Sobre a furada chantagem nuclear do tirano de Moscou - Paulo Roberto de Almeida

 Sobre a furada chantagem nuclear do tirano de Moscou:

Não acredito que o grau máximo de insanidade do tirano de Moscou consiga se sobrepor à racionalidade última dos generais russos encarregados da segurança do botão nuclear. 

Teriam de primeiro decidir: jogar o quê contra quem, onde e com qual objetivo estratégico? 

Alguma razão especificamente tática? 

A ameaça é pura bazófia, e se trata, sim, de um blefe, talvez o último do czar que pretendia ser Pedro o Grande, talvez até Ivan o Terrível, e que pode terminar como Nicolau II. 

Não vale o argumento de que a Rússia se encontra em mais uma postura defensiva, como em face de Napoleão e de Hitler. Desta vez ela É a potência agressora!

Minha única dúvida é sobre se a Rússia, derrotada militarmente, finalmente se encaminhará, ainda que muito lentamente, para uma nova democracia de fachada — como ocorreu entre fevereiro e outubro de 1917, objeto de um artigo de Max Weber — ou se recrudescerá nos seus instintos totalitários que foram a marca distintiva do regime bolchevique, mais até do que o absolutismo czarista.

Putin, em última instância, pode ser o aprendiz de feiticeiro que libertará a Rússia de sua doença senil do imperialismo, mas acredito mais num impasse histórico de dimensão e duração indefinidas. Ou seja, a humanidade continuará vivendo dramas não muito distantes da guerra de Troia.

À falta de um Heródoto ou de um Tucídides, talvez apareça algum novo poeta cego…

Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Ribeirão Preto, 22/09/2022

A Cornered Vladimir Putin Is More Dangerous Than Ever - Roger Cohen (NYT)

 The New York Times – 22.9.2022

A Cornered Vladimir Putin Is More Dangerous Than Ever

In a major speech, he recast the war in Ukraine and made clear it could spread.

Roger Cohen

 

Vladimir V. Putin’s menacing televised address on Wednesday was much more than a bid to change the course of his faltering war against Ukraine. It attempted to invert a war of aggression against a neighbor into one of defense of a threatened “motherland,” a theme that resonates with Russians steeped in patriotic history.

Mr. Putin, Russia’s president, aimed at nothing less than altering the meaning of the war for his country, raising the stakes for the entire world. He warned the West in unmistakable terms — “this is not a bluff” — that the attempt to weaken or defeat Russia could provoke nuclear cataclysm.

Rattling his nuclear saber, accusing the West of seeking to “destroy” his country and ordering the call-up of 300,000 military reservists, Mr. Putin implicitly conceded that the war he started on Feb. 24 has not gone as he wished. He painted the Ukrainians as mere pawns of the “military machine of the collective West.”

By veering far from his original objective of demilitarizing and “de-Nazifying” all of Ukraine, he made a nonsense of the Kremlin’s far-fetched claims that the war was proceeding according to plan, and tacitly acknowledged something he had always denied: the reality and growing resistance of a unified Ukrainian nation.

But Mr. Putin cornered is Mr. Putin at his most dangerous. That was one of the core lessons of his hardscrabble youth that he took from the furious reaction of a rat he cornered on a stairwell in what was then Leningrad.

“Russia won its defensive wars against Napoleon and Hitler, and the most important thing Putin did here from a psychological perspective was to claim this, too, is a defensive war,” said Michel Eltchaninoff, the French author of “Inside the Mind of Vladimir Putin.” “It was an aggressive war. Now it’s the defense of the Russian world against the Western attempt at dismemberment.”

In Mr. Putin’s telling, that imagined world imbued with some inalienable Russian essence has grown in size. He said Russia would support imminent referendums in four regions of Ukraine on whether to join Russia — votes denounced by Ukraine and the West as a sham, and a likely prelude to annexation.

The Kremlin has signaled that if it absorbs that territory, the Ukrainian counter-offensives underway in the east and south to recapture territory seized by Russia would be considered attacks on Russian soil, justifying any level of retaliation, up to and including a nuclear response.

The State of the War

“If the territorial integrity of our country is threatened, we will of course use all means at our disposal to defend Russia and our people,” Mr. Putin said.

