Jos et halua Suomen osallistuvan näiden iskujen rahoittamiseen, allekirjoita kansalaisaloitteemme venäjän kanssa käytävän metallikaupan lopettamiseksi: kansalaisaloite.fi/fi/aloite…

Kannata venäläisen nikkelin tuontikieltoa vaativaa kansalaisaloitetta kansalaisaloite.fi/fi/aloite…

Tämän lapsen nimi on Angelina. Hänen kasvonsa on peitetty, koska hän on kuollut. Hän on kuollut, koska venäläiset murhasivat hänet suihkumoottoridroonilla. Suihkumoottoridroonit osuvat nyt kohteisiinsa amerikkalaisten avustuksella: he rajoittavat torjuntadroonien nopeutta.

🚨Kansalaisaloite on julkaistu! kansalaisaloite.fi/fi/aloite… Venäläisomisteinen yhtiö tahkoaa Harjavallassa rahaa venäjän sotakassaan ja lähettää prosessin sivutuotteena syntyvän kuparisakan takaisin venäjälle. Jos tämä ei sinusta ole oikein - allekirjoita! Kupari on sotateollisuuden olennainen raaka-aine, jota käytetään ammuksissa, tutkissa ja muissa sähköjärjestelmissä, sota-aluksissa, raskaassa kalustossa ja ilma-aluksissa. Kuparisakka puolestaan jalostetaan venäjällä puhtaaksi kupariksi. Emme voi jäljittää yksittäistä kuparierää venäjällä, joten koko kauppa on kiellettävä. Lue lisää aloitteen tekstistä, allekirjoita ja jaa tietoa!

This is what “America first” looks like under Trump. Through PURL, Europe and Canada have spent $6.7 billion on American-made weapons for Ukraine in a single year. A decent ally would have donated them, but let's ignore that for a moment. PURL is now how Ukraine gets about 95% of its Patriot interceptors, so stopping the mechanism leads directly to more Ukrainian casualties. Now the U.S. is threatening to switch off PURL and intel sharing unless Ukraine stops hitting russian refineries. The first 300,000 tonnes, if delivered to the U.S., cover about 15 hours of demand. So Trump is willing to sacrifice significant U.S. profits for a negligible amount of diesel that may never arrive. Make that make sense.

