Deir Ezzor Event: Escalation likely
Two independent sources have now reported the presence of Su-57 stealth fighter at Khmeimim airbase. This increases the likelihood that contemporaraneous reports of a buildup of RuAF air superiority assets in the region are correct.
These are the latest images from satellite.
and here is the video of the a/c on approach to Khmeimim.
I am not sure if the a/c are being deployed there to boost RU morale after the Deir Ezzor fiasco or whether this is an attempt to challenge the US air superiority.
Either ways - given the importance of Deir Ezzor in the grand scheme of things in Syria and how badly Putin now needs a victory in Syria to save face with the elite of the Grand Duchy of Moscow - a fresh assault on Deir Ezzor (or elsewhere is to be expected).
In light of that - the RuAF in Khmeimim may attempt to maintain a BARCAP. If the RuAF BARCAP can get into place before the US can deploy its CAP - then the Russians will have the upper hand in the escalation. Like a well positioned queen on a chess board they will deter the US from pursuing an effective air to ground role.
This of course is over and above any stunts Trump might pull to compromise the US position from his perch in the White House.
Situation is likely to escalate.
Is there a GRU vs FSB fight underway?
This is a purely speculative analysis. It is very difficult to make guesses about why something like this happens but a few things caught my eye recently and I am wondering what it all means.
Two or so weeks ago, TASS helpfully informed the world that the head of the SVR, the FSB and the GRU had visited the US and met their counterparts as part of vital anti-terrorism cooperation [
1,
2].
I could not understand how exactly did they get past the sanctions regime?
It is also clear that both the FSB Chief Aleksandr Bortnikov and the SVR Chief Sergey Naryshkin met Dir Pompeo but no one can tell us who Colonel General Igor Korobov of the GRU met.
Someone in the State Department would need to issue a waiver as these people would be travelling on a diplomatic passport and that would immediately light up the sanctioned individual list at every port of entry and in the US embassy in Moscow. Rumor has it the Naryshkin and the Bortnikov paperwork went via the "proper channels" (apparently Bortnikov may not be sanctioned) but no one knows who did the Korobov paperwork [
3]
I can't quite get my head around why there is so much secrecy surrounding the Korobov visit and who he met?
Even the Russians who leaked the Naryshkin/Bortnikov meeting with Dir Pompeo, don't want to tell us who Gen. Korobov met.
It seems to me that the contact with General Korobov was the most sensitive of them all.
And strangely enough I am hearing rumors floating around (one should never believe them - only know that they are there) that the GRU has planted Nastya Rybka to expose Oleg Deripaska (
close to the FSB) ties to the
Trump election.
I was under the impression that a vast number of GRU types (eg. Rinat Akhmenitsin) were in open contact with the Trump campaign. Given the number of videos put out by Trump friendly YouTube channels, I got the impression that the GRU was going to set up a bunch of ex-GRU-SF guys as personal security around Trump.
After watching all this I came away with the idea that this Operation Install Trump was mounted by GRU at Putin's behest because the FSB and the SVR didn't want to get mixed up in something this messy and the GRU was the only one crazy enough to do so. The complete lack of backstopping on the legends of field agents and total lack of OpSec in the use of hackers, is reminiscent of a military led operation.
An operation led by the foreign intelligence service or even a internal security agency emphasizes deniability as an outcome. The cardinal law in such operations is "Don't Get Caught". In contrast to this an operation led by an MI organization at some level de-emphasizes deniability. Even if the agent is caught in an MI operation it is still useful as it sends a message - "I am watching you, rethink your hostility". The crudeness of the illegals that carried out Operation Install Trump is understandable the GRU is not a real foreign intelligence service. An unfortunate consequence of this kind of thing is that by participating in Operation Install Trump - the GRU is badly exposed to blame for the consequences since their role is highly visible.
There could be other reasons why the GRU and FSB are tussling it out. It could be that the GRU wants to be the big boss in the RIS community. That is possible but I just don't see the GRU competing for power with either the FSB or the SVR. The GRU is historically a military objective driven entity. It has faced an extremely challenging task throughout the last three decades of keeping Russia safe when its military spending was in decline and the US military was technologically ascendant. This workload is enough to make grown men cry and the GRU investment in cyber warfare in understandable in this context - it is a cheap way to hedge against the technological superiority of the enemy. I have great difficulty imaging that GRU's military leadership would want to get mixed up handling the complexities of internal security like the FSB (even less to want to get mixed up in the arcane world of diplomacy like the SVR is).