His speech, which may of course be a bluff despite his denial, nevertheless placed before the West a dilemma that has been inherent in its policy from the start of the war: How far can intense military and logistical support of Ukraine — effectively everything short of NATO troops on the ground — go without setting off nuclear confrontation?

“I believe the nuclear threat is a bluff but it gives Putin a means to terrify the West, and accentuate divisions about providing arms because some may now view that as too dangerous,” said Sylvie Bermann, a former French ambassador to Russia.

Hours after the speech in Moscow, President Biden denounced Mr. Putin’s “overt nuclear threats” against Europe, describing them as “reckless.” Addressing the United Nations General Assembly, he said the West would be “clear, firm and unwavering” in its resolve as it confronts Mr. Putin’s “brutal, needless war” in Ukraine.

“This war is about extinguishing Ukraine’s right to exist as a state, plain and simple,” Mr. Biden said. He continued: “Whoever you are, wherever you live, whatever you believe, that should make your blood run cold.”

A game of brinkmanship has begun with the American and Russian leaders seeking to outmaneuver each other as the war festers. If Ukraine and its Western backers have the advantage for now, that edge is by no means secure.

Seven months into the war, its resolution appears more distant than ever and its reverberations more dangerous. Perhaps not since the Cuban missile crisis six decades ago have American and Russian leaders confronted each other so explicitly and sharply on the danger of nuclear war.

As Olaf Scholz, the German chancellor, has said, the United States and its Western allies have been trying to use “all means possible” to help Ukraine “without creating an uncontrollable escalation.” But the risk of that escalation, possibly the start of World War III, just grew, because what constitutes a strike “inside Russia” may now be defined differently by Mr. Putin.

Full of anger and venom, portraying Ukraine as the headquarters of neo-Nazis and the West as a giant engine of “Russophobia,” Mr. Putin appeared as deluded about the neighbor he attacked as he was in his Feb. 24 speech that announced the war.

He has downsized Russia’s military ambitions in Ukraine — upended by the Russian defeat in Kyiv and recent battlefield setbacks in the northeast — without downsizing his obsessions over Russian humiliation at the breakup of the Soviet Union three decades ago.

On Wednesday, as in February, he accused the Ukrainian authorities, falsely, of genocide against ethnic Russians. He boasted of nuclear weapons that are “more advanced” than the West’s. He made wild allegations about the threat to Russia. He alluded, for example, to “statements by some high-ranking representatives of leading NATO states about the possibility and admissibility of using weapons of mass destruction — nuclear weapons — against Russia.”

There is no evidence of this.

Mr. Putin “claimed he had to act because Russia was threatened. But no one threatened Russia and no one other than Russia sought conflict,” Mr. Biden said.

The speeches came on the eve of a winter that will be hard in Europe, with inflation and energy costs rising, and days before an Italian election Sunday in which a far-right candidate, Giorgia Meloni, is the favorite. The European extreme right has generally been sympathetic to Moscow, although Ms. Meloni’s own position appears to be evolving.

Up to now, Mr. Biden has been very effective in cementing Western unity. But while the Biden administration has little apparent faith in diplomacy with Moscow at this stage, France and Germany still seek the dialogue with Russia that President Emmanuel Macron of France mentioned in his speech on Tuesday to the United Nations, a dialogue judged necessary, he said, because “we seek peace.”

Not at any price, however. Mr. Macron’s position has hardened. He presented a stark picture of a world hovering on the brink of war and brutal division as a result of Russia’s “imperial” aggression.

He said the world was close to “an enlarged era of conflict, a permanent one, where sovereignty and security will be determined by force, by the size of armies.” It was imperative, he insisted, that those remaining neutral — an apparent reference to India and China, among others — speak out.

“Those who are silent today are, despite themselves, or secretly, serving the cause of the new imperialism,” Mr. Macron said.

The Russian attempt to rebuild the imperium lost at the dissolution of the Soviet Union finds itself at a treacherous crossroads. After multiple military setbacks, Mr. Putin spoke from a weaker position than the one he held seven months ago.

“The situation is very dangerous because Putin is in a trap,” Ms. Bermann said.

 

*

Quem vai colocar o guizo no pescoço geopolítico do gato? - Paulo Roberto de Almeida

 Quem vai colocar o guizo no pescoço geopolítico do gato?

