Welcome. Here’s some of what’s happening in the world this week. Today is Saturday, September 30, 2023.
Today we look at elections coming in Slovakia and Poland, we talk about how Russia evades sanctions, we have news from Spain, India, Iran, the UK, the Netherlands, China and we look at a disgraced conspiracy theorist’s curious grocery bill.
Since we were away last Saturday, today we have several short items to bring us up to date on things happening in the world the last few weeks.
ELECTIONS IN SLOVAKIA AND POLAND:
SLOVAKIA: Slovakian elections are today, September 30th. Polls have generally given SMER, the populist party of former PM Robert Fico ( say “feetso”) in the lead. A poll conducted September 20 - 26 showed the leftish political party established in 2017 called Progressive Slovakia (PS) with a razor thin lead, at 18 percent to Fico’s SMER at 17.7 percent.
PS won municipal elections in the capital Bratislava in 2018 and a couple of European Parliament seats the following year. It’s pro-European, EU, NATO, environmental protection and LGBT rights.
This is important because these are all things SMER is not. As we discussed a couple of weeks ago, Fico tilts pro-Russian on the war and has promised “to end military aid to Ukraine and veto ‘pointless’ European Union sanctions on Russia.” He has also promised that, “if elected, he would — as a matter of policy — refuse to meet Slovakia’s NATO obligation to spend 2% of its GDP on defense, and would block Ukraine from joining NATO.” And so on.
The challenge for all the parties will be in coalition building. No party is polling more than 20% at this late date and “as many as eight or nine might conceivably clear the 5% threshold for winning seats.”
•
Slovakia is small, with not quite five and a half million people, and in a strategic location for aid to Ukraine.
Several rail lines cross the Slovak/Ukrainian border and transport weapons and other supplies to aid Ukraine’s war effort, including helicopters, rockets for Grad multiple rocket launchers and S-300 air defense missile systems. There is also a repair center for German-made weapons used in the war at Michalovce, a town of 40,000 near the border.
•
POLAND: Polish elections are two weeks from tomorrow, October 15th, and it’s also a battle of coalitions, the populist-leaning side led by the incumbent Law and Justice Party (PiS) and the more centrist opposition led by Civic Platform (KO). Here, PiS has held a consistent lead in polls (I wrote at some length about the no-good PiS has been up to in What Just Happened 16.) In the past week that lead has slightly narrowed to eight percentage points in this slow moving poll of polls at Politico.eu.
The campaign has intruded into geopolitics these last two weeks as Polish Prime Minister Morawiecki abruptly declared Poland would quit supplying weapons to Ukraine. It’s a campaign maneuver that must be seen in the context of a dispute between Poland and Ukraine over grain exports.
Ukraine has historically been a huge grain exporter and its wartime inability to ship its product via the Black Sea is disastrous for its agricultural sector. Ukraine has instead endeavored to move its exports to foreign markets over land, in the process inundating eastern Europe with grain to the detriment of, for example, Polish farmers.
(Polish Foreign Minister Zbigniew Rau walked back the PM’s words some on Monday, telling Gazeta Wyborcza "We will continue to support Ukraine, but we cannot do this at the expense of our own farmers. We need to find a balance between supporting Ukraine and protecting our own food security.”)
The rural vote, including farmers, is critical to PiS’s election effort. In the 2019 parliamentary election, PiS won 58 percent of the rural vote to just 37 percent for the opposition. Much of PiS’s success has been down to its support for conservative “traditional values,” which play well in the countryside.
A separate scandal has erupted involving Polish consulates allegedly issuing visas in exchange for bribes. Seven people have been arrested and charged, including former deputy foreign minister and Morawiecki ally Piotr Wawrzyk.
PiS is an intentionally intolerant, xenophobic party – it has for example, proposed restricting minority access to social benefits, and in 2022 Poland granted refugee status to only 26 people from outside the EU – so this scandal has the potential to do it some harm among its supporters.
PiS’s main opponent, Civic Platform, is led by former president of the European Council Donald Tusk, and it’s easy to see that German Chancellor Olaf Scholz would prefer to work with Tusk than Morawiecki (and Poland’s de facto leader, PiS Chairman Jarosław Kaczyński).
In perhaps some campaign politics of his own, Scholz has half tightened a screw, suggesting that Germany is considering implementing border controls on the Polish border in response to the visa scandal. It would be the first time that Germany has imposed border controls on a fellow EU member state since the Schengen Agreement was introduced in 1995.
