Russia is Ukraine writ massive. It is unlikely that vested interests that a century ago would willingly finance two world wars, the first in return for the IOU of Israel, the second to populate it, and depose half the monarchs of Europe, and yet lack the comprehension and competence to pursue greater goals. The only question is what are those goals?

IFIs or international financial institutions

For investors seeking a quick buck, shock has its use as a way to get hands on resources.

A cynic may spot the familiar IMF outcomes of wealth redistribution, of public utilities eased into private hands. If the Harvard crowd had moved fast enough, these might have been Western hands. As observed, the Russian economy proved too complex.

A pragmatist would observe that a stultifying bureaucracy cannot reform itself, and that economic reform must proceed by deal-making, realpolitik, in which nice guys finish last. Economies are not restructured by standing armies of apparatchiks but by syndicates who employ guerrilla fighters to do their dirty work at street level.

Western investors continue to pursue their objectives by geopolitical means — and lately by war.

Back to the 1990s

The proposal was to give every citizen a voucher stake in state-owned enterprises. The story goes that street traders and wise guys bought them up for kopeks or a quick hit of drugs, liquor or tobacco. In reality powerful figures, with investors behind them, lent money to the government which offered shares in state assets as collateral.

If and when the government ran into financial crisis, the assets would pass to the owner-investors. The looming economic collapse approached, with an assist. Foreign investment bankers were manipulating the Russian bond marke. Credit Suisse First Boston was leading the pump and dump.