Paulo Roberto de Almeida

A pergunta correta é esta: quantos milhares de russos mais o tirano de Moscou sacrificará na sua inútil e custosa guerra de agressão contra a Ucrânia, antes de ser detido em sua insanidade militar especial? 

Quem enfrentará Putin, o neoczar que está destruindo seu próprio país? 

Esta é uma tarefa que incumbe unicamente ao povo russo, que se encontra paralisado por duas razões principais: muitos estão ingenuamente convencidos de que Putin está efetivamente comprometido com a defesa necessária da Rússia contra um ataque da Otan, e todos sabem que qualquer resistência aos projetos do tirano sofrerá imediata repressão das forças de segurança e condenação por uma justiça inteiramente a seu serviço.

O lento desenrolar de mais uma tragédia numa história nacional que comporta basicamente expansionismo imperialista e brutal regime autoritário. 

Toynbee e Duroselle, se estivessem vivos, certamente teriam riquíssimos materiais sobre o declínio dos impérios. Também Shakespeare encontraria suporte para mais um drama exemplar. Não sei se Tolstoi gastaria tinta com um personagem tosco e claramente tomado por uma megalomania doentia. 

O fato é que a comunidade mundial está terrivelmente paralisada em face do mais dramático desafio aos fundamentos do Direito Internacional e aos princípios básicos da Carta das Nações Unidas. 

A ONU  será desacreditada como o foi, em seu tempo, a Liga das Nações, pela inoperância da maior parte dos seus membros?

Ribeirão Preto, 22/09/2022

Eleições 2022: esquerda latino-americana pede a Ciro Gomes que desista de concorrer

 *Carta abierta a Ciro Gomes: lo que hay que hacer para frenar a Bolsonaro*

20 de Septiembre, 2022

Querido compañero Ciro Gomes:

Los abajo firmantes somos militantes de la izquierda latinoamericana, profundamente antiimperialistas y comprometidos con la emancipación de nuestros pueblos y la creación de la Patria Grande. Somos también personas que amamos y admiramos a Brasil y su pueblo; a la exquisita cultura de ese país: su música, su literatura, sus pinturas, su gastronomía, sus diversas manifestaciones artísticas y también la larga lucha de su pueblo por acceder a una vida más plena, en lo espiritual y en lo material.

Sabemos que usted ha sido durante toda su vida un luchador por las buenas causas del pueblo brasileño. Por eso la perplejidad que nos impulsa a escribirle esta carta y que nos mueve a enviarle este fraternal mensaje porque nos resulta incomprensible, en la coyuntura brasileña actual, su insistencia en presentar su candidatura presidencial para la primera vuelta de las elecciones presidenciales del Brasil, este 2 de Octubre, mismas que sin la menor dosis de exageración pueden ser consideradas como un parteaguas histórico. ¿Por qué? Porque la elección de fondo no será entre Jair Bolsonaro y Luiz Inacio “Lula” da Silva sino entre fascismo y democracia. Y usted, hombre político, inteligente y con una amplia experiencia sobre sus espaldas, sabe muy bien que su candidatura no tiene absolutamente ninguna chance de llegar al balotaje, menos aún de imponerse en la primera vuelta. La dura realidad es que manteniendo su postulación, querido compañero Ciro, lo único que hará será dispersar fuerzas, debilitar la fortaleza del bloque antifascista, con todas sus contradicciones, y facilitar la victoria de Bolsonaro, y eventualmente abrir camino a un nuevo golpe de estado. A pesar de su buena voluntad infelizmente usted no está en condiciones de hacer el bien, ningún bien, y sí de hacer un mal muy grande al Brasil y a su pueblo. No podrá hacer el bien pese a sus intenciones porque sus chances de ganar son igual a cero. Al debilitar la candidatura unitaria de Lula, al disperar las fuerzas del bloque que se opone al fascismo, lo que usted objetivamente hará (más allá de sus intenciones que no dudamos son buenas) será allanar el camino para la perpetuación de Bolsonaro en el poder.

