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Ensign Expendable posted:Nobody in Russia thought that the lease agreement on the Sevastopol base would be renewed. A move to Novorossiysk has been planned for ages now. Sure, staying in Sevastopol brings them a little closer West, but losing it prematurely is not a catastrophe. It will be a domestic political disaster for Russia if there is any possibility of losing this base under pressure from Ukrainian authorities, many of whom were architects of the initial lease extension deal. Ukraine is asking for 35 billion in aid, and I hardly think that's to pay the Russians back for all the subsidized gas over the years. The Russian military has extensive movement rights both legally and de facto in and around Crimea, but the seizing of airports and the blocking or roads is obviously totally illegal and upping the ante considerably. That said, if the new authorities don't issue clear and believable statements about limits on how far Ukranization will go, no one in Crimea, Karkhov, etc. will be against Russian intervention. Tankus posted:The article, and the purpose for my posting it, was to directly address claims of antisemitism. While there have been some groups of idiots wih various agendas, i have never heard a single word of anti-semitism. I'm not trying to start any kind of flamewar, but Svaboda is an on-the-record anti-semitic party and they've grabbed a few important posts in the new cabinet. I agree that there was and is not any anti-semitic current of the Maidan protests, but there is a power vacuum now, and well-organized extremist parties are filling some of it. So no, there is no anti-semitism in the mainstream, but there is also no anti-anti-semitism. In general, it seems like the belief in a jewish conspiracy or that jews are actually foreigners is regarded as a political quirk and not as a flat-out unacceptable attitude. My experience comes from living in Odessa for a few years and most of my friends there now feel very betrayed and worried by the recent turns of events, as both Russian speakers and as Jews. No one there had much regard for Yanokovitch, but literally the first thing the new Rada did was to repeal the minority language protection law that allowed 90% Russian areas to use Russian. It would be a real shame if the new authorities get so hung up on making Russians watch The Hobbit dubbed exclusively in Ukrainian that they throw away the potential support of at least 15 million Russians who are uneasy about Putin but don't want to be treated like outsiders in their own country. Smerdyakov fucked around with this message at 11:49 on Mar 1, 2014 |
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Mar 1, 2014 11:45
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AlphaNiner posted:From a news report, it seemed like a lot of people actually supported it due to being "historically" Russian. It was a news report though and is likely to be selective in it's presentation A huge number of people in Crimea supports this, and obviously anyone who feels otherwise is keeping quiet right about now. Also, there's no reason to put "historically" in quotations--it was officially part of the Russian SSR until 1954, and the population there is 80% ethnic Russian. You can't see much of them in the western press, but there have been huge rallies in favor of Putin, defections in the Ukrainian army and navy, etc. The question is if Crimea has a right to break away just because they want to--and is it even possible for Crimea to agree to rejoining Ukraine in any form now that the genie is out of bottle and the Russian Federation is there in force? Anyone with any sense knows that the new government in Kiev made a huge mistake by immediately repealing the minority languages law and giving Svoboda cabinet posts, but they're gambling that the western press won't understand what either of those things mean in the domestic political arena. Basically, both sides have a vested interest in hardening their rhetoric rather than trying to find an acceptable middle ground, which is why there's now a very real possibility of something as insanely stupid as war happening. Smerdyakov fucked around with this message at 12:15 on Mar 3, 2014 |
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Mar 3, 2014 12:08
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utjkju posted:I don't read newspapers. I tell and write with people in internet or call them. http://youtu.be/ZwGd6vI-YsM А это просто прекрасная небольшая шутка из Одессы. You will not find a more Russian city than Odessa, and 75% of the population is die-hard opposed to splitting up the country. Even if one were to grant that the troops in Crimea are not Russian passport holders, providing material support for separatist movements is illegal in Russia and they have bitterly condemned other countries that have done so in the past. Smerdyakov fucked around with this message at 09:44 on Mar 7, 2014 |
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Mar 7, 2014 09:35
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Tankus posted:Do any of you guys have any ACTUAL insight into the immediate future of the Grivna? Im looking for anyone who is actually educated on this specific subject. Not media based speculation. I used to teach the Ukrsotsbank managers for the Odessa region English a few years back. They were offering 20% interest a year for 3 year locked-in accounts in 2011-2012. I asked them if I should do it and they said hell no, change your salary into dollars every week and keep it under your mattress. That was when things were looking relatively ok, too, so that's some actual advice. A fairly big company I worked for kept their capital surpluses in 40% dollars, 40% euros, and 20% Grivna, so something like that is probably not a bad idea if you have any savings. As you might recall, things went from 3.5-4 the dollar to 6.5-7 to the dollar in less than few months during the 2008-2009 financial crisis. There's no real reason it couldn't go from 8 to 16 now. Foreign currency reserves are low and a lot of the IMF/EU/American money is stretched out over the next 10 years, plus the IMFs target for making Ukrainian exports competitive is around 12. No one knows the future, but I can almost guarantee it's not going much below 9.5 in the next 12 months. Also, thank you for not typing it "Hrivna."