Just a quick word on the coalition-building drama that is sure to follow the election: The current governing coalition of PiS and United Right are currently polling a combined 40 to 42 percent of the vote. PiS and Konfederacja, a far right Libertarian party, combine at about 47 percent, but a coalition that includes Konfederacja would be controversial, as some Konfederacja members are even more xenophobic than PiS.
On the other side, a coalition between Civic Platform (KO) and the leftish Lewica, itself a coalition of two parties, polls this week around a combined 42 percent. The addition of the agrarian Polish People's Party (PSL) as a third coalition partner would raise polling numbers over 50 percent (and Civic Platform and the PSL have agreed to work together in this election), as shown:
An IBRiS poll conducted on September 22-23 found KO on 28%, Lewica on 14% and PSL on 12% for a combined 54%. A Politico.eu poll conducted on September 23-24 found KO on 30%, Lewica on 12% and PSL on 10% for a combined 52%.
In general, polling suggests PiS will receive the most votes and thus will likely be given the first opportunity to form a government.
•
And along those lines, in Spain yesterday the People’s Party leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo failed, 177 votes to 172, to win enough votes to become Prime Minister. the People’s Party received the most votes in the July election and so had the first shot at forming a government. Current caretaker PM Pedro Sanchez will now give it a go. He has until 27 November, after which parliament would be dissolved and elections held again.
•••••
RUSSIA: Lots of news here, starting with an interesting domestic story. Recall that shortly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin and Beijing hailed their "no limits partnership" and a "new era" in cooperation. Eurasia Daily Monitor reports that Chinese support for the Motherland might have gotten a little closer to mother than Russia prefers.
As the article puts it, “Russians have become increasingly accustomed to, if not comfortable with, the expansion of Chinese influence in the Russian Far East.” Now China is poking the bear “not just along Russia’s periphery but near its core. Beijing has been increasing its investments and influence in Tatarstan and the Middle Volga.”
What’s happening is, as Western companies leave due to sanctions, Chinese firms move right in behind them. Putin’s government is apparently trying to say ‘see, this is evidence of our new era of cooperation.’
Russia has never added much value to its exports. It has historically been mainly a commodity exporter, which is how the Soviet Union earned the wicked description “Upper Volta with missiles” (attributed to former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt).
In The Conquest of a Continent, Bruce Lincoln spends much ink describing how Russian settlers spread across Siberia at the expense of small animals, sending back fur pelts in what might be thought as the original Russian commodity export.
Interesting here is that while, true to form, Russia exports mostly commodities to China, “Chinese production in Tatarstan centers on finished goods.” This is sensitive since it “effectively places industries into Chinese hands that many Russians think should be Moscow’s alone.”
“Beijing officials are already talking about ‘billions’ of rubles going to Tatarstan in the 'first phase’ alone, signaling that China’s role will only grow.” The article says “the provincial capital, Kazan, “has given China special customs and tax free zones that will allow Beijing to use Tatarstan rather than Moscow as the major entry point for exports from China. Why Moscow has agreed to such arrangement … is far from clear.”
•
HOW RUSSIA EVADES SANCTIONS: It’s no surprise that as time goes on, the coalition sanctions regime sprouts leaks, and it appears there’s no limit to the number of enterprising players who are eager to insert themselves in the supply chain of sanctions-prohibited goods flowing to Russia.
To conduct sanctions busting business, Russia transships goods through third countries, uses cryptocurrencies to pay for goods and services and shell companies to obscure the true ownership of assets, among many other schemes.
•
THE BLACK SEA REGION: The eastern Black Sea is bustling with Russian trade in Western goods just now. There are direct flights between Russia and Turkey, Georgia and Armenia but none from Western Europe save for from Belgrade.
An analysis by Responsible Statecraft cites examples:
“Georgian exports to Russia were up 75 percent in the first half of 2023, at $1.3 billion, and the country earned $4.37 billion in remittances from Georgians working in Russia in 2022.
There is a brisk trade in sanctioned goods across the border between Georgia and the secessionist province of Abkhazia, from where they are driven into Russia. In the first quarter of 2023, German exports to Georgia rose 48 percent, to Armenia 132 percent and Kyrgyzstan 770 percent.”