Nos parece que por su trayectoria usted no debe ingresar a la historia del Brasil por esa puerta indigna, como la de un hombre que habiendo luchado por las buenas causas de su pueblo y logrado importantes resultados, en la instancia crítica y decisiva para su país comete un yerro garrafal y le abre las puertas a un proceso que sembrará muerte y destrucción en su país y que, sin duda, lo tendrá también a usted como una de sus víctimas. No puede desconocer la naturaleza perversa del actual presidente de Brasil. Sus palabras y sus promesas, inclusive las que les podría haber hecho a usted, carecen por completo de valor. Bolsonaro es un personaje inmoral, un alucinado fanático carente de principios morales que dejó morir a más de 700.000 brasileñas y brasileños sin hacer el menor esfuerzo para salvarlos. Es, además, un traidor serial, sólo comparable a los peores personajes de Shakespeare. Y no dudará un instante en traicionarlo a usted ni bien le resulte conveniente.

Todavía está a tiempo de enmendar su error, compañero Ciro. Diríjase ya mismo a sus seguidores y dígales que la urgencia de la lucha contra el fascismo no les deja otra opción que apoyar la candidatura presidencial de Lula. Pídales ese voto, crucial para derrotar en primera vuelta al capitán (así, con minúsculas) y sus escuadrones armados; crucial también para impedir la perpetuación en el poder de un hombre que exaltó la figura del canalla que torturó a Dilma Rousseff. Usted, por su historia y sus ideas, tiene que hacer lo imposible para impedir que semejante figura monstruosa permanezca un día más en el Palacio del Planalto. Además, por sus años, no nos cabe duda que seguirá siendo una figura protagónica de la política brasileña. Que éste no es su turno, que las circunstancias lo obligan a esperar. No se olvide que la paciencia es uno de los rasgos definitorios de los grandes líderes políticos.

Nada más por ahora. Esperamos que sepa apreciar el sentido solidario de este mensaje. Reciba un fraternal abrazo de sus compañeros de lucha de toda Latinoamérica y el Caribe.

_______________

 *Primeras firmas de adhesión*:

Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, Premio Nobel de la Paz, Argentina

Rafael Correa, ex presidente del Ecuador

Stella Calloni, periodista, Argentina

E. Raúl Zaffaroni, ex Juez de la Corte Suprema, Argentina

Atilio Boron, politólogo, Argentina

Piedad Córdoba, Senadora, Colombia

Amado Boudou, ex vicepresidente de la Argentina

Gabriela Rivadeneira, ex presidenta Asamblea Nacional, Ecuador

Fernando Buen Abad, filósofo, México

Ignacio Ramonet, periodista, Francia/España

Ernesto Villegas, República Bolivariana de Venezuela

Hugo Moldiz, ex ministro, Bolivia

Jaime Lorca, Fundación Memoria y Futuro, Chile

Xavier Lasso, periodista, Ecuador

Katu Arkonada, País Vasco/Bolivia

Jorge Lara Castro, ex canciller, Paraguay

Hernando Calvo Ospina, cineasta, Colombia

Esteban Silva, docente universitario, Chile

María Seoane, periodista, Argentina

Mempo Giardinelli, escritor, Argentina

Juan Eduardo Romero, diputado PSUV, Asamblea Nacional, Venezuela

Alicia Entel, docente universitaria, Argentina

Gilberto López y Rivas, antropólogo, México

Daniel Jadue, Alcalde de Recoleta, Chile

Telma Luzzani, periodista, Argentina

Florencia Saintout, presidenta, Instituto Cultural de la provincia de Buenos Aires, Argentina

