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.

7 Comments
  1. Blackledge says

    Can someone please explain to me what message, exactly, delivering a blood-stained sledgehammer to the EU Parliament is supposed to send?

  2. Oscar Peterson says

    “Can someone please explain to me what message, exactly, delivering a blood-stained sledgehammer to the EU Parliament is supposed to send?”

    It’s a plea for world peace.

    If I had a hammer
    I’d hammer in the morning
    I’d hammer in the evening
    All over this land
    I’d hammer out danger
    I’d hammer out a warning
    I’d hammer out love between
    My brothers and my sisters, ah-ah
    All over this land

  3. YakovKedmi says

    What a place Mother Russia is (not an empire, just a Mother, like Nurse Ratched was a mother to the ward), head-waiters and bouncers can tell the dictator and Grand Protector of the Slav Race, what to do.

    When Peter number three of Schleswig-Holstein wanted to do something sensible and beneficial, the Prigozhins of the day killed him, and put countessa Anhalt-Zerbst in his place. V.V. is not Peter #3.

    Today the ruling class of Russia speaks Russian, not just to serfs but in general (although everyone of them sends his children to England or US to learn proper english, and imports amerikano culture into Russia as much as he can)

    Putin created Robber Barons, or Robber Barons created Putin ?

    1. Yuno says

      Putin created Robber Barons, or Robber Barons created Putin ?

      The $power created both…as part of a long ‘lineage’ of puppets/crisis actors/dogsbodies & henchmen it uses to keep it’s drive towards ‘full spectrum dominance’ o’er this orb alive.

      It’s long time past to forgo this collective insistence on the ‘organic’ nature of events, personalities, and performances. Nothing is occurring, nor has occurred, for the longest time now – which is not scripted… laid out in advance… and performed by those handed their instructions and the threats needed to keep them from deviating from same.

      Is it all a ‘game?’ In a deadly sort of way I suppose. But in an appropriately ‘post modern’ manner; here, the audience … even those who Marko has described as ‘the elite’… the best & brightest of onlookers to this performance theater

      get to wander around the wax dummy museum, up close enough almost to ‘pinch’ the performers, certainly close enough to discern the waxen nature of the images… yet all choose to still pretend to see ‘live bodies’ with ‘agency’…. in the throes of conducting ‘human action’

      exactly as the puppet medias wish them to ‘see.’ SHADOWPUPPET THEATRE MEETS GAME OF DEATH.

      As Chuckie said: “NO ONE GETS OUT OF HERE ALIVE.”

  4. bugey libre says

    Erwan Castel’s last article is worth pondering. Like Riley Waggaman wrote, we are facing an evil never ever seen.
    Anyway, thanks for the blog:

    https://alawata-rebellion.blogspot.com/?zx=7906b4e091aadcbb

    About drones

    Published on Telegram on November 25, 2022

    I take the opportunity of this video to publish my response to several relevant comments noting this terrible use of drones, shaking up the customs of modern warfare and precipitating it deeper into a cold, invisible and distant cruelty…

    I understand your comment but we are also witnesses (and sometimes actors) of this inevitable evolution of weaponry.

    When the crossbow appeared on the battlefield, the chivalry of the time cried out at the cowardice of the beggar who could pierce the armor of the nobleman from more than 100 meters away. Then came muskets, couleuvrines, and aviation, which gradually moved the combatants away until they were invisible to everyone.

    What would a Spartan say about a sniper like me who works up to 700 m away on average?

    The drone turns us into the conflict of the XXI century with a loss of the requirements and that forged for millennia the warlike values but also those of the courage and the sacrifice thanks to which the people defend their dignities. 

    Technology, after having protected the soldiers, risks to protect the weak and the cowards who will cling to the merits of victory tomorrow without ever having waded in the mud, the shit and the blood, without seeing their enemy in the face and worse: without ever having to face their own fear.

    This hyper technology which, in the short term, offers us positive results on the battlefield will quickly dehumanize war and by emptying it of all its ethical dimension, the degenerate modern man, after having ideologized it, will now trivialize it.

    We are going to enter, unfortunately, a permanence of more and more deadly conflicts where the winners will not be those who have the most courage but those who have the most money to produce these machines without soldiers.

    Without soldiers, it means without courage, without fear, but also without fraternity nor compassion…. and therefore wars without laws nor peace.

    And the “barbarians” of the past will then appear to us for what they really were: Men in all the nobility of a preserved animal dimension…

    Erwan

    Translated with http://www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

    1. Yuno says

      https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/23/23475817/san-francisco-police-department-robots-deadly-force

      The race is on. Insertion of AI directly into battlefield situations is ‘on the cusp.’ Preparing ‘citizen/serfs’ to adapt their moral compass accordingly has begun. Dystopia is here… peeple just want to prepare it’s not. Non-vaccine compliance meets “deadly force”(un-vaxxed represent a “scenario where deadly force is the only option.”)

      “Voluntary euthenasia” becomes the ‘preferred choice’ for vax resisters seeking to avoid genetic reprogramming?

      1. Yuno says

        peeple just want to pretend it’s not

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