Yesterday, I was as shocked as the rest of you to find out about Trump’s diesel deal with russia. Today, I woke up thinking of the right frame for understanding it, and I have a proposition. First, the facts. According to Trump’s announcement, russia will immediately supply more than 300,000 tonnes of diesel to the market, including the US, followed by 500,000 tonnes in November and bigger volumes after that. The US Treasury has issued a sanctions waiver running to 7 April. The diesel would have to come from a refining sector that, by the IEA’s count, was hit by Ukrainian strikes roughly every third day through the first eight months of this year. Since July, Moscow itself has banned diesel exports to keep fuel at home. Now let’s convert the tonnes to barrels. 300,000 tonnes is about 2.2 million barrels; 500,000 tonnes about 3.7 million. Last year russia exported on average about 18 million barrels of diesel a month, so the two tranches equal 12 and 20 per cent of a normal month: roughly four and six days of exports. In September, under the ban, russia exported about 0.1 million barrels. The first tranche alone is 22 times that. You may have seen the figure “15 hours of supply”. It matches the first tranche measured against US consumption, which runs at about 3.8 million barrels a day. Against world diesel demand of close to 30 million barrels a day, the same tranche lasts less than two hours. Now, the proposition. Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation (1981) is heavy going, but it helps explain what kind of thing this deal is. Baudrillard argued that modern media societies increasingly run on signs that no longer point to anything real. He called them simulacra: copies without an original. He borrowed a fable from Borges about an empire whose mapmakers drew a map as large as the empire itself, a map that ended in tatters in the desert. Then he turned the image around: we now live in societies where the map comes first and the territory is made to fit it. A diesel deal that is announced before the diesel exists is that kind of map. Baudrillard also described four stages through which an image loses its hold on reality. They fit this deal uncomfortably well. 1) The image reflects reality: russia promises diesel, and the diesel arrives. 2) The image distorts reality: a small, real delivery is sold as a historic one. 3) The image hides that nothing is there: diesel is promised from damaged refineries, under an export ban still in force. 4) The image has no link to reality at all: the announcement is the product, judged by headlines and futures prices rather than by actual diesel exports. Simple arithmetic helps us see that this deal cannot be stage one: at best it is stage two, quite possibly stage three. The timing reveals what this AMAZING DEAL is really about. Weeks before the US midterms, with fuel prices high, the announcement works at stage four. Nobody will hold a press conference in April to count the barrels that were actually delivered. Baudrillard points out that simulation is not the same as lying. A lie hides something true, so it can be exposed, and the truth is revealed. Simulation is harder to fight. His example is someone who fakes an illness so well that real symptoms appear. The illness being faked here is dependence on russia: the idea that the world’s diesel problem is a russian problem that only Moscow can fix. The real illness is a diesel shortage, caused mainly by the war with Iran and partly by Ukrainian strikes on russian refineries, on top of our general dependence on diesel. By KSE Institute’s estimate, closing the Strait of Hormuz cost more than twice as much export volume as russia lost between March and August. But a russian diagnosis comes with a russian cure that Washington can announce, while the bigger cause leads back to Washington’s own war. The faked illness has already produced real symptoms in Washington’s policy: pressure on Kyiv to stop hitting refineries, a deal with Moscow, and a sanctions waiver on russian exports. Once a patient behaves as dependent, it becomes hard to say whether the dependence is real. That is the trap for Europe too. The diesel may be imaginary, but the waiver is real. Moscow has been paid in advance, in the currency it wants most from the West: exemptions to sanctions. Moscow had even named its price. At the Valdai forum on 1 October, Putin said russia had enough diesel but would keep it off world markets until sanctions were lifted. The day before, his government had extended the export ban to keep the home market supplied. The day after, Deputy Prime Minister Novak said exports could partly resume once there was a surplus. Now 300,000 tonnes are available immediately. These claims cannot all be true at once, and that is the mark of simulation: while a lie is one false claim you can check, simulation leaves you unable to tell what is true. It is also important to keep in mind that it was not sanctions that stopped the flow. A year ago, under sanctions, russia was still exporting those 18 million barrels of diesel a month. Ukrainian strikes and Moscow’s own export ban ended that. Washington has waived an obstacle that is not the one holding the diesel back. So the waiver will not free a single barrel. What it changes is who may buy, ship and insure those barrels once they move, and how much russia earns on each one. Laughing at Trump’s capital letters has a cost, too. Baudrillard said Disneyland is presented as obviously fake so that everything outside its gates looks real. The capital letters do the same job. Once we agree the superlatives are