Ramón Grossfogel, docente universitario, Puerto Rico

Mario Giorgi, Radio UNDAV, Argentina

Claudia V. Rocca, Rama Argentina de la Asociación Americana de Juristas

María Fernanda Barretto, escritora colombo-venezolana  

Daniel de Santis, docente universitario, Argentina

José Seoane, docente universitario, Argentina

Paola Gallo Peláez, Co-presidenta del MOPASSOL, Argentina 

Jorge Cantor, Argentina 

Rodolfo Hamawi, docente universitario, Argentina

Emilio Taddei, docente universitario, Argentina

Julio Ferrer, periodista, Argentina

Juan Ramón Quintana Taborga, ex ministro, Bolivia

Andrea V. Vlahusic, Co-presidenta del MOPASSOL, Argentina

Héctor Bernardo, periodista, Argentina

María Fernanda de la Quintana, periodista, Argentina

Jorge Elbaum, docente universitario, Argentina

Carlos López López, Parlamentario del Mercosur 

Ana María Ramb, escritora, Argentina

Pamela Dávila, periodista, Ecuador

Rafael Urrejola Ditborn, periodista, Chile

Paula Klachko, docente universitaria, Coord. REDH/Cap. Argentino 

Henry Morales, Coord. Movimiento Tzuk Kim Pop, Guatemala

Manuel Santos Iñurrieta, dramaturgo, Argentina

Carlos Bedoya, Coord. Latindadd, Perú

Alexia Massholder, docente universitaria, Argentina

Claudio Katz, economista, Argentina

Marcelo Rodríguez, docente universitario, Argentina 

Mario Alderete, Argentina

Graciela Josevich, AUNA Argentina

*Para adherirse, envía tu mensaje a:   cirorenuncia@gmail.com*

Antonio Guterres: 'Our world is in big trouble' - Stephen Collinson, Caitlin Hu and Shelby Rose (CNN)

 

Stephen Collinson, Caitlin Hu and Shelby Rose

'Our world is in big trouble'

United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres speaks on Tuesday (UNTV)

The international order that the United Nations enshrined is splintering. “Our world is in big trouble,” is how Secretary-General António Guterres put it in opening the annual General Assembly on Tuesday. The UN has rarely lived up to its loftier goals. But it’s hard to remember a time when its fundamental principles of forging common solutions for peace, supporting human rights and promoting international law have been so threatened.    Member state Russia has trampled the UN charter with its invasion of Ukraine. Neither Russian President Vladimir Putin nor Chinese President Xi Jinping will bother to show up for the meeting of leaders in the Big Apple — though they did get together last week separately. And recent floods in Pakistan suggest the UN's efforts to broker deals curbing carbon emissions are already too late for some nations. Once, the UN was a hotbed of diplomacy in times of war. But those days are gone as Beijing and Moscow wield their Security Council vetoes to hobble  efforts to mediate in places like Syria and Ukraine. Following its invasion earlier this year, Russia turned council meetings into a theater of the absurd. US President Joe Biden will extend his streak of frank talk when he calls on the world Wednesday to stand up against “naked aggression” from Moscow, national security advisor Jake Sullivan said. Biden's warnings that the world is dividing into a duel between despots and democrats look on the money. Of course, America’s critics point out that it has often appeared to infringe the principles of the United Nations itself, with its wars in Vietnam and Iraq, for example. And any return to power by former President Donald Trump, who spun US diplomacy on its head by dissing Western allies and coddling tyrants, could obliterate Biden’s efforts to save international law.  All this explains the extraordinarily bleak tone of the UN Secretary-General’s speech, as he lamented that there was “no cooperation, no dialogue, no collective problem solving” while warning, “the reality is that we live in a world where the logic of dialogue and cooperation is the only path forward."

Here’s what we know about the state of Russia’s military - Ellen Ioanes (Vox)

Uma explicação sobre as tremendas falhas russas na guerra de agressão contra a Ucrânia que estão permitindo – junto com o fornecimento de mais armas pelas potências ocidentais ao país agredido – a derrota das tropas russas nas frentes de batalha. 

Uma pena que o Brasil – tanto a do Bozo e sua horrível diplomacia, quanto a, possivelmente, a do Lula, e sua diplomacia partidária – não se coloque do lado do Direito Internacional e da Carta da ONU, e seja objetivamente favorável à Rússia, por causa dessa desgraça do BRICS.

Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Here’s what we know about the state of Russia’s military 

Ukraine’s recent victories expose even more systemic failures.

By Ellen Ioanes 

Vox, Sep 18, 2022, 6:48pm EDT

Russian military vehicles were among the equipment left behind by retreating Russian soldiers near Kharkiv, Ukraine, on September 10.

Juan Barreto/AFP via Getty Images

Ukraine’s continuing rout of Russian forces in the east has exposed fundamental problems within the Russian military, including deficiencies and power struggles in its command structure and gaps in intelligence gathering and processing. Though Russia’s early failures and difficulty recruiting enough soldiers for the front line have been clear for months, the latest operation shows the depth of the disarray and stasis in Russia’s armed forces. 

