Almost all Chinese banks, even small regional ones, are refusing to accept direct transactions from Russia, business execs have told Russian media.
The impact of the West's sanctions just seems to be getting worse and worse for Russia.
Now, 98% of Chinese banks — even small regional ones — are refusing to accept direct Chinese payment transfers from Russia, Alexey Razumovsky, the commercial director of the payments company Impaya Rus, told the pro-Kremlin media outlet Izvestia.
Such issues appear to have intensified over the past three weeks, as smaller Chinese financial companies were still processing Russian payments in May and June, Izvestia reported.
Last month, the Russian outlet Kommersant reported that about 80% of bank transfers made in the Chinese yuan were bouncing back with no explanation after being stalled for weeks while banks decided whether they could transact.
Razumovsky told Izvestia the payment challenges with Chinese banks could contribute to supply-chain difficulties and inflation in Russia.
Between that, his US lap dog Trump looking like he's going to lose the elections badly, and Ukraine taking control of more Russian territory in a week than they have been able to take from Ukraine in months, Putin is definitely not sleeping well right now.
Nobody thought Trump would win the first time, Ukraine is still in rough shape, and this could be a new way to avoid sanctions. I like the optimism, but there are reasons to be skeptical.
Indeed, Russia still has some currency reserves, the shadow gas fleet, huge increase in domestic production of arms, and has some how kept it's GDP growth up. Not that it doesn't have issues on it's horizon, but time is still there to wiggle around them. Also you are correct about Ukraine, many reasons to be enthusiastic, but Winter still looks like it might be rough.
And Trump, well yea still many days to the election and he may yet pull Vance's thumb out of his ass. Can't say I don't like the nice poll numbers from swing states though, seems like Harris has some good appeal to the swing voters.
his US lap dog Trump looking like he’s going to lose the elections badly
Eh, we'll see. Trump's "crushing defeat" of Hilary came down to 80k votes in three states. Biden's "decimation" of Trump was an even-thinner 40k votes across a slightly different mix of three states.
Dems love to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Just ask OG Tankie Michael Dukakis, Professional Wife-Kisser Al Gore, and Future First Woman President Hilary Clinton. All three gave up wide margins in the last few weeks of the race.
Would be nice to see Dems run up Reagan/LBJ-esque margins in 2024, but even the best polls still have Kamala in an electoral dead heat despite being miles ahead in the popular vote. She could very easily get Bush v Gore'd in some swing state with a red governor like Georgia or North Carolina or Nevada.
Now that I got that out of the way, yes yes yes, it can always be close and I think it will be just like it was close even in 20 goddamn 20, but here's the thing.
Since the 2020 election:
january 6
asking for more votes than he had from governors
stole confidential docs, lied about it, refused to give it up, was raided and still docs are missing, nuclear secrets shared to fat fucking foreign oligarchs simply because they paid to hang out at MAL. Many of America's informants and spies started getting captured in disturbing trends out of nowhere...
SA/Rape case with EJCarrol (judge officially wrote Donny was civilly liable for digital rape because she couldn't prove it was his penis vs his finger), the multiple defamation cases that followed
Felony conviction for election interference
RICO case in Georgia for trying to steal votes
Killed Roe precedent
project 2025
extreme side-effects of his frontotemporal dementia impossible to ignore by even laypeople
He has said he will be a dictator on day 1
Spoke about wanting to split up NATO
Told Netanyahu to finish the job
Clearly loves Putin, Xi, Kim, Maduro, etc. (dictator fascists, what he dreams of becoming)
Switches views based on who is paying him (asked oil barons for a billion dollars to destroy whatever regs they wanted, Elon starts donating and Trump tells us he has to shill for EVs now, hated TikTok until Thiel (who owns stock related to TT) talked him into supporting it
I'm happy to provide sources on any of the above points :)
It's not just that Dems have to win by +5% to make sure the Electoral College matches the popular vote, either. Now it almost has to be +7% to +10% to keep Republican election officials from contesting the result and it mattering in the end.
The Electoral College was bad enough. Its only justification is "whelp, them the rules". Now Republicans made up a new set of rules and expect us to follow them.