So the only scenario in which I can think of a clash between these entities, is if the RIS community (led by the FSB - the SVR is too small an entity to play a major role in this) is now trying to wash its hands off Operation Install Trump. From Putin's perspective this makes sense, the attempt to engage Trump has failed to produce anything that truly favors Russia. The operation appears now to be driven by the sole aim of producing political fission in the US and limiting direct damage to Putin's re-election process itself.
Under such circumstances the GRU may feel that it is likely to get shafted in this strategic maneuver.
While all three branches of the RIS may have competed for a role in Operation Install Trump, but the GRU is the only one in the open with its pants down.
I feel that perhaps the GRU doesn't want to be held to account for the failures of Operation Install Trump. And to that end shining a light on the participation of the others offers a way of deflecting the blame.
The SVR's exposure (AFAICT) is that "Professor" in the UK. That dude had a fairly deep legend well backstopped when compared to others in this shitfest. There was that rumor of the TASS photographer in Trump's office (when Trump leaked information to FM Lavrov and Amb Kislyak) being an SVR illegal and the story that all those RU Ambassadors dying suddenly due to various causes is somehow linked to their knowledge of the RIS role in this operation but in any case the SVR won't be able to hurt GRU interests very much as it too small a player in the RIS community.
That leaves the FSB. With Putin recasting FSB led conflict resolution teams into his
personal palace guard and paying those guys more than the RU Army, the FSB appears to be on the ascendant. The FSB exposure in all this is significant. As the Russian hacker Konstantin Kozlovsky has testified in court, he was directly guided to attack the DNC computers by Major Dmitri Dokuchaev of the FSB. The FSB has limited its exposure by arresting him first for passing information to the CIA. There is also the matter of the xFSB general who died under mysterious circumstances.
If this story of the GRU exposing FSB ties to Operation Install Trump is true, then the GRU seems to be saying to the FSB (and the SVR)- "you will all go down with us".
The real "laundromat"?
A lot of people are wondering how exactly the stock prices have gotten so high. Most point to a low interest rate and a steady flow of capital into the hand of corporations that prefer to use it to drive up their stock prices instead of improving actual product quality or investing in real innovation.
I think that part is true, but the there is another factor to consider.
ICIJ has been doing some brilliant reporting on the Panama Papers. And the one thing that stands out from this reporting is that the global financial elite, including the leaders of most of the major publicly traded corporations use the exact same places to dodge corporate taxes that the drug dealers, illicit arms traders and human traffickers use to launder their ill-gotten wealth.
There is a lot of paperwork to sort through, but one wonders if the massive surge in speculative investment in the stock market is correlated to a kind of "constructive interference" between the flow of ill-gotten wealth (form drugs, arms and human trafficking) and flow of tax dodging revenue. As both revenue streams end up in the same geographical locations and people who live together invest together, I wonder if these flows are ending up doing the same thing in the major markets.
I suspect that the laundromats operating in places like the Bahamas, Cyprus, Iceland, Mauritius etc... tend to move conflict capital out of the shadows and into the open market by buying up financial instruments.
The legally tax dodged capital produced in major corporations similarly loops around the same off-shore institutions and finds it way back into the market as fuel for speculative transactions. It has the same "free money" feel that conflict capital has.
It would not be too hard to imagine a banker in Panama or the Bahamas using earnings on speculation with tax dodged money to fill out the lumps in the cost of transacting ill-gotten cash from criminals and vice versa.
Is that what the real "laundromat" is?
Another drop in the Dow - this time they say it is driven by bond yields
CNBC has an article explaining why the stock market is tanking. The basic thesis is that bonds are becoming more attractive as bond yields are rising. The rising bond yield lures investors away from stocks which drop in value, which in turn draw investors back and drive up the prices and then investors chase bonds and so on.
This is a very good description of what happens in a PID loop (read earlier post on that matter). No PID loop works perfectly, there is always a frequency at which you see huge oscillations in the system due to the action of the loop. Since most traders and bankers don't study math or signal processing or physics (they graduate with degrees in
American Studies instead) - they have no clue that such phenomenology exists so it is natural to see this kind of behavior in the market.