Ukraine’s lightning strike operation in the Kharkiv region demonstrated the Ukrainian military’s ability to take advantage of those deficiencies to recapture not just territory, but strategically important transport and resupply hubs for the Russian military’s eastern front. Although the war is far from over, and Russia still controls around 20 percent of Ukraine’s territory, the Kharkiv operation provided a strategic and moral win for Ukraine, and revealed a Russian military seemingly unable — or unwilling — to learn from its previous errors.

Fighting continues in southern Ukraine near Kherson and in the Donbas, where Russia had sent its more experienced soldiers prior to the Kharkiv blitz. While it’s impossible to predict how the fighting will play out there, Ukraine’s ability to take the battlefield initiative and exploit Russian weaknesses — as well as materiel, financial, and intelligence support from Western countries — put Ukraine’s military in a stronger position.

Since the beginning of the war, Russian failures — its inability to achieve its initial goal of a short, surgical operation to remove Ukrainian leadership, its withdrawal from Kyiv and reorientation toward the south in the spring, and numerous tactical blunders — have been surprising. Earlier, devastating campaigns in Syria and Chechnya, as well as sophisticated military doctrine and strategic shows of force, successfully burnished the Russian military’s image, but in a large-scale ground war against a well-equipped and organized adversary, that same organization is buckling under serious miscalculations and a chaotic military structure.

Strikingly, the Ukrainian military’s recent victories have even forced the Russian media to acknowledge that “there are setbacks,” Rita Konaev, deputy director of analysis at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, told Vox. 

“Of course, there’s still a message of, ‘We will stay in it until we reach our goals,’ although the goals continue to evolve and shift and [Russian President Vladimir] Putin has demonstrated that he is able to re-articulate the goals to fit the changing reality on the ground without suffering much,” she said. “He doesn’t have to comply with reality” when it comes to his messaging on Ukraine, she continued.

The Russian military’s command structure is a mess

While neither Russia nor Ukraine disclose official military death tolls, the losses on each side are likely in the tens of thousands. An August estimate from the US Department of Defense put Russian battlefield injuries and deaths at “70 or 80,000 casualties in less than six months,” undersecretary of defense for policy Colin Kahl said. The death toll specifically was estimated to be around 20,000 — 15,000 of which were regular troops, and about 5,000 private mercenaries like those from the Wagner Group, the New York Times’s Helene Cooper reported at the time.

In the past week, reporting on Russian efforts to recruit soldiers both for regular units and for the Wagner Group has shown the military’s difficulty in attracting qualified troops to fight in Ukraine. A New York Times piece by Christiaan Triebert studied a leaked video of a man resembling Yevgeny Prigozhin, a close ally of Putin’s and long rumored to be Wagner’s head, trying to recruit shock troops at a penal colony in Yoshkar-Ola, about 400 miles east of the Russian capital of Moscow. The man in the video promises prisoners their freedom in exchange for a six-month tour of duty in Ukraine; while it’s unclear when the video was filmed, experts assess it was made sometime in the past three months, indicating that the recruitment efforts are not new. 

“To turn somebody who is a convicted felon with, as far as we know, no real military — or at least combat — experience, to marshal hundreds of thousands of men to the front line of what is arguably one of the most important wars in Russia’s modern history, tells you something about the mentality in the Kremlin right now,” Candace Rondeaux, the director of Future Frontlines at the New America think tank, told the Times.

It’s also an indication of the Kremlin’s continuing desire to shield the Russian people from the realities of the war, although the armed forces are also trying to bring in volunteers from the civilian population — touting high wages and leaning heavily on patriotism and hyper-masculine posturing to do so, Reuters reported Sunday. 

Even if the Russian armed forces somehow solve the recruitment problem, the intertwined issues of leadership and training remain. “We’ve seen such high levels of Russian officer casualties, and the officers coming are even less experienced,” Mason Clark, the Russia team lead at the Institute for the Study of War, told Vox. “We’ve seen cadets rushed out of Russian military educational institutions early and sent to the front lines, and the replacements are not getting the full training that they would if the Kremlin pursued large-scale mobilization. It’s just pushing forward largely unfit personnel to replace initial losses.”

That played out in the Kharkiv offensive in early September, when Russian forces fled in the face of oncoming Ukrainian troops, as opposed to a planned, orderly withdrawal, John Spencer, the chair of urban warfare studies at the Madison Policy Forum, told Vox. “Organizationally, it means they don’t even have the capability to do a measured withdrawal,” he said. Though the units that fled around Kharkiv aren’t representative of the whole Russian military, their strategy — or lack thereof — does point toward a potentially force-wide problem that can play to Ukraine’s advantage. 

