Don's Weekly, 9 September 2024: Part 3

by Donald Hill

(…continued from Part 2…)

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Russia

Over 100,000 tons of fuel were destroyed by Ukrainian UAV-strikes at two storage areas in the Rostov Oblast, last month. The facilities were originally built underground in 1962 and were designed to be bombproof. As the facilities degraded, it was decided to rebuild them above ground because it was less expensive. They took 15 years to build and one week to destroy.

Russian parachute flares and defensive fires with tracers at Novorossiysk: this is the present-times main base of the Russian Black Sea Fleet.

A fire broke out at a railway depot near Moscow.

An ammo dump in Voronezh is hit. Two hours later, the ammo was still exploding. An overhead view of the site the next day.

The US believes Russia will continue to damage undersea cables.

As of 2017, Russia produced 230 GW of electricity. (By comparison, the US produces 1,213 GW, China produces 2,920 GW, and India produces 495 GW). Russia has 800 power plants, including 15 nuclear sites with 35 reactors. It has 31,000 substations. Ukraine isn’t going to be able to destroy 800 power plants but it doesn’t need to in order to impact the Russian economy.

From January to March of this year, Moscow had rolling blackouts “not to exceed 12 hours” because production could not meet demand. In July, there were protests in Krasnodor because there wasn’t enough power for everyone to use air conditioning during the hot weather. A couple of weeks ago, Vladivostock had a power outage. And there are lengthy blackouts in Dagestan due to cryptocurrency mining, and Putin warned in July (a high demand month) that cryptocurrency mining could lead to rolling blackouts. Cryptocurrency mining represents 1.5% of Russia’s energy consumption, so the margin between demand and supply can be very small and every power plant that is knocked out will strain the system. When demand for electricity exceeds production then choices have to be made for rail (86% of Russian trains run on electricity), factories and homes, and given a choice the Russian government will always make its citizens pay the price.

0.1% of Twitter/X accounts were responsible for 80% of the misinformation and disinformation in the 2016 US election. Pekka Kallioniemi writes how Russian information operations switched from small bot and troll accounts to supporting accounts with a large amount of followers. He also discusses how Russia funds paid content creators with a combined following of seven million people. The US Justice Department indicted two Russia Today employees on charges of money laundering to hide the $10 million they used to pay the superspreader influencers. For some reason, Scott Ritter was also impacted.

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Ukraine

Two missiles hit a military communications training center in the western city of Poltava. The missiles impacted seconds after the air raid siren sounded and 55 were killed and over 300 wounded as they were rushing to shelters.

Zelensky shakes up his government personnel.

A MiG-29 engages drones at night.

The cost of the war continues to climb in so many different ways. In Kyiv, the children in class 6H are the most troubled, disliking discipline, ignoring teachers and finding it hard to sit still. “It’s a difficult group,”said the teacher. “These children are loud. They want to shout something. But we never asked what they are shouting about. These children are crying for help. They are like a bleeding wound, and no one sees it.” A class art project helps them speak.

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Diplomacy

After almost ten years of negotiations and an agreement signed in 2018, the Baltic countries will disconnect from the Russian/Belarus electrical network and join the EU electrical system on 8 February, 2025. €1.2 billion has been spent preparing for the event. After seven years of planning to switch to the EU network, Ukraine started a 72 hour test of the new connection on 22 February, 2022. Four hours later, Russia invaded. They weren’t supposed to actually switch until 2023 but completed a year's worth of work in two weeks and was fully integrated into the EU electrical grid by 16 March.

Ukraine and Estonia discuss the voluntary return of Ukrainian men abroad. Back in December, Estonia said there are no legal grounds to repatriate them.

The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency is happy to meet the Russian occupiers.

When sanctions were imposed on Russia, exports to Kyrgystan suddenly shot up. Russia is Kyrgystan’s biggest trading partner.

The trade with Kyrgystan increased after Russia’s open invasion of Ukraine and continues to climb. Even with the reductions by some countries it is still much higher than the pre-2022 figures. 5.3% of their imports are electronics. 4.8% of their exports are electronics.

Kyrgystan’s import of Chinese ball bearings rose 1562 percent from 2021 to 2023. Without any large domestic need for them, they were very likely sent to Russia to be used in tanks and railcars. Imports of all Chinese goods rose 168 percent from 2021 levels.

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(…to be continued…)