Vladimir Putin has become the pivotal figure of the 21st century. Of that there is no doubt. The size and breadth of the ground operation in Ukraine, despite some mistakes, has been impressive.
Before I go any farther I want to make sure that we’re clear. While the situation seems to be moving decidedly in Russia’s favor, I am willing to remain reasonably skeptical of all the reports I’ve seen so far.
The slowdown in the information flow over the past few days has been as impressive as the stated gains of the Russian military in Ukraine over that same timeframe.
Since what I’ve been seeing is repetition and amplification of the same maps and sources, nothing should be taken for granted about the outcomes in Ukraine for Putin and Russia. That said, let’s not get carried away in thinking the Ukrainian army is putting up much of a fight here, because they are not.
Bill Roggio’s article from the Times of London somehow made it through the media blackout on nearly all things moderately Russia-positive and lays things out for the normies in the audience.
Sympathy for the outnumbered and outgunned defenders of Kyiv has led to the exaggeration of Russian setbacks, misunderstanding of Russian strategy, and even baseless claims from amateur psychoanalysts that Putin has lost his mind.
A more sober analysis shows that Russia may have sought a knockout blow, but always had well-laid plans for follow-on assaults if its initial moves proved insufficient.
The world has underestimated Putin before and those mistakes have led, in part, to this tragedy in Ukraine.
What’s obvious to me is that Putin put in motion a plan far more ambitious than was originally expected by the West. Their hysterical overreaction to this decapitation of Ukraine is my barometer on this. Because of this hysteria there are now all manner of questions as to why Putin did this and why, in effect, he allowed the West to respond to this war this way. Thus generating some quite fanciful theories.
These rabbit holes are getting dug nearly as quickly as Russia’s armed forces have taken the northern coast of the Black Sea.
And I feel like all of them have a nugget of truth.
But they all lead to the same fundamental conclusion, in my mind. This has become a race between two radically different versions of The Davos Crowd’s plans for a Great Reset.
And what happens in Ukraine over the next few days/weeks will determine which path to the future we wind up on.
More Questions Than Answers
One of the big questions out there is the following: Why would Putin launch such a massive campaign if he knew the response would be so strong from the West?
Is it because he’s really a secret WEF stooge who is accelerating their plans for them by sacrificing Ukraine on the altar of their Brave New World?
In short, no. This is clearly a theory akin to the whole Q-tard, 4-d chess crowd who lap up CIA/MI6 disinformation to feed their growing solipsistic fugues. It’s just dumb. Davos et.al. are openly honest in their hatred of him. He’s stood athwart their plans for more than two decades now. There are factions who hated him less before troops crossed into Ukraine, now all of them have their marching orders.
Putin must be destroyed and MIlosevic’d.
The better way to frame that question would be to make the argument that Putin was their unwitting dupe here; goaded into a war he didn’t want, to give them the excuse to continue the Great Reset by pivoting off the failure of COVID-19 and onto him.
They could then manipulate market disruptions to their preferred ends.
This is where people like Martin Armstrong have landed this week. And I don’t begrudge anyone that conclusion. It’s at least closer to the truth, in my read. I believe they’ve gotten Davos’ motivation correct, but I do not think they have Putin’s correct.
Because it implies Putin did not game plan this out. That, I think, is also wrong, even Bill Roggio begrudgingly admits this.
In fact, I would think Davos going financial DEFCON 1 would have been #1 on his list of potential reactions from his adversaries because that’s the way they have reacted in the past to major challenges to their plans, c.f. The Election of Trump and Brexit.
It would be dumb of you to think Putin so thick.
Do you really think he wasn’t paying attention over the past six years? That he slept through the clear operation to take out Trump through election fraud and societal upheaval in the US in 2020?
The four years of libs lighting their hair on fire over every word that came out of his mouth?
The sham impeachment process of 2019 over a phone call with Ukraine?
Of course not. Putin and his staff are completely dialed in because the survival of their country demands it. They know better than the people making up these theories who exactly they are dealing with.
