Weaponising Money

In the days of emperors, they had the habit of telling the mint to use less gold in coins, so everyone owed money by the empire got paid less than they expected, but the power of most empires meant creditors of the empire had no choice but to accept the coins.

 Going to the 19^th century, there were several major currencies, called reserve currencies since major banks had to keep them in reserve. The UK empire had about a quarter of the world as colonies, and each colony had their own currency, but when paying for international trade between two colonies or the colony and the UK, they had to pay in £ sterling, so the £ was a reserve currency. The French had a smaller empire, but, again, when French colonies had to pay for international trade between two French colonies or with France, they had to pay in ₣, so the ₣ was the #2 reserve currency. Those are the two best known of the old reserve currencies. There were more European empires, and some of their imperial currencies were also reserve currencies.

 Then came World War II that left the UK and France broke. The US and the USSR told them they had to liberate all their colonies, and they had already spent far too much on the war (plus France had been a German colony for 4 years) and the ₣ had collapsed. The UK £ had always been at least $5, and Churchill had tried to keep it there, but, right after the war, it had dropped to $4.80 (and kept dropping) and it took ₣1,000 to equal £1.

 But, before the war ended, a strange thing happened in 1944 at Bretton Woods. The US$ was declared the Key Currency. This was because the US$ and only the US$ was a major currency backed by 24K gold (the South African Rand was also backed by gold, and people were not so sensitive about Apartheid back then, but the Rand was too small a currency for the job). 1 US$ could be exchanged by anyone not an American citizen or permanent resident for about 889 mg of gold, the US had a huge amount of gold in Fort Knox, so there were lots of US$, enough to support world trade. So a US$ was the same as gold, and everyone agreed that the only real money was gold. For the first time in history, the world had a Key Currency, the standard currency for all international transactions. Sort of. Since, really, the US$ was the same as gold, it was just a very convenient form of gold to use for international transactions, and everyone agreed to use the US$, making the US$ the Key Currency. For historical reasons, the UK£ and the French₣ remained reserve currencies, as was the US$. Eventually, after they managed to recover economically, the GermanDM and the Japanese¥ became reserve currencies, and also the SwissCHF. But the US$ was the one and only Key Currency, something never seen before 1944.

 Then, in 1971, President Nixon announced that the US$ could no longer be exchanged for gold. A US$ was just a US$, a piece of paper worth whatever people thought it was worth. But, in the absence of any alternative, and with the huge growth in international trade after WWII, the US$ remained the Key Currency.

 If someone put US$ in a Swiss bank, their deposit was somewhat protected from scrutiny, and the depositor remained the owner of the currency unless a Swiss court ordered the depositor to pay for something like a fine that could be taken from the deposit, and the Swiss courts usually would not do that, which is why many people preferred Swiss banks.

 Next came SWIFT, The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (Swift), legally S.W.I.F.T. Many banks are on SWIFT, meaning all depositors have a SWIFT code, and money is easily transferred by computer or app or a visit to the bank from one SWIFT account to another. And since SWIFT was so easy to use, it became the standard for international transactions.

 But now that the world had a Key Currency and SWIFT for international transactions, the US suddenly realised what they could do.

The US can ban a country from using the US$ or SWIFT. Any tourist to a sanctioned country can only bring cash, since credit cards and traveller’s cheques don’t work and there is no way to make international payments. The first victims were Cuba and the DPRK, then Iran, then Venezuela. All their money in banks outside their own country was frozen. Switzerland, strictly neutral for 200 years, honours any US request to freeze US$ accounts in any Swiss bank.

 For more than 40 years, Iran has found all international trade and tourism very difficult. Venezuela didn’t have a problem until Chavez nationalised US oil property and spent the money on the Venezuelan people when, under US law, all that money belongs to US oiligarchs.

 With the G7 strongly supporting the US and holding most of the world’s money, US sanctions on nations cause massive problems, typically starvation and death from treatable injuries and illnesses.

 So, when the US put those sanctions on Russia, …

 The weaponised US$ proved to be a dud. The G7 honour the US sanctions. The G7 announced they would be leaving Russian energy at the end of their current contracts (after they get LNG terminals that can accept US LNG), and also that, when they paid in US$, all those US$ were frozen by the US, and none went to Russia.

 So Russia demanded payment in rubles ₽, which cannot be frozen by the US. And the Europeans who could not completely abandon Russian energy had to pay in ₽ or close their factories for lack of energy.