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Mar 14, 2014 10:10
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Tankus posted:The grivna was already on the mend before this stuff with the annexation of Crimea started, but in the last few days the Grivna started falling again. I think people are buying dollars in anticipation of Crimea voting to leave Ukraine. Im just curious if this trend will continue or will rebound in the next month or so. 12 grivna to the dollar is a loss of 50% of the currency's value, could you imagine if something like that happened to the dollar? Sure, but the grivna was doing "great" in 2007 and early 2008, apparently, then it lost 40% of its value in a month. I don't think it's been on the mend, honestly--creeping up from 8 to 8.5 to 9 back down to 8.75 briefly before going to 10 does not constitute improvement. So while I can't imagine that happening to a reserve currency like the dollar, it's not only possible but likely to happen to the grivna over the next 12 months. I would guess that things will either stay approximately the same or get worse, so there's really no reason to hold them beyond what you need for everyday purchases. The 2-3% exchange fee doesn't really matter since the grivna is fully capable of losing 5-10% of its value over a 24 hour period. The reason not to hold onto the currency in significant amounts is that it's very unstable, since both political and financial events can cause its value to fall by a huge amount in a short period of time. When that happens, it causes a domino effect that makes the currency fall more AND the cost of exchanging it higher. Lord Windy posted:At 12 to the dollar, would it cause absolute poverty? Like as a lower income worker would I be able to afford food, housing and energy or are we talking doom and gloom? For frame of reference--a loaf of bread is 10-15 Grivna, a beer at a bar is 10-12, and many older people own their own apartments from privatization in the early 1990s, so their kids usually live with them until they get married. Ukraine is an agricultural breadbasket and neighboring Moldova and Belarus are also economic disaster areas, so food scarcity isn't the concern. The government heavily subsidizes electricty and gas, and even when they don't, most people fiddle with their meter and steal it regardless. My highest electric bill was about 100 grivna a month when it was 8 to the dollar, and the free hospital was free to all citizens and they charged foreigners about 60 grivna for it. This is part of the problem of "increasing economic efficiency." The first step is to cut all the crippling subsidies that let factories built in the 1930s stay in business, but when you do that you put people out of work and makes it impossible for millions of others to get by, which in turn causes political authorities to either backtrack or lose the next election/be overthrown. If anyone were to step up and subsidize the entire economy, there's no guarantee it would actually modernize, and previous attempts mostly resulted in all the money being stolen. Smerdyakov fucked around with this message at 02:22 on Mar 15, 2014 |
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Mar 15, 2014 01:32
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Tankus posted:Also, just curious, where and when did you live here? It couldn't have been Kiev. Beer in bars here is almost never below 20 grn and is typically 25 grn for half a liter. Odessa and some brief spells in Nikolaev. Kiev is overpriced because business owners there expect to make money from things other than the black market. Odessa is also the city of 10,000 currency exchanges, so rates were always a little bit better there. That said, some bank lockouts definitely happened in Odessa anyway and whoever wasn't checking twitter or vkotankte missed out on the best opportunities to exchange.
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Mar 16, 2014 04:29
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