Q-and-A

 1.  At the end of this 'war'....who exactly will be left to pay for the damage in the Ukraine?

Christopher Schiltz of WELT wrote a good piece this morning and basically said....since both Ukraine and Russia will be bankrupt by the end....it's the west (Europe, Asia and the US) that will be left paying for an entire decade.

I do agree with this assessment....but adding that whatever cash reserves exist outside of Russia....will be drawn for this program, and that the entire riches of the Oligarch folks will probably be drawn upon as well.

Yeah, it's basically a tax upon those who didn't participate, didn't want WW III, or support either side.

2.  Will Germany cut Russia's natural gas sales?

If you go and listen to the nightly news pieces and interviews with politicians....the gut feeling is that half of all Russian natural gas sales in Germany will disappear by the end of 2022 (minimum).  

I should add....it'll be a tremendous pain for some folks, with their heating systems turned down to two to three degrees in the home.

3.  Back a couple of weeks ago when the Germans said they were going to give 'weapons' to the Ukraine....did they actually go and do that?

It's a funny topic.  This came up last week in the Bundestag and the opposition folks (now, the CDU Party) asked for an accounting.  So, what you can get out of this....some deliveries had not been made.  The coalition government kinda got caught with it's pants down on this matter.  So, the claim is this week....yes, transport is going on.

4.  How long can front-line assault troops go on, without a pause/break?  

N-24 brought this topic up in the AM today.  Generally, you can stage some incursion and drag troops around for about ten days....then their attention level and mistake-making start to increase.  In a normal world, you'd have fresh troops in a staging area....rotating them with the front-line guys, and just continue on.

My humble feeling is that there aren't that many folks on Russian soil in preparation for a swap-out, and that the A-team....is 'it'....continuing on.  Some of these guys haven't showered or had a full six hours of sleep since mid-Feb?  Probably the majority of the Russian troops are in this category.  

All of this, if you think about it....leads to stupid mistakes and lives lost.

5.  Some German suggestion going around for people to eat ten to fifteen kilos of meat less (yearly) because of the food crisis affecting the world?

Well....yeah, that started up in the last week.  Fifteen kilos adds up to 33 US pounds.

This logic is all tied into less fertilizer, less feed for cattle/swine, and lesser meat production.

The same people haven't understood that if this makes perfect sense....then consuming less wheat products (because of the war affecting the Ukraine's production of wheat) is also on the table.

6.  Is a lot of this Russia military strategy simply based on 'wishful thinking'?

This got brought up on German N-TV this morning, with an interview with a military analyst.  

Yeah, there's a lot of speculation that Putin has only a handful of people that he talks with, and they feed him chatter that makes him happy but isn't connected to reality.

So he turns the chatter around...implements orders, and then briefs the general public of Russia of great things...which haven't occurred in the real world.  

Yeah, the more you think about this.....it sounds like a Doctor Strangelove-Stripes-Tropic Thunder-Kelly's Heros scripted movie.  You could easily have some Ukrainian film crew doing a zombie-flick where Russian soldiers were fed Fauci-pills and inject 30-minute 'movie' into Russia as some false sense of reality.  

7.  Panic attacks increasing in Germany, since the war started?

Well....yeah.  This gets brought up at least once or twice a week via newspapers or public TV reporting.  Germans are seeing their doctors.....getting slips to visit a mental health clinic, and openly discussing breathing issues/heart palpations.

No one says numbers....but I would imagine that people who spend two hours nightly of raw video viewing or getting countless interviews with Ukrainians....start to get 'dizzy'.

Any day now, I expect some German doctor to invent a new phrase to cover the trend.

8.  From that big Friday Putin-fest held at the Moscow Luzhniki Stadium.....were there actually fake video inserted into the TV broadcast?

Well.....this is what N-TV said last night.  Some people went back and viewed the whole video feed....NOT just the five-to-ten minute pep talk by Putin.

What they say is that some of the video-clips came from a 2021 stadium event called 'Crimea Day'.  

How much of the stadium video was faked-up?  Unknown...it's triggered some people to go back and look at past situations.  

Kind of comical if you think about it....building up a whole 'show', with five-to-ten clips which were a year....maybe even two years in the past.  

9.  If you were a German holding Russian stock?

Baader Banker here in Germany made a comment that they consider a scenario like this....to be a pretty crappy outcome (hint: total loss).  How you report this to the German tax folks?  This might get interesting as you near the end of 2022, and people decide to take a total wash on a million-Euro investment profile in Russia.

10.  Is there a German plan in existence to cover the situation if Russia cuts off natural gas?

Yes, on the books since 2019.

Companies and industry to suffer?  Yes, to a significant degree, and it'd likely trigger more recession/inflation problems.

11.  Ukrainian kids in Germany as refugees.....preferring home-school situations?

This got brought up by ARD (public TV) yesterday.  The bulk of kids would prefer that, and it probably wouldn't take that much to build a network system (in their language) and support it by the German government.