And for that reason the scenario that makes the most sense to me here is what I’ve been suggesting in my last few posts (here, here and here).
Who Cauldron is it, Anyway?
Putin is upping the operational tempo on the neolibs of The Davos Crowd in Europe and the White House and their neocon useful idiots in the US/UK foreign policy circles, Congress and intelligence services to create the ultimate geopolitical Russian cauldron for their avarice.
Ukraine represents everyone’s existential threat.
If the neocons lose, they are done as an influence within foreign policy circles in the West forever because they will have failed to penetrate Fortress Russia.
If Davos loses, their grand plans for global domination become diminished to, at best, the European Union and some parts of the Commonwealth.
If Russia loses, the entire Global South, as Pepe Escobar calls it, fails to escape the fiat, debt-based slavery of the Western central banking cartel, because they will control the flow of Russian natural resources in such a way that they will not be stopped. More on this later.
If you are wondering why everything about this war feels weird or off, it’s because the stakes are so high for everyone. These are the stakes for the world. And because of that you had to expect the quality of information surrounding it has literally dropped to the international price of Russian sovereign debt, i.e. zero.
Do not let Putin’s focus on finishing off Ukraine militarily blind you to thinking this is his true end goal. This is, as I said the other day, an opening salvo.
We’ve already seen that there is no appetite within NATO, which means both the US military and EU politicians, to go into a direct fight with Russia. That means there is no appetite for nuclear war. That doesn’t mean nuclear war is a zero-probability event.
It means there is no current appetite for it.
And the reason for that is the belief there is a way to stop Putin in Ukraine still exists within the minds of both the neocons at the State Dept. and Davos. That belief hinges on binding Putin in a land war in Ukraine he can’t win against an insurgency of the type and kind Whitney Webb just exposed the CIA has been building around the globe (including here in the US) for years now.
This has now become official US policy, setting up a Ukrainian Government-in-Exile in Poland while sending money there to support an al-Qaeda like guerilla army to harass the Russians. This makes sense since this is what we did in Syria, using Turkey as the staging ground for their assaults into Idlib and Aleppo.
This is likely the reason why Putin has been so adamant about ‘Denazifying’ Ukraine and speaking in absolute terms about their not receiving protections under the Geneva convention. Many of them are, in fact, foreign-backed actors, at least according to his intelligence.
So, regardless of the ‘fact’ that exterminating these men would be ‘war crimes,’ legally, Putin, with his Ph.D. in International Law, either doesn’t care or feels if he wins the war he will be able to make his case in any post-war tribunal.
You can see the attempts to paint Putin as reckless everywhere. The events at the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant were reported to put all the blame on Russia while the silenced Russian information sources, including the Ministry of Defense, told a different story. I’m happy to bracket between the two to suss out the truth.
The longer the official war can be prolonged in Ukraine the more time the Davos-backed insurgency gets to form up while resupplying Ukraine’s west. It’s also why Putin has to up the operational tempo in Ukraine soon or he and his army could be in big trouble.
The Race up Oil Mountain
So the race to the end of the ground war is here. And with that shift, it’s time to back off the battle field and look at the capital markets to see what they are seeing. Because there is no military response coming from NATO other than guerillas.
The capital markets are supposed to be Davos’ turf while Russia is financially weak. But that is only if you look at things in nominal terms, nominal dollars, euros, etc. Russia has weapons it has only just begun to deploy here.
So, Act II has to be the financial war because the guerilla insurgency strategy only works if the governments in NATO’s pivotal countries don’t collapse. This is why Putin will have to make a move financially in the next few weeks.
Two minor moves have already been made. First, is the removal of VAT on purchasing gold for Russian citizens. The second he announced yesterday, avoiding default on foreign-held Russian debt by offering bond payments in rubles to bondholders.
But, these are minor moves. They simply signal to the world that Russia has the intentions to make good on its promises and not punish those who are ‘bystanders’ in this war between governments.
If I know Putin well, he will wait for his next big move so as to cause maximal damage in the financial markets and that means waiting to see how the central banks and capital markets respond to the big changes occurring within them right now.
