Putin Talks Free Fertilizer for Hungry Africa but Problem Dog Prigozhin Spoils the Picture
Bananaization of Russia under Putin continues fast apace
Vladimir Putin just finished hosting Dmitry Mazepin at the Kremlin. Mazepin is an oligarch, and a bigshot at the Russian Union of Industrialists, a big business interest group.
Mazepin is also the owner of Russian fertilizer giant Uralchem.
The oligarch briefed Putin on Uralchem’s efforts to transport some of the 262,000 tons of fertilizer frozen in European ports to African countries for free. Europeans no longer want the fertilizer but their sanctions are also blocking its transport so the Russians are working with the UN to unfreeze it for charity.
Mazepin also reminded Putin that the July deal to lift the Russian naval blockade of Ukraine for grain ships included language that signatories will support the export of Russian ammonia, but that this export remains impossible.
Uralchem would normally export ammonia — a component in fertilizer — via a pipeline to Odessa port. But since the war, Ukraine has closed the pipeline citing US sanctions on suspected Uralchem owners Dmitry Mazepin and Arkady Rotenberg.
The grain deal extension that was just signed this month also includes some of this aspirational ammonia language, but again to no effect.
Putin assured Mazepin that Russia will be working to try to get the UN and Ukraine to reopen the export pipeline. (Something Zelensky has said is possible only if Russia agrees to a POW exchange on the basis of “all for all”.)
There are different angles that Putin’s interest in ammonia and fertilizer exports could be seen from.
1. An idealist might say that getting fertilizer out to the hungry world was important and that this was precisely the noble and humanist pursuit that a Russian leader should be associated with.
2. A cynic might say that in the middle of a bloody war that he was sending regular Ivans from Sverdlovsk to fight and die in, it was in poor taste of Putin to make the monetary losses for a fertilizer oligarch a big concern of his.
3. A realist might say that whether laudable or deplorable, all this ammonia business was small-fry and the last thing a war leader should be spending his time on. This is supposedly an “existential” war against “satanism” that Putin has already sacrificed 25,000 Russian lives to. One in which the path to victory seems very uncertain and that the West has unloaded so many weapons into that it is starting to run out of things to send. So why isn’t Putin spending his every waking minute visiting every last foundry, steel mill, and defense plant in the country, ringing their ears to increase production and twisting the arms of moneymen to give them everything they need, regardless of the cost? (Instead Moscow doesn’t even want to pay for the mobilization but is instead pushing the cost onto the regions.)
At the same time as Putin was hosting Mazepin to discuss the humanitarian subjects of fertilizer for Africans and profits for oligarchs, Russia's richest prison gang, Wagner PMC was sending a “message” to Euro parliament. The “message” turned out to be a red-stained hammer implying that it was the hammer used in the murder of Yury Nuzhin.
Putin is at least partly singing onto fertilizer giveaways and talking about them for PR reasons. So I wonder why Prigozhin is allowed to run around spoiling this.
Regardless of whether Putin should be spending energy on the opening up of an ammonium pipeline through Ukraine, Prigozhin certainly shouldn’t feel himself free to send a murder weapon to Euro parliament while that is happening. And how is it going to reflect on Russia’s image? Certainly not in a way that any normal Russians can welcome, I can tell you that. The Russian mainstream reaction on Yaplakal forums is heavily negative as you might expect.
Arguably there might be a utility to keeping a dog like Prigozhin with his career-criminal world outlook around. I would argue against it, but maybe there is such a reason. But there is absolutely no reason not to leash such a dog, but to allow him to run around to the point of now even interfering with foreign policy.
We can talk about all the ways the Russian state was eroded in the 1990s during Yeltsin, but even Yeltsin didn’t find himself with a part of his foreign policy outsourced to an ex-convict oligarch.
Russia tried to show too eagerly how civilized they are, how they are on their best behavior and how they respect the international law, how they stand for the high humanist ideals etc. since Gorbi coming to power in 1985. They still continue the same rhetoric through their Foreign Affairs office and basically by all top level officials, including Putin's spokesman Peskov. But ask yourself, where has it gotten them? I'm talking here about the situation even before the start of the SMO in February of this year. They lost their big country (USSR) and their influence in at least 20% of the world. They got NATO right at their doorstep. Citizens of Russia in Western countries are treated as potential criminals. Russian sports was destroyed and Russia is humiliated by not even being allowed to display national symbols at the international events. Russian diplomats are treated as a scum, they are constantly expelled and not allowed into places like UN HQ in New York. But to "pay back" for all this mistreatment through capital flight and trade disbalance Russia has gifted to the West over 3 trillion dollars since 1994 and the process continues today - capital flight from Russia to the West is expected to reach record $243 billion this year and trade imbalance will exceed $200 billion. Russian CB and the government continue to do nothing about it.. So taken into account all of that and Western support for the terrorist forces working against Russia in places like Chechnya two decades ago and now in Ukraine, that uses terrorist methods (think of killing of Darya Dugina or mass executions of unarmed Russian PoWs) isn't now the time there was a person like Prigozhin to balance out all that sweetness in official Russian talk? Should they still care what the representatives in Europarliament think or say when they declared Russia a terrorist sponsoring state and when the head of EU Commission Ursula von der Leyen insists on war to complete destruction of Russia to the last Ukrainian?
As for Putin, his dedication to the globalist agenda (except for LGBTQ+), to his oligarch friends against the interests of ordinary Russians, this guy makes me nauseous.
Honestly, the European Parliament which received the war hammer has been the most hostile european anti-russian entity of all, with the possible exception of Ukraine. They were asking for SWIFT blockade even back then in 2014. Declaring the Russian Constitution "illegal". EP has been under russian sanctions even before the war. They are one of the the biggest euro hawks on China and Iran too.
Some context on the relations between the two would not be bad.
Right now their site can not be accessed. A cyber attack on the European Parliament followed its declaration of Russia as a terrorist state, something that even the US and UK refused to do. Even Iran has not been treated in such a way.
Declaring someone a terrorist state is serious and some reaction is warranted. In diplomat speak, it gets pretty close to declaration of war.
Overall, this "arrows or olive branch" approach with the fertilisers and the hammer fits realpolitik, and yes, the Global South and the Non-Western world are pretty important to Russia, otherwise the country would be suffocated by the West pretty fast.
Interestingly enough, i notice that the issue of the European Parliament declaring Russia a terrorist state is relegated to one of the tweets cited, with no mention or discussion by the author. Or the associated staggering levels of russophobia coming from that entity.
Yaplakal does not provide much context to their readers either, with similar infos missing.
Imo the article follows a simplistic no context approach, in order to justify negativity about everything. At first glance it looks good and easily digestible, but not to someone who is aware of the deeper contexts involved.