But this does not explain what caused the bond yields to rise. It turns out that for the past month, there has been a steady drum beat of articles saying that the new Fed Chair will increase interest rates. A lot of big banks have been talking about hiking interest rates (after all per Donald Trump the economy is doing so well). That talk apparently has sparked a bit of a panic in the markets. Even before the actual rate hike has been announced, the market is moving to cope with the inevitable pain that is to follow. Hence the rise in the bond yields.
So we have two questions that don't seem to have answers
1) Why is the interest rate likely to rise?
2) Why do investors find bonds (which have traditionally lower yields than the market) more attractive?
The answer to the first question (IMHO) is that the Fed's biggest debtor - the USG is cutting taxes per Donald Trump and the GOP's instructions. All bipartisan estimates indicate a trillion dollar short fall in the foreseeable future. With declining revenue and the GOP-of-Trump completely abandoning all notions of fiscal responsibility, it is clear that anyone lending money to the USG will charge higher interest so as to coerce the USG back on to the path of fiscal incentive. There is no guarantee but they at least have to try. There is a rumor doing rounds that Trump blew it with the major bankers in Davos, they all came away with the idea that Trump was unhinged but that is a rumor.
The answer to the second question, I feel follows from the first. As the traders in the market are far more informed of the details of what is likely to affect the rate of return on a stock investment, the general sense in the market appears to be that borrowing money to buy stocks on the market at a time when interest rates might rise is risky. As the market is already so high up, any transaction is very expensive and the interest on large sums of money is substantial. If I am even slightly unsure that I can make a profit that exceeds the interest I owe, I am unlikely to enter into a stock purchase and I will try to reduce my exposure to stocks and buy something like bonds instead.
The idea is gaining ground that the bankers are going to jack up the interest rates. If that idea gains ground, then the see-saw effect of the bonds vs stocks seems like a trivial follow on.
Most probable theory of why the stock market tumbled.
The DJIA saw a big shift downwards. There was a lot of commentary about why it happened - most of it was political. I suspect there is some politics at play here, something Trump did make the market uneasy and that started this shift.
The market has recovered somewhat and there is hope that it is going to keep going back up.
Here is my take on what likely happened.
I think of the market as a kind of
PID loop. This is the preferred way for guys like me to think about the market because it is a well understood control theory construct. A PID loop locks a system's response to a set of control or reference signals. As the reference signals are tied to the state of the system itself - the PID loop works on feedback.
There are three parts to any PID loop - an integrated gain, a proportional gain and a differential gain. For extremely slow changes relative to the reference, the PID loop keeps aggregating the changes and only responds when the aggregate change has gone above a certain value. For extremely fast changes in the system relative to the reference, the system looks at the derivative or the instantaneous rate of change and responds to that. For changes in the system that are in the Goldilocks' Zone (not too fast and not too slow), the loop responds in a fashion that is directly proportional to the signal.
In every PID loop, there is a dead zone where the change in the system is simply too slow or too fast for the loop to respond to. In those situations the system drifts and the loop can't do anything to correct the drift.
In every PID loop, there is a oscillation zone, where the change is happening is peculiar and rather than damp out the disturbance to the state of the system, the loop actually amplifies the disturbance. This is called a "positive feedback".
You can always tune the position of the integrator and the differentiator in a loop to determine where the dead zone and the positive feedback zone lie, but you CANNOT make these phenomena go away.
In the market, there are two types of loops - human traders who follow trends in the various indices or keep track of true value in a corporation's stock and performance, and mechanized/computerized algorithms that do the same thing.
Most of the computerized trading companies actually have humans in the loop that constantly tweak the position of the dead zone and the positive feedback zone to keep the system from becoming unpredictable.
As each of these loops (human and assisted AI) are operating on different mixtures of reference inputs from the market and each of them have different dead/positive feedback zones. The result is a stock market that is subject to multiple loops.
As long as the banking sector is able to pump debt into the market, the stock prices keep rising even if there is no real growth in the productivity of the underlying companies. Companies are able to buy back stock and keep their stock valuations high. This high valuation comes in handy when borrowing money to cover financial eclipse periods.
What seems to have happened some weeks ago is that a fluctuation occurred in the market that hit the positive feedback or dead zone of multiple loops. With a large number of these loops operating in a quasi automated way, the algorithmic trading entities began to ride the DJIA down. This caused what I believe was a type of "flash crash" at 3:30 on Tuesday Feb 6th 2018.