I alluded to one of these moves the other day, saying
Those that brave the waters {Shell at -$28.50 to Brent} will get their {Russian} oil at a steep discount, those that don’t will pay through the nose, further accelerating the decline of those economies as inflation spirals out of control and the people put the blame, not on Putin, but on the people in charge.
Moreover, Russia has kept the gas flows going to ensure that money keeps flowing into the country to finance further expansion of its gold reserves.
And that’s the key, gold. Russia has oil it pulls out of the ground for >$10 per barrel.
If Biden decides to excise Russian energy from US markets (and talking with Maduro in Venezuela is a clear signal here) then Davos is pushing for this to further isolate Russian energy. The JCPOA was supposed to be signed this week to get Iran’s oil back into the market, but Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov put a monkey wrench in that.
But it’s Iran’s model of resistance to US sanctions that is Russia’s model for the future. Simply put, sell gold for oil. During the pre-JCPOA period Iran did this with buyers depositing the gold in Turkish banks. Iran kept the oil flowing.
Third party oil trades (through Hong Kong maybe?) will also get around any sanctions for Russia and allow them to sell oil while making China a mint in transaction fees.
But the big move for Putin is quite simple (H/T to Luke Gromen for this) which is to offer up its oil at a steep discount to the futures price but only in gold, physical gold. The current ratio of gold to oil is ~17 bbls/oz.
All Putin has to do is begin a global run on physical gold. Oil is the M-zero of global trade. It is the trade on which all of the West’s financialization power is built upon. And that foundation is built on the petrodollar. By directly tying Russia’s marginal barrel produced to the price of gold far below market prices does two things.
First it creates a massive arbitrage opportunity for oil and gold that the market will fill. Second, it follows, it collapses the valuations of all assets priced in paper gold to the price of physical. So, either the price of everything collapses to maintain the fiction of $2000 gold or the price of gold rises to meet the new price.
This forces the West to come clean on just how much gold it actually has, creates a massive short-term run on physical gold and forces a repricing of everyone’s balance sheet.
And, that, my friends is the big weapon Putin is holding in reserve. He can afford to sell his oil at a deeply discounted price. I’m thinking 50 barrels/oz should do it. He forces the world to reprice oil in terms of gold, and then, by extension, rubles rather than the dollar.
This creates positive gold inflow into Russia to create a two-tiered ruble — the long-held dream of Sergei Glazyev — a domestic gold-backed ruble and a global circulating one which floats.
The key to understanding whether things are primed for this is looking not at Europe but at Saudi Arabia.
Y’all realize this is just code for “We are getting ready to de-peg the Riyal from the US dollar.”
And that means the official end of the petrodollar economy in place since the early 1970’s, opening the way forward for a complete repricing of energy by those that produce the lion’s share of it.
Those that are energy importers are the most vulnerable. The US is not nearly as dependent on foreign energy as Europe, which produces almost nothing other than coal. Everyone today virtue signaling about pulling out of Russian energy projects are slitting their own throats.
I don’t care if you’re talking Exxon-Mobil or Statoil.
The proof is in the markets now. Gold is breaking higher alongside oil, meaning currencies are crashing relative to energy and tokenized energy (money). The euro crashed to $1.0886 on Friday. All other commodities are repricing higher from metals to grains to fertilizers to coffee at levels the world has never seen.
Embargoes on food exports are coming in fast. If this was Davos’ plan it was a stupid one. Because Putin and Russia hold all the cards to ensure they decide what these commodities will be priced in, not them.
And that is the ultimate weapon here.
This is why the race is on now to some new Great Reset. But is it Davos’ or Putin’s?
Davos has to destroy Putin and Russia before Putin destroys Davos. They are fighting on his turf now in both arenas — militarily and financially. And Putin, despite the media blitz to the contrary, has a lot of friends across Asia representing more than half of the world’s population.
If I were Klaus Schwab right now, I would be very careful getting what I wished for because I may just get it good and hard.
https://tomluongo.me/2022/03/