 Not only that, the GDP of the G7 is now less than the GDP of the BRICS at PPP, so Russia can sell all their oil and gas to India and the PRC and get paid in rupees ₹ and yuan 元.

 But there’s more. The US military said that oil can only be sold for US$, and when Saddam and Gaddafi said they’d accept payment in other currencies, the US military quickly got rid of both of them. Saudi never considered accepting payment in anything except the US$, since the US was their biggest customer, so the US and Saudi were locked in an economic embrace: the US had to have Saudi oil, and Saudi had to have US customers and protection.

 But that was then.

 Today, the US is a net exporter of oil, and Saudi’s biggest customer is the PRC, so now Saudi accepts the 元, and India is a big enough and important enough customer that Saudi accepts the ₹, and Saudi is desperate to join the BRICS.

Economies at PPP?

 Right after WWII, the US GDP was more than 50% of the world GDP. The European colonizers kept the colonials very poor, and the war had destroyed most of Europe. The US were terrified that Western Europe would decide to join the Warsaw Pact, so they spent a lot of money rebuilding Western Europe on the Marshall Plan. As 6 economies recovered well  after WWII (with a lot of help from the US), they joined the US to be the G7, the 7 richest countries in the world. About 25 years ago, the G7 had much more than 50% of the world GDP, and today they figure they're still the G7.

And, in dollar terms, they're still on top, but that's because their prices are very high.

There is something called Purchasing Power Parity, or PPP. Suppose you have two islands. Both have livestock, crops, so enough to eat, also some manufacturing, but they don't know how to build a boat that could make it from one island to the other. Both produce exactly the same goods and services, and in the exact same amounts, but one island has twice as much gold as the other island, and everything is priced in gold, so the island with twice as much gold has prices of twice as many milligrams of gold for every good and service than the other island. Measured in gold, the island with more gold has an economy twice as large, but measured in goods and services, the two economies are the exact same size. The actual economy of a real country produces different quantities of goods and services than the economy of a different country, and some items cost more in one economy than the other, and some items cost less, so how does one calculate the PPP of different economies? Not altogether clear, but one can try. The easiest method is to look at a Big Mac. Almost every country has a MacDonald's (of course, Russia no longer does because of sanctions), so one can compare the price of a Big Mac in two countries and use the ratio of the prices to adjust the actual economies in the local currencies and get the two GDPs at PPP. Or one can use a larger basket of items than just the Big Mac. It's complicated, but economists somehow come up with a PPP economy for every country.

If one converts all the local currencies to US dollars and compares GDP, the G7 are still on top, but at PPP, the top 6 economies are The PRC, the US, India, Japan, Germany, and Russia. And, at PPP, the GDP of the combined BRICS is more than the GDP of the G7.

This is something that is vehemently denied by the Western media.

Officially, Secretary Yellen announced that the sanctions totally destroyed the Russian economy. Russia was just a cold Saudi Arabia, selling oil to the West and using the money to buy everything Russia needed from the West, so with sanctions, no money and no economy. But if one looks at the Russian economy at PPP, it is the world's 6th largest, and has not really changed much with the sanctions.

For 300 years, Russia wanted to be part of Europe. And Europe wanted Russia out. Edward Tufte wrote The Visual Display of Quantitative Information and said the best display of quantitative information is "Napoleon's March to Moscow" by Charles Joseph Minard, that shows Napoleon's great victory in 1812, celebrated in the "1812 Overture". And, of course, a German fellow sent the German Army against Stalingrad, and if one looks at a map, there is no longer a Stalingrad anywhere. So Russia have always been an easy target for the great European powers.

In any case, Russia were selling Europe oil and gas at below market prices, hoping to gain European friendship. But European leaders were happy to stop buying all Russian energy products. Somehow, the German economy has been growing, but not adjusted for inflation. Lots of German companies are moving to the US because energy is too expensive in Germany to run their plants and sell at a profit. But the German leadership, like the rest of Europe (with a couple of minor exceptions) are bought and paid for by the US, so they do what they're told. Switzerland and Sweden were strictly neutral for more than 200 years, but when the US ordered them to help fight Russia, their leaders all agreed to join the fight (the Swiss by agreeing that Russian assets in Swiss banks would all be frozen because of the war, something they never did to Germany in WWI or WWII, and Sweden by joining NATO).