“Ukrainians have been attacking Russian sources of power — their ammunition supply, their command and control networks — because they don’t have a flexible command and control network,” Spencer said. “So if you take out their control cells and their generals, it weakens the enemy.”

There’s also a political element to the disarray in leadership, Konaev said. Not only do the armed forces lack qualified leaders because they’re being taken out on the battlefield, they’re also “being purged continuously from within,” she told Vox. “We’ve seen a lot of turnover in who has the military districts, who’s the head of the airborne forces, the VDV — they’re elite forces — the commander of the Black Sea fleets, and a bunch of junior commanders have all been continuously replaced,” causing a lack of “institutional knowledge, lack of trust, not enough time to prove any sort of an independent concept of how they would reorient and regroup or perform better — there’s not enough time to implement it.”

The culture of fear is also “likely further impeding the willingness [of commanders] to take risks or plot effective operations,” Clark said, making a tactical shift next to impossible.

So while Ukraine is attacking Russia’s command structure on the battlefield, the Kremlin and personal politicking at the highest levels are doing plenty to push that process along.

“A lot of this starts with the problems at the top,” Konaev said. “There’s a bit of a tension between vying for power and trying to avoid responsibility” for Russia’s failures on the battlefield. “So you always have these levels of command who want more leadership and prestige and power, but at the same time, nobody wants to be the last one standing, caught responsible for all of these failures.”

The challenges of intelligence collection are amplified

Another major area of weakness is Russia’s reconnaissance capabilities, which leaves Russian forces vulnerable and has also caused havoc on the front line, as Clark told Vox. After the fast and continued successes of the Kharkiv offensive, he said, “there’s been a lot of exaggerated reports from Russian sources of imminent Ukrainian attacks all along the line” — a testament to the demoralizing nature of the attack, but also units’ inability to get good information. 

Part of Russia’s challenges with intelligence collection are apparently due to the heavy losses that some of its elite teams — including reconnaissance units — have suffered due to poor planning and lack of heavy armored support, according to a recent report from the Congressional Research Service. Ukraine has also destroyed and captured Russian surveillance drones like the Orlan-10, according to reporting from Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. Moscow has reportedly lost 918 unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) during the war, both surveillance and attack varieties, according to the Kyiv Independent and the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense.

But it’s not just a problem of collecting intelligence, Konaev told Vox; intelligence analysis and dissemination on the Russian side also suffer from disorganization, mistrust, fear, and failure of command and control, leading to “institutional incapacitation.” It’s a fundamental question of “who is in charge of the intelligence gathering, processing, and coordination, on which front, and are they speaking to each other,” she told Vox.

Adding to the confusion, Putin in May switched responsibility for intelligence gathering in Ukraine to the GRU, the military intelligence unit, after repeated failures on the part of the FSB, the state security services, prior to and in the early stages of the war. “There’s a lot of conflicting, and often rivaling, intelligence bodies and groups that are active there,” Konaev said. “And this multi-layered, disorganized, and incoherent approach to intelligence collection, analysis, and coordination has undermined them at every part of the war.”

“Intelligence is notoriously difficult to get right and to coordinate, especially when you have a country like Russia where the intelligence services have accumulated so much power,” Konaev explained. Intelligence services have significant influence at the political level, as well as “massive amounts of control over information that they can disclose or choose not to disclose, but at the same time, they still very much fear the consequences of disclosing something that might dissatisfy Putin.”

Doctrine and practice are two different things

Ultimately, Russian military doctrine — the planning, systems, and strategy that are supposed to underpin how it conducts war — hasn’t been particularly effective in Ukraine. Hybrid warfare, a vaunted aspect of that doctrine, has broken down, to the extent that it was even used in this conflict. Russian military parades and shows of force aren’t the same as doing battle with an adversary. It also seems as though Russia is operating from a Soviet-era personnel playbook that doesn’t function in the current landscape.