nonsense, the rest of the deal looks sober by comparison: volumes in tonnes, a Treasury licence, an April deadline. But neither part is what it seems. The tonnes sound credible because they come as numbers, yet they are still nothing but an ephemeral promise. The licence looks like routine administration, but it is the one real thing here: a concrete concession to Moscow. While we laugh at the capital letters, that concession slips through as paperwork. Fact-checking is necessary, but it is not enough. A simulation is rarely killed by exposure. It is replaced by the next one. In mid-September Trump announced that russia and Ukraine had agreed to stop hitting each other’s energy infrastructure. It took one day for Kyiv to set the record straight, but Trump did not withdraw the claim. Six days later Trump was pressing Zelenskyy to stop the very strikes he had said were over. The following week Trump said Kyiv had agreed to scale back the strikes. Now there is a diesel deal with Moscow. Each new claim quietly admits that the last one failed. If the russian tankers full of diesel fail to appear in November, you’ll know what to expect: an even greater announcement. Even arguing over whether the deal is huge or only 12 per cent of a normal month accepts that it is a deal. The question that matters is really simple: what real thing has changed hands? So far, a sanctions waiver for a promise from russia. This is the hall of mirrors Europe now has to walk through. Moscow promises fuel, Washington makes a grand announcement, markets react to the announcement, commentators react to the markets. Each reflection seems to confirm the one before. We’re dealing with Hans Christian Andersen’s emperor here. Is he wearing a rag (stage two: a little real diesel dressed up as a royal robe) or nothing at all (stage three)? When the child shouts that the emperor is naked, the procession simply goes on. His courtiers keep walking behind him as if nothing had happened, holding up the long tail of a robe that does not exist. That is stage four: the parade was always the point. The arithmetic has already done the child’s job, and the procession is still moving. The real danger lies in joining the parade, adjusting to the mood that it creates: why tighten sanctions now, if Washington is loosening them and a deal is supposedly in motion? In a mirror maze your eyes lie to you, so you find the exit by touch. Europe should keep its hand on what it can measure, and measure it against the only acceptable number for russian fuel exports: zero. That number is actually not all that far away. Moscow’s own bans now cover diesel from the oil companies that refine it until 31 October, diesel from traders and all petrol until the end of January, and jet fuel until the end of November. Washington’s sanctions waiver is a bet on those bans ending soon. The oil companies’ ban is the one to watch, because they ship most of russia’s diesel: if it lapses on 31 October, or turns into quotas, exports restart. Treat every cargo that then loads at Primorsk or Novorossiysk as an enforcement target: ship, flag, insurer, buyer, payment route. Watch the repairs at Kirishi, Volgograd and NORSI, three of russia’s six largest diesel refineries, and ask whose equipment is used in the repairs. Europe must not be complicit in any of it, from insuring the tankers to supplying the repair parts. It is essential for Europe to keep track of the real territory instead of the map. Ukrainian strikes knocked out enough refining capacity to leave russia short of fuel at home and force it to halt most exports. Putin himself puts the cost at about one per cent of russia’s GDP, roughly 2 trillion roubles or 25 billion dollars. That is why he is selling promises instead of diesel, and why a sanctions waiver is worth so much to him now. Ukrainian strikes took the diesel off the market; sanctions decide whether russia gets paid for whatever it still sells. The path for Europe is clear: enforce the sanctions already agreed, close the gaps russia uses, and keep supporting Ukraine’s ability to strike the refineries that fuel russia’s war. Baudrillard called what is left behind “the desert of the real”, the phrase Morpheus borrows in The Matrix. In Borges’s fable the map rots in the desert. In Baudrillard’s reversal it is the real that lies there in scraps, dull and scattered, while we live in the map. In the diesel story, the desert is everything that does not trend on social media: refinery throughput, tanker loadings, expiry dates on export bans, truckers paying record prices. Collecting this information in tables takes time: weeks, at the very least, while announcements OF THE PERHAPS GREATEST DEAL OF ALL TIME are immediate. In the end, Ukraine turns Baudrillard against himself. He believed the real had been permanently outrun by its models, and in 1991 he argued that the Gulf War, as Western audiences experienced it, “did not take place”. Ukraine shows the limit of that view. A refinery hit by a drone does not produce the diesel that Trump is so thankful for, and a tonne of diesel that was never produced cannot be announced back into existence. In this case the real world is not all that hard to see. It is damaged refineries, an export ban that runs to 31 October and a waiver that runs to 7 April. The real world may be dull compared to capital letters, but that is where Europe’s strength lies. Count the barrels, ignore the capital letters.

Kuulehan, ihminen: Tässä on erinomainen kansalaisaloite käytettyjen autojen toimittamisesta Ukrainaan niiden romuttamisen sijaan. Allekirjoita ja jaa! kansalaisaloite.fi/fi/aloite…