By Tuesday night, all the big algorithmic players sat down and moved the positions of the dead zones and/or positive feedback zones. The result is a miraculous looking recovery in the market.
My guess is that this recovery is an illusion. The underlying bubble which kicked into play after November 8, 2016 has reached a critical size. The flow of more debt into the system is shaky. Most of the humans in the loop are wondering if Trump himself will politically survive the next few months and it is not clear how much longer this bubble is sustainable without Trump to keep pumping up the confidence of his ethnic compatriots on Wall Street.
I feel beyond this point sudden unexplained fluctuations like the one that triggered this market slide two weeks ago will be quite common. As one can never create a PID loop that completely avoids dead zones and positive feedback zones, there is no way to escape the phenomenology that we have just witnessed.
In his recent comments Nouriel Roubini has pointed out that BTC is become a kind of sub-prime loan and the true exposure of the market to this BTC menace is difficult to quantify. I feel he may be on to something, with people borrowing money to buy BTC and now facing the prospects of "HODL when then they should have SODL..." - there is no limit to how bad this could be. Nouriel believes that the BTC is being propped up in fashion that is blatantly illegal, so if that is correct, this problem we saw a few days ago will recur with alarming regularity.
Siachen keeps the "Door To Central Asia Open"
This is a phrase I hear repeated in various circles about India's defensive posture in the glaciated region.
I do not know of any plan to open a land route through the Karakoram Pass. Per my understanding there simply isn't enough trade volume to justify the expense of constructing a route in that adverse a terrain.
So my understanding of this is that "Keeping the door to Central Asia Open" is some sort of flowery language that is being used to mask some other logistical security issue in the region.
One other view that I have heard in Indian Army circles is that if the Army does not dominate the Saltoro Ridge, then the Pakistan Army could take Dzingrulma in a creeping infiltration. Once PA has artillery positioned at Dzingrulma, then can dominate the Nubra valley all the way down to Sasoma.
The importance of Sasoma is sometimes lost in all the noise about the SSN-DBO road and the usual fanfare that accompanies the landing of a C130J or the flight of a Searcher drone at Daulat Beg Oldi strip.
There is a road that goes west from Sasoma toward Murgo La. Just before reaching Murgo Village, it crosses the Shyok river. This road is not all weather and cannot sustain a large material transport on it, but
in a pinch one could move material over it and then along the Shyok and get it to DBO airfield.
The only other supply route in the region is the SSN-DBO road, and it is exposed to possible action by PLAAF and PLAGF artillery.
I suspect that the "keeping the door to Central Asia" talk is about protecting the Sasoma-Murgo La link.
The LCA - a cheat sheet.
Luke O'Brien astutely commented that
He is right, the stated performance of an LCA is about the same as a
Mirage III NG.
Luke's comments led me down memory lane to an article I co-authored with my friend George Joseph some 17 years ago about the LCA [
1].
It has been a while, but as you might know, I have written a bit about the LCA and I want to share some of the details which I fear may have gotten lost over the years.
The LCA was developed with three stake holders who pulled in completely different directions. The IAF wanted something with the performance (i.e. Mean Time Between Failures - MBTF) of a Mirage 2000. The Govt of India/MOD bean counters wanted something that had the cost of a MIG-21. The DRDO/ADE/NAL who wanted to completely reinvent key things and build an modern a/c that was statically unstable, with FBW, with a Indian engine, Indian avionics and advanced carbon composite air frame.
The reason it took forever to build the LCA was the IAF kept moving the product specs to match whatever it felt it needed at that instant (the case of Indian Navy needs a separate discussion*), the Govt of India kept cutting funding due to economic pressures and whatever foreign policy needs were at any given instant, and DRDO set its aims extremely high and deep indigenization of the kind they wanted took a lot longer than they realized. The DRDO really didn't have the capability to perform the material science on the engine side and the radar tech proved very difficult to get right. They worked really hard but this stuff takes time. The IAF bitched about the time it took and the bean counters complained about the rising development costs before kicking the engine and radar of the DRDO deliverable list.
