Another sitrep collating the latest news. Nothing you wouldn't already know about if you have been following the news closely, but it's useful to have the most relevant new developments all gathered into one place.
The most interesting, as usual, is not so much what is happening in Ukraine, where Russia continues to dismantle the "mother of all proxy armies" in a cool and methodical manner, nor is it the Saudi related rumor referenced in the title, but rather the mounting evidence of deliberate and accelerating dedollarization in BRICS+, and increasing desperation on the part of the collective West as it loses the financial and economic war.
Also, Dmitry Medvedev has yet again escalated his "bad cop" rhetoric to another level, which i personally find very entertaining.
The West artificially creates economic crises, uses the green agenda to maintain elitism
Oh come on. The reactionary vibes are through the roof. Climate catastrophe is the west's primary means of taking from the global south. The west exhausts the planets capacity to support industry (for the benefit of an elite minority) while the rest of the world is forced to absorb the pollution from the west and compete for scarce resources. The "green agenda", if successful, would be one of the single biggest blows to western vampirism in human history.
The west definitely uses the green agenda to keep global south countries from developing. Look at Mexico, the leftists party is constantly criticized by the opposition for its efforts saving the state run oil industry and investing in new refineries, they argue that the left does not care for the environment and the future is in clean energy so we should privatize our oil industry and move to clean energy.
They use the agenda to make global south countries pay for the climate debt that the west generated, it is literally used to maintain elitism.
Yeah, as i pointed out in my other response, that part is actually referencing a summary written by someone on Twitter of a longer article in a Russian publication. That summary is not entirely accurate to what the original said.
I think rather than arguing over the way that this random Twitter user chose to phrase it, it makes more sense to go read what the original article says because it actually makes some good points:
https://rg.ru/2024/06/14/vremia-metropolij-isteklo.html
They use the agenda to make global south countries pay for the climate debt that the west generated
I think this is very true. They pretend to care about the environment and always point fingers at China, at India, at South America, everyone but themselves, and sometimes they even drop the mask entirely and go full eco-fascist when they talk about "overpopulation" in Africa (transparently genocidal rhetoric)...they try to shift the blame and the burden onto the global south and keep it from developing, meanwhile they themselves are responsible for the vast majority of historical emissions and they still have by far the larger per capita carbon footprint. It is their corporations and their excessive consumption a lot of the time that are responsible for the environmental damages in the global south. It's pure hypocrisy.
They already industrialized and developed their economies and now they want to keep others from doing the same. They are trying to pull up the ladder behind them. It's no wonder that people outside of the collective West have become so cynical and suspicious of when the West talks about going green.
The problem is real and it disproportionately affects the global south, but the pretense of the West of caring about it is so obviously not genuine, it's a smokescreen for a malicious and imperialist (and very much not green) agenda behind which they themselves have no intention of curbing their pollution.
It also drops an ableist slur towards the end. Seems like one of these news sources that are full of red flags but unfortunately have some decent analysis as well
It just goes to show that real battles aren’t won on steril statistics and WarThunder forum sp*rg-out
While I agree with the sentiment that the player base of games like WarThunder is full of reactionary armchair generals cheering at every new weapons shipment for Ukraine like it's a football match, that word was really unnecessary and from what I've seen it's basically a new iteration of calling people autistic as an insult on places like 4chan and other incel/Gamer communities, which is what bothers me most - usually you can tell what communities some people frequent online based on the words they use, which in this case is one of the red flags I mentioned about the author
Ah, right. Thanks for clarifying. I glossed over that part when reading because i didn't know that word and i didn't understand the "WarThunder" reference either. Went over my head. But as i said, not surprised.
Yeah, not to detract from the sitrep which I think is good, but it helps to point this out since it's a bit of a dog whistle
Oh, i completely agree with you.
However, that part of the sitrep is referencing a summary written by someone on Twitter of a longer article recently written by Medvedev in Rossiyskaya Gazeta. And it's a bit misleading because that's not exactly what the original article said.
Here's the article in question: https://rg.ru/2024/06/14/vremia-metropolij-isteklo.html
I recommend reading it, it's a scathing and quite accurate indictment of western imperialism and neo-colonialism.
Though i wouldn't have been surprised if there was also a bit of climate denialism in there, because that's unfortunately not uncommon in Russia. As a major fossil fuel producer and with a population that already leans more conservative, Russia has been particularly receptive to that narrative.
But actually when you read that passage in the article it's a bit more nuanced and leaves some room for interpretation (at least in the translation i got):
Under the guise of caring for the environment and combating climate change, narratives that are de facto beneficial to the "collective West" are being promoted "green/climate neocolonialism". Rich countries are forcing the states of the Global South to take hasty and uncalculated measures to "preserve nature", without taking into account the traditions and structures that have developed over centuries in the field of agriculture, water and subsoil use. Our partners directly point to the methods used in this area "regulatory imperialism" (de facto neo-colonialism), including on the issue of deforestation and other important issues.
He's not entirely wrong, and he isn't outright saying that environmental concerns aren't valid, but some of these are also talking points sometimes used by climate change deniers. Medvedev is a pretty astute politician and i wouldn't put it past him to have deliberately given himself sufficient plausible deniability while still including a dogwhistle for that part of the audience that is skeptical of climate change and green initiatives to feel like he agrees with them.
The part about the creation of economic crises comes in the next paragraph:
To preserve its "elite" [...] existence, the self-named "golden billion" does not disdain anything. Up to the artificial creation of economic crises. Continues to slow down the allocation of loans through global development institutions and provide support to pro-Western opposition parties.
Whoever wrote the summary on Twitter for some reason connected these two ideas when they are not really directly connected in the original.
When reading things like this you always have to be conscious of the bias of the person writing. Conservatives are inevitably going to have bad takes on anything related to climate change and, as they call it, the "green agenda". And as i have mentioned before, the person writing these sitreps is undoubtedly a conservative. It's to be expected that they will include some reactionary cringe every now and then. Doubly so when they are reporting on what a conservative politician said.
In short, all the current snowballing events are gearing up to potentially effect a massive black swan moment in 2025, which may shake the foundations of the entire Western financial system off its rails. And that’s where the Saudi situation comes in: KSA now sports full BRICS membership and has previously signaled willingness to accept Yuan for oil sales to China, so we know—at the least—the suggestion of Petrodollar demise is not conspiracy theory.
The big question is not where things will go, but how fast: their trajectory is nearly certain, it only remains to be seen how quickly the BRICS-adjacent countries can agree on mechanisms and muster the initiative to implement them into actual practice.
Thanks for sharing the article, had a lot of fun reading it since it provides some confirmation to many thoughts i've been having. The conjucture we are living right now makes me very hopeful for a better future.
This is very interesting, if long, I recommend taking the time to read it because it's probably another inflection point in global affairs.