And the top economies, at PPP, ain't what they used to be. As Scott Ritter keeps saying, the sanctions were like boomerangs: they came back to bite them what imposed those sanctions on Russia, while Russia had to make a bunch of changes, but they're getting by. One big problem in Russia is the shortage of chips. The hamburger chain that took over MacDonald's can't get plastic bags of frozen chips ready to be thrown into hot oil, and no place in Russia is up to producing the quantity of chips needed, so they're serving potato waffles with the burgers, but the Russians would prefer chips.

Meanwhile, the PRC and India are buying a lot of Russian energy and selling stuff to Russia that they used to get from the West. So Russia are muddling through much better than the West is.

The great shape of the NATO military

When I graduated from university, back in 1972, the only job I found was in the defence industry, where I was offered a job because the US government paid them $20,000 to hire me, a STEM graduate.

My first day on the job, my new boss told me, “We don’t need any T or E, we need S and M, and I mean Sales and Marketing. Your quota is $250,000 a year. Meet your quota, your commission is 20%. If you don’t meet your quota, you’ll be fired. Now where are you going to sell $250,000?”

I told him I had no idea.

“You should resign today. If you don’t, you’ll just waste your time and ours.”

But I had read my contract. If I quit, I had to repay the US government the $20,000 they’d paid the company to hire me (and if they laid me off, they had to repay the $20,000). And I didn’t have the $20,000, so I did not quit. For a year, they gave me jobs like digging holes and filling them up again, anything to convince me to quit and pay the $20,000 so they could keep the $20,000 and offer the job to someone who might be a great salesperson, but, tightwad that I am, I dug those holes and filled them up. The small draw they had to pay me against future commissions wasn’t great, but getting a small salary was better than having to pay $20,000. Cold, hard cash. And then being out of a job because I had quit, and so was not entitled to any unemployment insurance payments.

During that year, I saw a classmate who knew what to do. His degree was in Organic Chemistry, and his final paper was “Studies in the synthesis of …” In Organic Chemistry, if you succeed in synthesising something, your final paper is, “Synthesis of …”, but if you fail, your final paper is “Studies in the synthesis of …”, so he’d failed to synthesise whatever organic compound he’d been trying to synthesise. They asked him, “What do you know about weapons grade lasers?”

He answered, “My real degree is in weapons grade lasers, and I worked on a project at the Balcones Research Center, but my project is classified TS/SCI/NOFORN/BBR, so I can’t tell you anything about it. They put Organic Chemistry as the fake name of my degree, since my real degree is Top Secret, but I am one of the world’s greatest experts in laser weapons.” They said, “You’re our boy!” and for a year, he went with the team of salespersons and came back with several pots of money, then the team fought over who did how much to get the several million or so dollars that they got and who was entitled to how much of the commission.

The actual contract employed a bunch of $5 an hour people punching computer cards for $100 a card. The code did not compile or run, but the team promised that the code solved some of the most complicated and important problems in the physics of advanced laser weapons. Then the team and the contracting officer had to go tell the senior officers, the bosses of the contracting officer, that the code solved some of the most complicated and important problems in the physics of advanced laser weapons (the contracting officer wanted to keep his job, so, if he knew that the code did not compile or run, he lied to his superior officers, but usually, the contracting officer was careful not to look so he didn’t have to lie, he could truthfully say that he had watched hours and hours of presentations by the salesmen with STEM degrees who promised him that the code—which did not compile or run—solved some of the most complicated and important problems in the physics of advanced laser weapons). Then the senior officers overseeing the project, who had absolutely no physics background, listened to a bunch of big words that sounded sciencey and were convinced that the presenters knew what they were talking about and were telling the truth that they had developed code that solved some of the most complicated and important problems in the physics of weapons grade lasers.

I was fired as soon as my year was up and my company could fire me without having to return 1¢ of the $20,000 they’d gotten for hiring me, since I was $249,500 short of my $250,000 quota, but at least I could collect unemployment insurance, and, after a month paid for by unemployment insurance, I was hired by another company that was paid $22,000 to hire a STEM graduate (the price went up every year with inflation, which was obviously 10% that year). And a few months later, my classmate applied for a job with my new company.

“We’re doing research in particle beam weapons,” they told him.

“My real degree is in particle beam weapons,” he said, “and I worked on a project at the Balcones Research Center, but my project is classified TS/SCI/NOFORN/BBR, so I can’t tell you anything about it. They put Organic Chemistry as the fake name of my degree, since my real degree is Top Secret. I had to work on lasers for the last year because I couldn’t find a job in particle beam weapons, but it will be great to get back to working on what I am one of the world’s greatest experts in.” And, once again, they said, “You’re our boy!”