The reason why the LCA will most likely persist as a project and the LCA Mark 1 will enter service with the IAF is that all stakeholders have learned to compromise. The IAF realized that the time required to train pilots to fly the LCA is 5x lower than the time to train pilots to fly the Mig 21. This leaves more time for actual combat simulation (flying the bag etc...) . The bean counters are happy that they don't have to shell out forex for a Mig21 replacement and only have to pay for the F404 engine and the Israeli MMR. DRDO/HAL/ADE are happy that they are able to put into place a large production line that makes aviation grade composites and their proprietary FBW. They are also happy that the CFD tools developed by NAL and data driven design philosophy at ADE will make for many new LCA and MCA variants in the years to come. It's not exactly where they wanted to be, but they are more than half the way there.
This strange compromise between the stakeholders will not last long. DRDO will want to push ahead with its locally produced MMR and with its Kabini engine. They will put it to the test on at least one variant of the LCA in the near future. The IAF will set its eyes on a stealth platform and move the goalposts again. And the bean counters will want to see cost of LCA production brought down even further. So this fight between the elephants is not over yet and don't expect to read about it in the lay press, those poor reporters are out of their depth.
I see the LCA as the Indian equivalent of the F-35 - the Indians knew just as much about actually building the LCA as Lockheed Martin did about the building the F-35.
That said - comparing Indian Aerospace to Lockheed Martin is like comparing one of those abused mutilated child beggars you see on the street in India to an Olympic athlete like Usain Bolt or Ben Johnson or Carl Lewis. Theoretically the Indian child beggar could run as fast as Ben Johnson or Carl Lewis but ... s/he doesn't actually have legs - the child trafficker cut them off so as to make her/her a more profitable beggar and less likely to run away when s/he is sacrificed and her/his organs harvested... so no it's not going to happen in reality**.
* The Indian Navy is technologically subaltern to Russia. As long as India lags Russian maritime engineering, the Indian Navy will remain very skittish about upsetting its Russian friends. Let's just say there is a reason why they celebrate Indian Independence Day in Sverodvinsk shipyards all the way out on the edge of the Arctic Ocean. I suspect the IAF has faced similar pressures, but no one from the IAF has come out and openly said this to my face. IAF types do however get realy shirty when you call them out on technical matters regarding the DRDO GTRE Kabini engine core tests in Russia. I have been yelled at by people with birdshit on their hats for pointing out they had no idea what they were talking about but no one from the IAF will just come out and say "We are afraid of angering the Russians, they are good friends and we don't want to lose their support." Instead we hear all this stuff about the FGFA funding etc....and how bad the LCA is. That said the private statements of IAF/IN officers with actual exposure to the LCA itself are very different from public postures taken in front of reporters.
** Yeah it is really that fucked up in India. Might as well put it out where everyone can see it. I really pisses me off but that is the reality of child trafficking in India.
Idlib hospital NICU hit with CW
It appears that RuAF and SyAF have launched air strikes on Idleeb yesterday. It is generally believed (based on the tone of statements on RU and Assad friendly fora) that these attacks are part of a reciprocity for the downing of the Su25.
Based on reports from the ground, the SyAF has used chlorine gas in these strikes and at least one of these strikes has hit a Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) in a hospital there. I have reviewed the images such as these[
1 -
WARNING!!! EXTREMELY NSFL+NSFW] from this site. Based on the information presented from these ground reports, I believe
I am looking at something beyond the usual war crime that I have become numb to in the Syrian Civil War context.
I do not know if Putin was aware of Assad's intention to use Chlorine gas on a NICU but that question will be asked by everyone including people inside Russia. If Putin was aware then that makes him a participant in this war crime, if he didn't know then it looks like he can't even control a shitty captive asset like Assad.
I do not believe that the usual "the White Helmets did it to their own hospital" story will carry weight as no one actually believes anything the Kremlin says. Statements of the usual "what about Mai Lai in Vietnam" etc... will not move the needle with anyone that matters.
As long as there was no temporal overlap between RU reciprocity operations in Syria and Assad's fetish for mass murder, the notional distance between Assad's Nazi antics and Putin's personal responsibility could be maintained.
Now with such a close temporal overlap between RUAF reciprocal strikes and Assad's genocidal freakshow - the distance is gone.