“One of the hallmarks of the Russian, and before that the Soviet, system was they effectively designed around the fact that their baseline infantrymen were not as skilled as in the US or NATO, or, in World War II, the Axis powers,” Clark told Vox. “But the intent was that the officers were competent, and the overall operational minds were very effective, and they sort of played to their own strengths.” Under that logic, pushing inferior troops onto the battlefield would still be operationally useful because they’d be operating under strategically superior leadership executing a well-designed battle plan. “We’re not seeing that here,” he said. 

That sense of stasis permeates the whole structure, top to bottom, with the “paralysis in the Kremlin’s decision-making,” since the spring, Clark said, resulting in a “Russian approach to the war [that] has not really changed since then,” to its own detriment. 

It’s also unclear to what extent Russian war gaming, such as it is, has tested the pain points of its operational strategy. Though Russia is part of its own military alliance, the Collective Security Treaty Organization, and conducted war games just this month, “the public war gaming that we see, that is essentially a show of force,” Konaev said. The covert war gaming — in which militaries are supposed to probe their own weaknesses and strengthen or otherwise compensate for those areas — are kept under wraps for a reason. If the Kremlin did conduct these kinds of stress tests, it’s not clear what lessons were learned, if any. 

“At a certain point, you can, in theory, understand a certain miscalculation,” Konaev told Vox. “Everyone, even much better-equipped, -trained, and -learned organizations like the US military make mistakes and make incorrect assumptions about their enemy, and miscalculate their levels of commitment and resistance. But the fact that [the Russians] have continuously made mistakes throughout the war that are of a very similar kind is unforgivable, from that standpoint.” 

Crise imobiliária preocupa China e derruba preço do ferro - Rafael Bevilacqua (Levante-UOL)

Crise imobiliária preocupa China e derruba preço do ferro

Rafael Bevilacqua

Levante-UOL, 20/09/2022

Ao que tudo indica, o setor de construção civil não será mais o motor do vigoroso crescimento econômico chinês, como foi nas últimas décadas. A crise imobiliária alcançou níveis alarmantes na segunda maior economia do planeta, e tem feito o preço do minério de ferro cair.

Além do alto grau de endividamento das gigantes de construção e incorporação, essas empresas se deparam com um cenário de menor demanda por imóveis. Esse fenômeno tem provocado um recuo nos preços dos imóveis residenciais no país, o que tem contribuído para a deterioração da situação financeira das companhias do setor.

Mesmo com o anúncio da flexibilização das medidas restritivas impostas à população em virtude da pandemia do coronavírus, o setor imobiliário dá sinais de esgotamento. O preço da tonelada do minério de ferro recuou 3,06% na Bolsa de Dalian nesta terça-feira (20), para US$ 99,23. Vale ressaltar que o setor de construção civil consome a maior parte do aço produzido na China.

Apesar do cenário adverso, a crise imobiliária está longe de decretar o fim do crescimento econômico chinês. Ao longo das últimas décadas, a China conseguiu se consolidar em diversos outros mercados, principalmente no setor industrial, e pode ser considerada "a fábrica do mundo" nos dias de hoje.

Produzindo desde itens simples e de baixa qualidade até produtos da mais alta tecnologia, a indústria chinesa se tornou um componente vital para a economia global.

Além disso, gigantes chinesas têm ganhado terreno no setor de tecnologia, popularizando marcas como o TikTok, a Shopee e a Xiaomi. Cada vez mais essas marcas rivalizam com as tradicionais big techs dos Estados Unidos, mostrando a força da nova economia chinesa.

Em suma, mesmo sem o impulso do setor imobiliário, a economia chinesa deve continuar crescendo, agora em ritmo menos acelerado. Trata-se de um fenômeno natural e já esperado, uma vez que essa desaceleração do crescimento é observada em todas as economias desenvolvidas. Em outras palavras, quanto maior você é, mais difícil se torna continuar crescendo.

Com o setor imobiliário em queda, a demanda por minério de ferro deve arrefecer na China, o que pode ser ligeiramente prejudicial para as mineradoras brasileiras no curto prazo. Entretanto, a indústria também demanda volumes expressivos de commodities metálicas, e a expansão da máquina industrial chinesa pode compensar a queda da demanda do mercado imobiliário.

Leia no 'Investigando o Mercado' (exclusivo para assinantes UOL, que possuem acesso integral ao conteúdo de UOL Investimentos): informações sobre o cancelamento de leilão de energia elétrica por falta de demanda.