The executives of the defence companies earn huge sums for doing stuff that has absolutely no value of any kind, which (I guess) is better than doing stuff that kills people (but they still manage to produce some WWII era weapons that can kill people in Third World countries while getting paid to produce WWIV era ultra-advanced weapons suitable for defence against an invasion by extra-terrestrial warmongering aliens).

Net: The Ukrainians, fighting a proxy war by NATO with NATO weapons against Russia are losing, and losing badly, while all the Western media are required by law to write that the Ukrainians, with ultra-advanced NATO weapons, have completely destroyed the Russian invasion force which, because of the sanctions, only have outmoded and inept Soviet and Czarist weapons.

Or, to put it another way, lies, lies, and more lies by the West and all the Western media.

Putin has lost the war

 President Biden announced that Putin has already lost the war, and he is correct. Not the Russian Putin, of course, but the American Putin, a dictator determined to rebuild the USSR, then the Warsaw Pact, and then move westward to take Paris and London.

But the attack on the Ukraine, after a year, has not yet completely conquered the Ukraine, so Paris is looking more and more remote, and this is a complete and total victory for NATO.

Proving Brandon's leadership in wartime has been exceptional!

Hi, Thucydides

 In 2012, Graham Allison wrote "The Thucydides Trap" based on Thucydides' history of the Peloponnesian War, where Sparta was the hegemon of the Greek city states and Athens was a rising rival, and that led to war. Allison, studying a lot of history, concluded that, when a hegemon faces a rising rival, war results about 75% of the time. Allison and his Thucydides Trap are denigrated in Wikipedia, but, looking at history, it does seem that, more than half the time, when a hegemon faces a rising rival, war ensues.

In 1991, the US achieved Global Hegemony: the world's strongest military and no rival. This had never happened before. There had been European hegemons, Asian hegemons, South American hegemons, sometimes hegemons over a much smaller area, like the Greek islands, but never a Global hegemon. Gradually, being the only Great Power did not last, and in 2012, Allison saw the PRC as the rising rival, and predicted there was about a 75% chance of war.

But the PRC have MAD, so how?

The US, of course, saw how they destroyed the USSR by funding jihadists in Afghanistan to attack anything and everything Soviet until the USSR bankrupted themselves fighting the Afghan jihadists and the USSR collapsed completely, making the US the first ever Global Hegemon.

But the PRC were rising rapidly, building more naval ships than the US, a larger army than the US, and they had MAD, so what to do?

The US idea was to provoke the PRC to invade Taiwan, then the US would impose global sanctions and supply Taiwan with advanced weapons and the proxy war would destroy the PRC.

But the US also had their eye on Russia, another rising hegemon. John Joseph Mearsheimer says that there are now three Great Powers: the US are first, the PRC are a close second, and Russia are a distant third. And the US saw how easy it was to destroy the USSR, but Russia would never be tempted by Afghanistan, they needed a more irresistible threat, and that was the Ukraine. The US made moves to provoke the PRC over Taiwan, and in 2008 threatened to make the Ukraine and Georgia part of NATO, but not much happened.

Then, in 2014, the US engineered an overthrow of the elected Ukraine government by a group who hate everything Russian and are determined (with a lot of NATO help) to remove all ethnic Russians from the Ukraine to make Lebensraum for all the ethnic Aryans in the Ukraine. They planned to cancel the Russian leases on naval bases in the Crimea and give those naval bases to NATO. So Russia marched in and annexed the Crimea, and insisted that the Ukraine accept the Minsk Accords, that no ethnic Russian in the Donbass would be harmed. Germany and France promised to ensure that the Ukraine observed the Minsk Accords.

For the next eight years, the anti-Russian group in the Ukraine violated the Minsk Accords, and the former heads of Germany and France said they were just a ruse to buy time to reorganise the Ukrainian military, removing all ethnic Russian officers, and heavily arm that military.

The Ukraine planned a massacre of ethnic Russians in the Donbass in spring of 2022, so Russia invaded, and the US figure their trap had been sprung, and Russia will soon have a new regime that will allow Russia to be broken up just as the USSR was broken up.

But now the US want the PRC to invade Taiwan, after which the US will impose worldwide sanctions on the PRC that will destroy the PRC economy and will give advanced weapons to Taiwan that will enable them to destroy the invading PLA force.