OG Tankie Michael Dukakis
I was too young to have memories of the Dukakis run. Was he actually a tankie in the Hexbear sense, or are you just referencing that picture of him riding a tank?
I assure you that a handful of well-positioned arms dealers in Russia are getting extraordinarily wealthy. I just wouldn't want to be one of the kids of a 20-something young man who has been shipped to the front right now, cause they're growing up broke as shit.
Some people have likened the economic growth that Russia is experiencing like that of the US' post war boom. So, some analysts believe that Russia will be okay for the foreseeable future. I don't want to sound coping and I still leave room for imagining other possibilities (the war is still unpredictable after all), but those analysts haven't considered that 1) USA became the sole major free market economy untouched after World War 2 and the rest of the world became reliant on US as the result. 2) USA has not been sanctioned during and after the war by major Western powers, unlike Russia is today.
There is a rumor that a coup had placed Xi under house arrest and had silently taken over the country a few weeks ago. Normally rumors don’t mean anything in most countries. But this is China where anyone speaking out against their leader would mean you’d get “disappeared”.
Supposedly the coup plotters don’t like the direction China has taken and want a return to good relations with the West when everyone was making money.
Moving away from relations with Russia could be a sign of this.
Yeah China was staunchly neutral about this war and I suspected was subtly making it worse/prolonging it to keep the west distracted, wasting money, and divided while they put pressure on Taiwan and other interests.
But this is weird. I hope they aren't doing this to keep funds in the country for their own eminent war.
Between this and the looming collapse of the Russian rail network (due to lack of maintenance and supply chain issues for rolling stock parts), it’s finally looking really good for Ukraine. Now we just need Kamala to win so that they keep getting supplies for the campaign.
If everything goes right, Ukraine could topple the Putin regime. Kind of crazy to think about right now though.
The craziest part of all this is that when the invasion of Ukraine started, some of my coworker friends had genuine concerns that pootie was gonna lean on his nukes.
He still might! Suppose this goes on for several more years and Ukraine keeps getting support and gaining more territory. Then they decide to make a run at capturing Moscow, Prigozhin style. Putin might decide that nuking Kyiv is his only chance at stopping Ukraine from toppling his regime!
We must never forget how much it matters to understand that the war is against the Russian government and that us and the Russian people are the victims of that government.
Maybe I shouldn't have said that, since there obviously isn't an official source on it, just some YouTube channels reporting about China that claim it.
Well. They're claiming it for two years already, but this time seems different.
So it's not to be taken seriously and is just a gut feeling fueled by the YouTube algorhythms and news like this post.
The value of cryptocurrency is usually tied to the price. The price is determined at exchanges. Russia however can't use foreign exchanges as the accounts there normally require identification (some offer pseudonymous crypto to crypto swaps) as the exchanges don't accept Russians, and if you want to convert crypto to a currency, you need a bank account calling in that currency, which is not happening. If the exchanges even transferred money to those as they'd lose their license.
The value of cryptocurrency is much less than what you see on CMC etc. if you can't actually convert it to those currencies. Which is the main issue.
Add to this that most crypto currencies can be traced and having transacted with known Russian problematic accounts - even via proxies - taints your wallet, making it hard to impossible to buy and sell on exchanges later down the line.
Why would they not just use cryptpcurrency at this point?
Waiting two hours for my cryptocurrency transaction to process against a third party broker "NoScamSafeTransact.ru" only to discover that I've had my wallet hacked and all my funds plundered.
Lol well this depends on the crypto used and its hard to think that bank fees of any kind would be better than to just pay the fee to speed the transaction up.
Also, presumably they would use dummy wallets and not send amounts from their cold wallet with the full amount on it.
Idk, just seems like they deserve the trouble at this point if they can't utilize the ways around it.
Bitcoin has a marked capitalization of about 30 billion USD. A S-400 air defense system costs 1.2 billion USD. So you could trade 25 of those systems using the entire "supply" of bitcoin. Russia calimed to have about 450 of these systems before the war. Even if they would use bitcoin for trading military equipment, cryptocurrency simply does not have the volume to pay for a meaningful amount of equipment.