Armenia saw 13 percent GDP growth in 2022 thanks to the influx of Russians. They do a brisk business buying used cars from Europe and exporting them to Russia, to the tune of $180 million a month. (There is also re-export of used cars to Russia via Dubai.)"
There are many more examples: in March of this year, for example, a Greek oil tanker was caught transferring Russian oil to a Turkish tanker in the Mediterranean Sea. In April a Russian ship was caught shipping grain to Turkey through Syria. And in May a Russian ship was caught shipping machinery to Turkey through Iran. But the eastern Black Sea isn’t the only place to benefit from war trade with Russia.
•
AZERBAIJAN, IRAN AND INDIA: Iran doesn’t just send arms to Moscow; it is instrumental in the transshipment of all manner of goods along the so-called International North-South Transport Corridor, a 4400-mile long multimodal freight link between India, Iran, Azerbaijan, Russia and Central Asia. Look how much shorter this route is than shipping via Europe.
•
THE NORTHERN SEA ROUTE: Two weeks ago we talked about Russia sending an oil tanker without a strengthened hull for protection from ice through the Arctic for the first time. It traveled via the so called Northern Sea Route, a shipping route that runs along the Arctic coast of Russia, from the Barents Sea to the Bering Strait.
Besides the Russian terminus ports of Murmansk in the west and Vladivostok in the east are three freight ports in particular, Dudinka, on the Yenisei River (oil and gas), Tiksi, on the Lena River and Pevek, on the Chuckchi Sea (fish and seafood). Because of its (relative) accessibility to the eastern Siberian region, and in turn to China, let’s look at Tiksi.
I commissioned Bard to compile a summary of shipping data from MarineTraffic.com and VesselFinder.com for the port of Tiksi. It reports that MarineTraffic.com has the number of ship arrivals and departures at the Port of Tiksi in the first six months of 2022 (most of which were before sanctions were more or less firmly in place), at 2,134. For the first six months of this year: 3,456.
VesselFinder.com has much the same numbers: first six months of 2022: 2,098, first six months of 2023: 3,387
Arrivals and departures increased year on year by around 62 percent. With a determined squint you might attribute the increase to the thawing of the Northern Sea Route. Much more likely is that Tiksi is a Russian sanctions busting entrepôt.
•
THE PUTIN KIM SHOW: One last note on Russia.
Look at these old buds making like it’s the most natural thing in the world to see one another again. Putin speaks Russian, German and some English, while Kim is fluent in Korean. These warm, brotherly greetings were either incomprehensible in a common language or consisted of nothing beyond happy talk memorized from a phrasebook.
•••••
If you’re reading this as an email your provider may clip this post before the end. Try clicking on ‘view entire message’ to see the whole thing, or you can always read all content at Common Sense and Whiskey online.
•••••
INDIA is playing Russia smart. According to reporting from Politico.eu, Russia is selling hundreds of millions of barrels of crude oil to India — but instead of the dollars and euros the Kremlin needs, it's earning rupees and having trouble spending them.
“So far this year, India has already bought more than half a billion barrels of crude, an almost tenfold increase since 2021, the year before the war, according to statistics collected by analytics firm Kpler. As a result, an estimated $1 billion worth of rupees is landing in Moscow's coffers each month.”
“Over the weekend, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov acknowledged the dilemma. “We've accumulated many billions of rupees that we haven't yet found a use for," he said during a press conference following the G20 summit in New Delhi.”
“India is earning an extra bonus as the crude it's buying at knock-down prices from Russia is being refined in India and then diesel and other products are being sold to Europe and elsewhere.”
•••••
THE NETHERLANDS: An Atlantic Council article headlined The Dutch are leading the way on military aid to Ukraine. Here’s why. tells me something I didn’t know:
“The Netherlands has a unique feature among sovereign nations in that it has the promotion and the preservation of the rules-based international order inscribed in its constitution as a task for the government. This has led to a strong track record on protection of human rights, development aid, and multilateral cooperation on security, underscored by the status of The Hague as the international capital of peace and justice. The Dutch are simply compelled to act in a situation like this.”
•••••
CHINA: Seems to be going through an insecurity moment. It has quit publishing statistics on youth unemployment, bond transactions and patents.
•••••
THE UNITED KINGDOM: Strange story here.
This woman faces a possible jail sentence for holding up this poster.
“A retired social worker who held up a placard about the rights of jurors outside a trial of climate protesters is being prosecuted for contempt of court by the solicitor general.
