The Pension System In The L/DPR Is Apparently Really Relevant Right Now
Well that was a bit of a surprise
The key headline today is Taylor, Adam and Westfall, Sammy, Shift to ruble in Kherson could signal consolidation of Russian control in occupied region, Washington Post, April 30, 2022.
Kherson has been a hotly contested war zone since nearly the start of the Ukraine invasion. The most recent assessment from the Institute for the Study of War as of today shows that it is currently in Russian hands.
I note that a staged-looking raid, alleged to be undertaken by FSB Alpha Group, occurred in Kherson on or about March 19th, suggestive of ongoing paramilitary activity and potential prosecution of the “kill list” (see: sources 1, 2, 3) alleged to exist prior to the invasion.
This is the context of the statement emerging from the alleged “deputy head of the civil-military administration of the Kherson region” in the Post today:
Speaking to Russian state television, Kirill Stremousov, described by Tass as “deputy head of the civil-military administration of the Kherson region,” said there would be a four-to-five-month transition away from the Ukrainian currency, the hryvnia, which has been in use since 1996.
Stremousov, who was installed by Moscow, said the move was necessary because “the pension fund and the treasury left the territory of the Kherson region” during the conflict. “We plan to introduce the ruble zone [to provide] assistance, first of all, to pensioners, socially unprotected segments of the population and, of course, state employees,” Stremousov said in an interview with the Rossiya 24 TV channel. (emphasis added)
By virtue of a rather straight-up accident, I happen to understand exactly why they’re mentioning the pension system.
What you’re looking at here is not only a “destabilization playbook” as Stefan Wolff, quoted in the Post article, is calling it, it’s also a method of human terrain seizure, by means of currency primacy.
What that means is:
If Russia follows the precedent they've set in the so-called L/DPR, we're going to see seizure of important industries of Kherson followed by integration into Russian oligarchical ownership.
Author, May 1, 2022 Russia is going to try to set up a structure to extract wealth from Kherson, sell it for foreign currency and maintain its local cost structure in an insular, ruble-based economy. In anticipation of sanctions (I would, in their shoes), they’re going to set up something like a double-blind system for exfiltrating currency from Russia to operational support accounts in (what they anticipate to be) a Kherson under long-term Russian control.
Author, May 1, 2022 The goal is to set up a geopolitical hustle with multiple profit centers. By trapping Kherson residents in a rubles-based economy, Russia will not only profit from the currency differential, it will also open up the area for exploitation by Russian industries with precious few other markets for their goods. This is, again, what appears to have happened in the so-called L/DPR.
Author, April 21, 2022
That all means that we can make a few guesses about what Russia wants, and what they’re thinking right now.
Actually, that makes it fairly possible to act preemptively to cut it off, by means of preemptive disclosures (à la the U.S. intelligence community’s disclosure practice in the run-up to the Ukraine war) and forward-thinking on sanctions designations.
The thing is, I have a pretty good guess on who’s going to pay those pensions in Kherson.
And I’m pretty sure how they’re going to pay it too.
Kherson is the agricultural center of the country. That’s literally what the Wikipedia article says, that’s what OpenDemocracy found when they interviewed people in 2019, and as of seven days ago, the UK Ministry of Defence noted that it had been severely disrupted by the war.
And there is an ongoing international food crisis going on that Russia is poised to catch the brunt of, in large part because of the Ukraine war that Russia started. I was just looking at it yesterday.
We’re about to see something like this arrangement set up to handle stolen agricultural processes and farms in the Kherson region.
I’m making a second-order guess based on a guess here, but…
I’m pretty sure I can find a way to get ahead of what’s about to happen in Kherson.
With sanctions.