The US has staged provocation after provocation, but the PRC have not responded.

This is because the PRC say they will not be ready to challenge the US before 2027, so they will put up with almost any provocation before then.

Meanwhile, the US have said they intend to force the PLA invasion of Taiwan before 2025.

Two for two beats 75%, so it is looking very much like Allison was right about hegemons and rising rivals.

Ukraine in the News

 Russia keep hoping that the odd fact will somehow make it into the Western media. They found a headline in the Telegraph that "Ukraine and the West are facing a devastating defeat", but if one reads the article, it says that, unless the West sends much more money and weapons to the Ukraine, there is a chance that the war might result in a stalemate, and this would be terrible, so get that money and weapons going ASAP. If the West does not totally mess up, eventually Russia will be ejected from all of the Ukraine and a huge chunk of Western Russia will become a border zone controlled by the Ukraine to ensure there cannot be another invasion.

 Officially, Russia have lost more than 300,000 dead soldiers, many more injured, the Russian economy is in a state of total collapse (I heard Secretary Yellen repeating that recently), so no money for weapons or ammunition, hence the Russians round up any males they can find, mostly very young boys and elderly men, give them Soviet or Czarist weapons, and send them into battle with trained soldiers behind them and told that, if they do not charge the Ukrainians who all have advanced US weapons, they will all be shot from behind, so off to slaughter they go, but most Russian males are in hiding or have sneaked out of Russia to somewhere safe from the draft. The result is that Putin is having a very hard time replacing the lost 300,000, all Russia are united against Putin, and he will very soon be overthrown and replaced with someone like Navalny who will agree surrender and let NATO break Russia up into 7 unarmed states, all with a nominal local leader (appointed by NATO) and with NATO supervisors who will tell the nominal leaders what to do. 

The US said at the beginning that the goal of the war was regime change in Russia and to weaken Russia enough that they could never again engage in any military activity. Recently, the US have said they have no intention of destroying Russia. When one smashes a mirror, one has not destroyed the mirror, one has just transformed a big mirror into a bunch of small mirrors, an improvement. The US did not destroy Yugoslavia. There is no longer any Yugoslavia on the map, but that wasn't destruction, just improvement. And removing Russia from the map will not be destruction, but improvement!

It is illegal to write anything else in the Western media, so this is all one can find. The odd misleading headline somehow managed to make it into the Telegraph, but none of the facts: i.e., the Russian economy is doing OK, in fact, the top 6 economies by PPP are the PRC, US, India, Japan, Germany, and Russia. The GDP at PPP of the BRICS is now larger than the GDP of the G7. So the Russian military, after a first fortnight in February 2022 of horrible mistakes, got their act together. A classified document leaked by Airman Teixeira showed that the actual Ukrainian losses have been 7 to 10 times as many as Russian losses in terms of dead and wounded soldiers. Tucker Carlson mentioned this on his show and was fired the next Monday because he reported this prohibited fact. Plus NATO materiel and troop burn rate are far more than their replacement rate while Russian materiel and troop replacement rate are somewhat more than their burn rate, which means things have been going badly for the Ukraine and NATO and will only get worse. But you'll never see that in any of the Western media. And all the Western news anchors know what will happen if the odd fact ever gets into any of their newscasts about the Ukraine.

Things have changed (but no one told the West)

 After WWII, the US GDP was a large majority of the world GDP. Europe was in ruins, the European colonies had been robbed blind for a century or more, and there was a video made in 1949 called "King Joe" that the typical American factory worker earned $10 a day while a Chinese coolie earned 10¢ a day.

Right after WWII, the £ and the ₣ were no longer the strong currencies they had been, and a US$ could be exchanged for 889 mg of 24K gold, so the US$ became the World Key Currency, the currency most often used for international transactions since a US$ was as Good as Gold.

The US worried that Western European and Japanese peasants might be attracted by the promises of the USSR, so the US pumped money into Europe and Japan to help them rebuild. The US share of the world economy fell below 30%, but the US and their close allies, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Canada, and Japan formed the G7, which still had 70% of the world GDP.

Then, in 1971, President Nixon announced that a US$ was just a US$, no gold. But there was no alternative, so the US$ remained the Key Currency.

