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Fascinating. Thank you for shining light on Glazyev and the information he has conveyed. I don't doubt that he is representative of the Russian position now. It is also enlightening to know the divergence between BoJo and Baidan as per the negotiations. I can't imagine Russia not holding out for all that it wants re: the Ukraine at this point. Not to do so given all of the current conditions would be self-defeating.

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Made the mistake of going on to the Daily Mail site for two minutes. Made me worry that World War III is on the way. You'd think Putin is in a bunker somewhere, screeching to his generals like Hitler, with his hand hovering over the nuclear button. Won't do that again.

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"The Zhou administration’s pivot to allowing Zelenskyy to negotiate—after the initial refusal—is a desperate effort to salvage US influence in a postwar Ukraine."

But but I'm told by all the media and experts that Russia is losing and Putin is going to be chased out of the Kremlin by mobs of freedom loving transgenders. /sarc.

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Here's something else to throw on the side of the scale for Putin:

https://www.rintrah.nl/the-collapse-of-the-they-them-empire-western-elites-have-overplayed-their-hand/

"Here is the physical reality we’re dealing with: Europe is dependent on Russia, not just for electricity or heating, but for the very food that we consume.

Russia and the European Union both produce enough food to feed their own population. There is however a major difference between the two: According to the most recent figures, Russia applies 20.8 kilogram of fertilizer per hectare of arable land, whereas the European Union applies 154.8 kilogram of fertilizer per hectare of arable land.

This leads to important differences in yield. Europe harvests 5,240 kilogram of wheat per hectare of harvested land. We use very little space, to grow enormous amounts of food. On the other hand, Russia harvests 2,616 kilogram of wheat per hectare of harvested land. Places like the Netherlands and Belgium are at the top of the chart, with 8,318 and 8,154 kilogram respectively. The secret to our success is very simple: We’re highly dependent on technological tricks, to produce the maximum amount of food, with the maximum amount of inputs.

And looked at in this way, the European idea of food self-sufficiency is a myth. We don’t produce our own food. We’re about as self-sufficient as a college student who lives by herself but has her father pay for her rent. Because ask yourself: Where does all this fertilizer come from? We produce it ourselves, by fixating nitrogen from the air. But what do we use to fixate the nitrogen? We use natural gas. Nitrogen fertilizer costs have gone up by 263% last year.

But that’s not all. The Netherlands is a massive exporter of food, thanks to our greenhouses. How do you think we produce our food? With natural gas. We don’t just use the natural gas to warm our greenhouses, we use the carbon dioxide released from burning it to massively enhance carbon dioxide concentrations in the greenhouses, because this makes the plants grow faster. This is not to mention the artificial lights that are used for the plants, allowing us to produce fruit and vegetables during dark winters.

If Russia won’t deliver us natural gas, we will literally die of hunger. The greenhouses stop working, we become unable to produce fertilizer so grain yields plunge too. And what are Russia and China now doing? They’re declaring that they’re not exporting fertilizer."

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