As awareness of this crime spreads it will be exceedingly difficult for Trump to resist the pressure to do something about this. If Trump does not act against Assad for these attacks - the calls for his removal and imprisonment as a Russian agent will get immensely strong. His much advertised tax cut has just caused his poll numbers to rise, GOPers are slowly coming back over to Trump's side because he finally did something he actually promised, that support will ebb if he looks like a holster for Putin's cock. A rise in the stories about the Trump Russia scandal will tank Trump's numbers again.
Trump loves launching cruise missiles, it makes his poll numbers go up as GOPers get a hard on every time he does that. So - the question really is - when Trump launches his cruise missiles, will he be able to put some kind of magical spell on them to make sure they only hit Assad's guys and kill absolutely no Russians?
And how will that look for Putin's re-election prospects? Will the powers-that-be* in the Grand Duchy of Moscow tolerate someone who can't seem to manage his assets properly?
* An easy way to think about Russia is the oil/coal/gas is in the east and the food is in the west. In order for oil to go west and food to go east, it must cross the Moscow railway station. Everything is decided by a handful of people in Moscow. The rest just sit and wait for the food or oil/coal/gas to come in on the next train.
My growing sense of concern about the US Ag sector
I have been following some trends in the US Ag sector and I am a little worried about how precarious it seems.
In most parts of the world, the US Ag sector is seen the model for success. Most other nations want to see their Ag sector reach the yield per hectare that US Ag seems to routinely pull off. The success is to yield per hectare, the amount of confidence that a US Ag commodity contract or option carries is something quite extraordinary if you think about how unpredictable the whole process of agriculture is.
But now it seems that the Ag sector is in trouble. Either the price of Ag output is too low or the "real" premium associated with an Ag contract is too high because everyone in the Ag chain is complaining.
The farmers are complaining the loudest. They are saying that the price point is too low and they cannot keep taking out loans that allow them to improve the quality of production (i.e. reliably delivered volume per contract) without taking on essentially unsustainable loans. If farmers depart from this process of risk reduction, the premiums associated with the Ag contracts will rise.
There is no trivial answer to these complex questions.
It is not a good idea to ignore this problem either as it could lead to a sudden unexpected collapse in farm debt or worse to a sudden sell-off in farms (such as rumors circulating in Lancaster PA are now suggesting).
That Ag debt collapse would be fantastically similar to the collapse encountered during the Great Depression.
With Trump cutting taxes, there is no way to ensure that the USG will be able to borrow enough money to hand out the relief the Ag sector needs in this nightmare scenario. The US would have to risk default on its own debt at that point.
People are openly talking about a "repeat of the 1980s farm debt crisis"[
1].
I am 100% certain that Trump and his gang of idiots have no clue what is going on. The Ag "Deep State" obviously know what is going down but with Trump putting his giant ass right where their foot wants to be, I am not sure they are going to make a whole lot of progress containing the situation.
We are heading towards a massively shitty situation. I hope we come to our senses soon and restore a viable political order in DC soon.
Oh the tangled web we weave, when we practice to deceive!
Hope Hicks has been pulled up in front of the OSC to answer to charges of obstruction of justice.
Now she is not a skilled professional liar like Trump. She has kind of made her way in the world by leveraging her good looks and above average intelligence against the lust of stupid old white men.
She is not going to lie to the OSC. She is smart enough to know that such lies would result in long jail terms, She is only 27 - which means she has her whole life ahead of her. I am quite certain she does not want to spend it in Gitmo or that oil rig in the middle of Indian Ocean.
Which brings me to the other... moron (I am very polite today morning).
Nunes altered the draft of his memo that he showed to the WH *AFTER* he obtained a razor thin majority on it from his own committee. Seriously how fucking stupid do you have to be to do things like this? I would be much more accepting of collusion if I felt that the people carrying it out had some semblance of competence but that is not what we have here.
While we are on the topic of competence.
Was the WH forced to issue a statement "explaining" why it was not enforcing the new sanctions on Russia when they were told that key newspapers were going to tell the world that several Russian intelligence chiefs (who are sanctioned under the new laws) were allowed to travel to the US and meet with Trump Administration officials?
Also can we please get a read a read back on what information was exchanged between Trump Admin officials with these Russian intelligence representatives during their illegal visits to the US?
As tax payers we have a right to know what part of the Arctic these "Officials" have been promised by their Russian handlers in exchange for delivering our economic slavery into Putin's pocket!!!