More and more Americans bought cars and flew on jets, and the US soon needed all the oil it could produce, and then a lot more, mostly from the Middle East, so the US and Saudi became locked in an economic embrace. The US desperately needed Saudi oil and were Saudi's biggest customer, and Saudi desperately needed US $$$ and protection. And when the US asked Saudi to take over their Yemen war as proxies, Saudi were happy to oblige. Saudi are not fond of Shi'a, so killing the Shi'a in the Yemen with advanced US weapons was a pleasure.

But then came fracking, and the US are now a net exporter of oil. The US have no need of Saudi oil and are no longer pumping huge amounts of US$$$ into the Saudi coffers.

But the US control the World Key Currency, so they can ban anyone buying or selling in US$, and did this to Iran. The US said it is illegal for anyone to buy Iranian oil or to sell anything to Iran. The Iran economy fell by 50%, and Iranian lifestyles were reduced, with some hardship, but Iran did not agree to regime change to be able to engage in international trade. If the US wanted to blockade Iran, they put up with the poverty that produced. The Ayatollahs figured poverty was better than capitulating to The Great Satan.

The US Navy enforced the blockade of Iran. Any oil tanker carrying Iranian oil would be seized by the US Navy and the oil and the tanker sold with all the money going to the US government.

But times change.

That Chinese coolie now earns enough to buy a car and petrol, and there are a lot of Chinese coolies buying far more oil than the US ever did. Enough that, in 2021, a fleet of PRC tankers guarded by PLANavy warships began pulling empty into Iran and loaded with Iranian oil out of Iran, and all that oil made it safely to the PRC.

The G7 are sure their GDP is still at least 70% of the Global GDP. But the G7 leadership can't count. At PPP, the BRICS GDP is larger than the G7 GDP.

So when Brandon went to Saudi Arabia recently to ask for more and cheaper oil, he got a very cool reception.

And when Xi Jinping went to the PRC, he got the reddest of carpets, and was told Saudi would be very happy if the PRC paid for their oil in 元.

So when the PRC demanded that Saudi and Iran end their conflict and make peace, they both said, 'Yes, Sir! Whatever you say, Sir.'

Prof. John Mearsheimer says the world now has 3 Great Powers (and only 3). Russia are in 3rd place, and are far, far weaker than #1 and #2. He puts the US as #1 with the PRC a very close #2. The PRC agree with this assessment, and hope to have the PRC military the equal of the US by 2027, so the US are desperate for a war that will end with regime change and Balkanisation of the PRC before 2025.

I'm not sure Russia are really that far behind. Russia have no hatred for the ordinary Ukrainians, only for the ones who are convinced they are ethnic Aryans and much better than ethnic Russians who should all be eliminated for Lebensraum. This is unlike the US who were told that every Afghan, Iraqi, Yemeni, and Libyan worked hard to plan, engineer, and execute 9/11, and all must be destroyed. Reliable reports are that Kiev has a great night life and no one is worried about being carpet bombed the way the US carpet bombed their perceived enemy jihadist terrorists. 

Of course, the US leadership figure this is because the feeble Russian military lacks the capability to carpet bomb Kiev, they have already lost more than 300,000 dead Russian soldiers, cut off from weapons by the sanctions, forced to use Czarist weapons against NATO weapons, the most advanced weapons in the world. Only a few are left of the invaders, and they sneak into undefended villages, kill all the villagers, and leave before the Ukraine military (or even the Ukraine police) can come to stop them. This is the only version allowed in the Western media (Tucker Carlson was fired for saying something else), so Western leaders and ordinary citizens read it and watch it and believe it.

In fact, Tucker Carlson read from a classified TS/SCI/NOFORN/BBR report that the Ukraine are losing 7 to 10 times as many soldiers as the Russians, along with at least 30% of all the materiel that NATO sent them. NATO say the Russians ran 100 pictures of one Western tank that was briefly stuck and called it 100 NATO tanks destroyed. Just Russian Photoshop, don't believe your own eyes.

NATO are losing, even though NATO 'know' they must be winning a decisive victory, since that's all they ever read in the newspapers or see on the broadcast news.

And the G7 still think they are 70% of the Global economy and the PRC are a bunch of coolies earning 10¢ a day, with a Navy that's just junk(s) and an air force that's just coloured kites, and the US plan to drag the rest of NATO along as they force the PRC to go to war over Taiwan, after which the sanctions will destroy the PRC economy, putting it back to where it was in 1970, and the advanced NATO weapons will quickly destroy the entire PLA.

Good luck with that, NATO.