The decision to prosecute Trudi Warner, 68, came as it emerged the police were separately investigating at least 12 people on suspicion of attempting to pervert the course of justice for holding up similar signs outside a London court.”
•
It’s sad, the unforced abdication of the UK as a serious country. As Carnegie Europe puts it, “the UK today has waning global influence and a weakening economy.”
And there’s this: a paywalled Times of London story claims:
It’s a big, long, grim article. Westminster, Downing Street, Whitehall, they’re all stalled out awaiting the most highly anticipated housecleaning in memory with next year’s election.
•••••
FINALLY, WHAT’S YOUR GROCERY BILL? Alex Jones still has his Infowars show and has been asking his audience for donations. “I won’t be able to continue this show in a month myself if I don’t raise $1 million,” Jones said. “We’ve raised $133,000 and we’re in the hole for $1 million.”
“With all my expenses and things, that’s nothing. I don’t care about that — I’m wearing a shirt that I bought like eight years ago and I love it to death,” Jones told his audience.
The conspiracy theorist owes a $1.5 billion court ordered judgment to families of the Sandy Hook shootings, none of which has yet been paid, according to court documents.
Yet in July Jones spent $93,180 besides legal and professional fees, “including $15,184 on payments to his wife Erika Wulff Jones, $7,900 on housekeeping, $6,338 on meals and entertainment, and a separate $3,388 on groceries, an August 29 court filing from lawyers for the families shows.”
•••••
WEEKEND READING
Every weekend I suggest worthwhile reading that’s guaranteed to improve your posture, your online dating prospects, and make you an all around better person. Read a dozen articles, lose five pounds. Here we go:
•
The story of the “Atlantis of the North Sea” is one about our impermanence and ultimate futility against the elements. But within it also lies a warning of our potential future in an age of climate change. Climate Lessons From A Lost Land
•
After the release of Lucinda Williams’ memoir, “Don’t Tell Anyone the Secrets I Told You,” Wyatt Williams explores the family stories, Southern territory, and distortions of memory that her songwriting evokes. Lucinda Williams and the idea of Louisiana
•
Here it is. Everything. (You won’t have to know this for the test).
•
Non-state actors make the perfect saboteurs. One year on, who blew up Nord Stream 2?
•
“While strolling in the garden one day…a priest said to him, ‘Father Joseph, oh, how beautiful God has made heaven!’ Then Joseph, as if he had been called to heaven, gave a loud shriek, leapt off the ground, flew through the air, and knelt down atop an olive tree.” Making Sense of Levitating Saints
•
The United States has long supported the repression of Latin American land defenders. The tactics it exported are coming to an Atlanta forest.
•
Imperial Russia had little access to the bountiful tropics that other empires enjoyed. So it created its own in the Caucasus. Dream of the Russian tropics
•
In these days of vanishing forms of regional speech, if you wanted to hear a new one coming into being, you’d have to go to the ends of the Earth. So they did. Scientists Working in Antarctica Unwittingly Started to Develop a New Accent
•
Poverty, exclusion and violence: El País English has the story behind Johan David Castillo and the other assassins who were hired to kill Ecuadorian presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio. The life and death of Ito, the hitman who assassinated a presidential candidate in Ecuador
•
There must be a way to ensure safe driving in snow that doesn’t destroy every vehicle on the road, but so far all the less harmful substitutes for rock salt, such as sugar beet juice, cost four to ten times more than rock salt’s $60 a ton. Rust Never Sleeps
•
The current Hollywood strikes have a precedent in Disney’s golden age, when the company was a hothouse of innovation and punishing expectation. Storyboards and Solidarity
•
Away from the front, life appears to be the same, but the country has undergone profound changes. Ukraine’s New Normal
•••••
Thank you for reading Common Sense and Whiskey. This post is public so feel free to share it.
While you’re here, why not sign up for a subscription? You get three posts a week and subscriptions start at the entirely reasonable rate of free.
Something like 20,000 of my travel photos, currently from 113 countries and territories, are on EarthPhotos.com. And join 2,100 people who follow my constantly updated Twitter list of 200 experts whose job it is to follow Russia’s War on Ukraine.
In Tuesday’s travel tale we continue with part two of a trip to Burma in 1995. Read part one here. Next Saturday’s What Just Happened will, among other things, consider the fallout from the collapse of Nagorno Karabakh.
Good weekend. See you Tuesday.